Landscape near Auvers: Wheatfields

Catalogue numbers: F 782, JH 2099.

In the last weeks of July 1890 van Gogh was working on pictures of familiar motifs, thatched cottages and wheatfields. In these late pictorial essays the problems of colour, space and texture, which had been so troublesome and unsatisfactory when he had first taken up such subjects, have been resolved.

The motif from which this painting was made is the plain outside Auvers. It could as easily be Provence or Brabant; there is nothing specific about it. It tells us nothing particular about Auvers or its population and their ways of life or work. But by the organization of its colour, the combination of perspectives in the close foreground and the receding middle and far distance, the painting invites the spectator to contemplate fields, clouds, trees and haystacks, held pleasantly and harmoniously together, potentially extending beyond the limits of the frame to surround him or her.