Wheat Field with a Lark

Catalogue numbers: F 310, JH 1274.

In the autumn of 1886 van Gogh met an Australian painter, John Russell, who had just spent the summer painting with Monet in Brittany. It was probably Russell who first explained Monet's work and the principles of Impressionist painting to van Gogh. In the following months he explored these novel insights and made the acquaintance of other artists of the Parisian vanguard.

Yet when one examines this landscape, painted in the summer of 1887, these encounters seem to have had little impact. Admittedly the palette is different from those of the Drenthe and Nuenen periods, and the paint is applied in small strokes and not broad, undifferentiated bands. But in compositional structure the painting is typical of van Gogh's previous landscapes, especially of Drenthe. The viewpoint is low and intimate. The canvas is crudely divided into three horizontal bands, grass in the foreground, then the wheat, and, above rather than beyond, an expanse of blue sky which does not achieve any of the atmospheric or luminous subtlety of Impressionist painting. The sky is not the source of light, and thus the colour in the painting, however much it is richer and brighter in tone than before, does not represent the fall and diffusion of sunlight. Moreover each object, each blade of grass and stem of wheat, is carefully delineated. Forms are not dissolved into colour and light. The wheat field is not a mere 'appearance', but is almost physical in its tactility.