Reaper (Van Gogh series)

However, Van Gogh did not consider the work to be sad but "almost smiling" and taking "place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold".

Work on the piece resumed in early September after the artist suffered a mental breakdown from which it took him several weeks to recover.

In May 1889, Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), a Dutch painter, moved to the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, to commit himself at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a psychiatric asylum which was previously a monastery.

[4] Van Gogh's bedroom window framed a view of an agrarian landscape that became the focus of the artist's work.

[6] He first mentions the painting in a 25 June 1889 letter to his brother Theo van Gogh where he describes it as "a wheatfield, very yellow and very bright, perhaps the brightest canvas [he has] done".

[7] The painting is mentioned again in a 2 July 1889 letter: The latest one begun is the wheatfield where there's a little reaper and a big sun.

[6] However, Van Gogh was making further changes to the work while he described it in more detail in a later letter to his brother written on 4–5 September 1889: I'm struggling with a canvas begun a few days before my indisposition.

I then saw in this reaper – a vague figure struggling like a devil in the full heat of the day to reach the end of his toil – I then saw the image of death in it, in this sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped.

But in this death [there is] nothing sad, it takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold.

[13] While writing the 4–5 September letter, he touched up the first painting, which he described as a "study", and began working on a new version.

[10][12] Van Gogh appears to have completed the second painting in a single day and taking breaks to write the letter on 4–5 September 1889.

He added a small tree near the left edge of the painting along the hills in the background and removed the pile of sheaves from the foreground.

[12] In late September 1889, Van Gogh painted reduced versions of several of his earlier works, including a replica of the Reaper similar to the one he made earlier that month, smaller versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses and Bedroom in Arles, and what he called "a little portrait of me", Self-Portrait Without Beard.

[29] The same year, art collector Karl Ernst Osthaus of the Museum Folkwang acquired the painting for his collection in Hagen, Germany.