Wheat Fields
Wheat Fields is a series of dozens of paintings by Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh, products of his religious studies and sermons, connection to nature, appreciation of manual laborers and desire to provide a means of offering comfort to others.
"[3] In the series of paintings about wheat fields, Van Gogh expresses through symbolism and use of color his deeply felt spiritual beliefs, appreciation of manual laborers and connection to nature.
[6] After a nine-month period of withdrawal from society and family; he rejected the church establishment, yet found his personal vision of spirituality, "The best way to know God is to love many things.
[5] Drawn to Biblical parables, Van Gogh found wheat fields metaphors for humanity's cycles of life, as both celebrations of growth and realization of the susceptibility of nature's powerful forces.
He held laborers up to a high standard of how dedicatedly he should approach painting, "One must undertake with confidence, with a certain assurance that one is doing a reasonable thing, like the farmer who drives his plow... (one who) drags the harrow behind himself.
"[16] The close association of peasants and the cycles of nature particularly interested Van Gogh, such as the sowing of seeds, harvest and sheaves of wheat in the fields.
[14] Van Gogh saw plowing, sowing and harvesting symbolic of man's efforts to overwhelm the cycles of nature: "the sower and the wheat sheaf stood for eternity, and the reaper and his scythe for irrevocable death."
"[17][18] Van Gogh writes Theo that he hopes that his family brings to him "what nature, clods of earth, the grass, yellow wheat, the peasant, are for me, in other words, that you find in your love for people something not only to work for, but to comfort and restore you when there is a need.
"[19] Further exploring the connection between man and nature, Van Gogh wrote his sister Wil, "What the germinating force is in a grain of wheat, love is in us.
[23] In Paris Van Gogh met leading French artists Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat and others who provided illuminating influences on the use of color and technique.
[24] While Van Gogh learned much about color and technique in Paris, southern France provided an opportunity to express his "surging emotions.
"[24] Enlightened by the effects of the sun drenched countryside in southern France, Van Gogh reported that above all, his work "promises color.
"[26] Van Gogh mentioned the liveliness and interplay of "a wedding of two complementary colors, their mingling and opposition, the mysterious vibrations of two kindred souls.
"[23] Van Gogh, who "particularly admired a poem written by Walt Whitman about the beauty in a blade of grass", began painting waving stalks of wheat in Paris.
"[32] The audience is drawn into the painting by the glowing disk of the rising Sun in citron-yellow which Van Gogh intended to represent the divine, replicating the nimbus from Eugène Delacroix's Christ Asleep during the Tempest.
Van Gogh wrote about Sunset: Wheat Fields Near Arles: "A summer sun... town purple, celestial body yellow, sky green-blue.
[37] The painting, made just outside Arles, is an example of how Van Gogh used color in full brilliance to depict "the burning brightness of the heat wave.
His work, like that of his friend Paul Gauguin, that emphasized personal expression over literal composition led to the expressionist movement and towards twentieth-century Modernism.
He was initially confined to the immediate asylum grounds and painted (without the bars) the world he saw from his room, such as ivy covered trees, lilacs, and irises of the garden.
[44] As he ventured outside of the asylum walls, he painted the wheat fields, olive groves, and cypress trees of the surrounding countryside, which he saw as "characteristic of Provence."
His brother, Theo and artist Camille Pissarro developed a plan for Van Gogh to go to Auvers-sur-Oise with a letter of introduction for Dr. Paul Gachet,[47] a homeopathic physician and art patron who lived in Auvers.
[48] Van Gogh had a room at the inn Auberge Ravoux in Auvers[5] and was under the care and supervision of Dr. Gachet with whom he grew to have a close relationship, "something like another brother.
[5] Van Gogh arrived in Auvers in late spring as pea plants and wheat fields on gently sloping hills ripened for harvest.
"[50] Van Gogh painted thirteen large canvases of horizontal landscapes of the wheat harvest that occurs in the region from the middle to late July.
An animated Wheatfield with Cornflowers shows the effect of a gust of wind that ripples through the yellow stalks, seeming to "overflow" into the blue background.
In van Gogh's Wheatfields Under Thunderclouds, also called Wheat Fields Under Clouded Sky, landscape he depicts the loneliness of the countryside and the degree to which it was "healthy and heartening."
The ancients, who lived far more completely than ourselves in and with nature, found it no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things where human experience as yet affords no light, the directions so prudent and sage a bird."
103, 148, cautious of attributing stylistic changes in his work to mental illness, finds the painting expresses both the sorrow and the sense of his life coming to an end.
The road, in contrasting colors of red and green, is thought to be a metaphor for a sermon he gave based on Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress where the pilgrim is sorrowful that the road is so long, yet rejoicing because the Eternal City waits at the journey's end.Erickson 1998, p. 162 Wheat Stack Under Clouded Sky also called Haystack under a Rainy Sky, was made July 1890, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands (F563).
After returning to Auvers he said: "the trouble I had in my head has considerably calmed...I am completely absorbed in that immense plain covered with fields of wheat against the hills boundless as the sea in delicate colors of yellow and green, the pale violet of the plowed and weeded earth checkered at regular intervals with the green of the flowering potato plants, everything under a sky of delicate blue, white, pink, and violet.
