Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 6 of 11

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers.

On the 20th of May 1890, Vincent van Gogh moved to the small town of Auvers on the river Oise, north-west of Paris.  For the previous year, van Gogh had been living in a psychiatric clinic in an old convent in Provence. But in the picturesque hamlet of Auvers there lived a homeopathic doctor, Paul Gachet, whose treatment, Vincent and his loyal brother Theo believed, might be able to help the increasingly desperate Vincent.

Auvers had also drawn other avant garde artists, Cezanne, Pissarro and in the aftermath of his recent mental health crisis, painting had proven to be the most effective medicine for van Gogh.

In Wheat Fields with Reaper, which he painted en plein air, the oil paint is incredibly thick and heavy with lashings of yellow tones, from ochre to pale gold. Van Gogh places himself at the very edge of the wheatfield and directs our eye to the straw-hatted reaper, whose  silver-grey scythe blends into the outline around his body. The haybales are slightly andromorphic. Each has an individual quality and van Gogh has painted their landscape alive with bright summer light.

The distinctive, directional brushstrokes delineate this composition, giving those fields a recessive depth as our eyes are guided from the sun-dried yellow wheat to the dancing hay bales and the cool blue distant hills, all under a luminous, two-toned sky.

You might see those brush strokes and vivid, contrasting colours as very similar to the style of the Impressionists, but van Gogh only encountered the art of the French Impressionists well into his career. Though he met many of them in Paris.

More than anything, van Gogh viewed the landscape and colour itself, as a subject through which he could express intense emotional experience. This figure almost central in the painting is typical of van Gogh’s admiration for rural people and their work. But in the history of art, the reaper also represents Death.

Here in Auvers, van Gogh spent the last two months of his life, in a state of intensifying psychological distress, before he died at just 37. In this short period, he painted at least seventy-four works, some of them unfinished and many of them of wheatfields like this.

Van Gogh is buried in Auvers, alongside his brother Theo, who died just six months after him.

Although he famously only sold one work in his lifetime, van Gogh is now one of the most recognised artists in the world, thanks in large part to Theo’s widow, Joanna, who worked tirelessly to secure the artist’s legacy and reputation, forever.