Harvest in Provence at the Left Montmajour

Vincent van Gogh

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Keywords: HarvestProvenceLeftMontmajour

Work Overview

Harvest in Provence, at the Left Montmajour
Vincent van Gogh
Date: 1888; Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône, France *
Style: Post-Impressionism
Genre: landscape
Media: ink, watercolor, paper
Dimensions: 39.5 x 52.5 cm
Location: Fogg Museum (Harvard Art Museums), Cambridge, MA, US


Van Gogh painted thirteen large canvases of horizontal landscapes of the wheat harvest that occurs in the region from the middle to late July. The series began with Wheat Field under Cloudy Sky then Wheat Field with Crows was painted when the crop was on the verge of harvest. Sheaves of Wheat painted after the harvest and concluding with "Field with Haystacks" (private collection).[77]


Green Wheat Fields or Field with Green Wheat was made in May.[78]


Wheat Field at Auvers with White House[79] was made in June. The painting is mainly a large green field of wheat. In the background is a white house behind a wall and a tree.[80]


The outlying fields of Auvers, setting for Wheat Fields after the Rain (The Plain of Auvers), form a "zig-zag, patchwork pattern," of yellows, blues, and greens.[81] In the last letter that Van Gogh wrote to his mother he described being very calm, something needed for this work, an "immense plain with wheat fields up as far as the hills, boundless as the ocean, delicate yellow, delicate soft green, the delicate purple of a tilled and weeded piece of ground, with the regular speckle of the green of flowering potato plants, everything under a sky of delicate tones of blue, white, pink and violet."[82] This painting was also called Wheat Fields at Auvers Under Clouded Sky.