Vincent van Gogh - Wheat Field with Cornflowers 1890

Wheat Field with Cornflowers 1890
Wheat Field with Cornflowers
Oil on canvas 60.0 x 81.0 cm. Auvers-sur-Oise: July, 1890
Riehen/Basel, Switzerland: Fondation Beyeler

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From Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland:
With fresh hopes of an improvement in his condition, on 20 May 1890 Vincent van Gogh departed for Auvers-sur-Oise, which lay to the west of Paris. After devoting himself at first to motifs that he found in and around the picturesque town, which had already attracted other artists (Daubigny, Pissarro, Cézanne) before him, van Gogh soon turned his attention increasingly to the vast fields of wheat on a plateau above the town. In these now legendary pictures, the painter lent expression to his “extreme loneliness”. The Fondation owns two works from this very last phase in van Gogh’s œuvre. The first to be painted was the animated Wheatfield with cornflowers: a gust of wind, rippling in ecstatic hatching through the stalks, makes the wheat field disappearing into the background ‘overflow’. The heads of a few yellow stalks of wheat detach themselves in the centre and plunge into the blue of the hills behind, thereby echoing the blue of the cornflowers in the field.