After the particularly hard winter of 1887-88, Vincent van Gogh traveled to the south of France, hoping the sun and warmth would restore his failing health. From February 20, 1888, to May 8, 1889, he lived in Arles, a small town on the Rhone River. In less than fifteen months, the artist created about one hundred drawings and water colors and two hundred paintings, a prolific flowering of creative genius unequaled by any nineteenth-century artist. Although prodigious, this production was carefully planned and focused. As van Gogh explained in his letters, he divided his work into a series of thematic paintings. The Academy's Wheat Field belongs to the "Harvest" series, ten paintings executed in the last half of June 1888.

Unlike other works in the series, which display dramatic perspectives accented with diagonols, this painting is constructed in distinct horizontal bands that lead the eye from the sheaves and stubble in the foreground to the rows of wheat in the middle ground, to the trees and buildings on the horizon line, and finally to the sky. Only the seemingly swaying sheaves in the foreground and the two distant trees disrupt the separate, brightly colored planes.

"Everywhere now there is old gold, bronze, copper, one might say, and this with the green azure of the sky blanched with heat," van Gogh wrote of the fields around Arles in June. To accentuate what he termed the high yellow note, van Gogh used a complementary violet, setting up a vivid pulsating interplay in the lower halt of Wheat Field. To create a deliberate abstraction of form, he used slashing strokes, dots, and whorls to compose the elements of the painting. This abstraction can be seen in two van Gogh drawings (Staatliche Museem, Berlin, and private collection, Switzerland) based on Wheat Field.

During his summer in Arles, van Gogh evolved his mature style and left behind the dominating and restricting influences he had felt in Paris. His relief-like impasto, accentuated brushwork, and lightness of tones were breakthroughs. Van Gogh's construction of form by discrete emotion-charged strokes and his expressive use of color-to-suggest more than the appearance of reality-introduced important elements into modern art.

Oil painting by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888. Poster size: 24 x 26 in. Image size: 20 1/2 x 26 in.