Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, Vincent van Gogh, 1889. Oil on canvas, 72.1 × 90.9 cm. The National Gallery, London. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from The National Gallery, London replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
A Wheatfield, with Cypresses
Vincent van Gogh · 1889
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 72.1 × 90.9 cm
- Held by
- The National Gallery, London
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh painted for roughly ten years, and for the first five of them he was not very good. That is worth saying plainly, because the usual telling turns him into a natural whose genius was simply unrecognised. He trained himself late, starting at twenty-seven after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher, and the early Dutch work is dark, thick and often badly drawn — he knew it, and he kept drawing figures for years specifically because he knew it.
Nearby
Related works
The Bedroom
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Café Terrace at Night
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Sunflowers
The National Gallery, London
What to look at
The same Saint-Rémy summer as The Starry Night, painted outdoors rather than from memory, and it shows in how much of the picture is simply weather. Roughly the top half is cloud, built from thick curling strokes of white, cream and grey-blue that read as a mistral pushing across the Alpilles. The cypresses on the right are nearly black-green against it; Van Gogh had become fixated on them that summer, writing that nobody had yet painted them as he saw them, as an Egyptian obelisk of dark green. Below, the wheat is laid in with short directional strokes that change angle three or four times across the field, which is what makes the ground feel like it is being combed by the wind. The structure is simple and very stable — three horizontal bands, one strong vertical — and that stability is probably why the turbulence on top of it works instead of becoming noise.