Poppy field

Poppy Field is an oil on canvas painted by Vincent van Gogh in June 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village near Paris, about a month before his death. It belongs to the final stage of his life, when he lived close to the psychiatrist Paul Gachet and to his brother Theo, who supported him financially. In those months he produced more than seventy paintings, many of them northern landscapes, and he found some comfort in painting the wheat fields. In a letter from July 1890 he wrote that he wanted to express sadness and extreme loneliness in the vast stretches of grain under turbulent skies.

The composition is built in horizontal bands: a foreground of red poppies on green ground, ragged masses of darker trees along the horizon, and restless blue skies above. The horizon sits high, so the flowers fill almost the entire space. Van Gogh often worked the contrast between red poppies and green, which he called a motif in red and green, and he believed certain colours make each other shine, like a couple that completes each other. The picture resembles a poppy field by Claude Monet from 1881, though with a higher viewpoint and the flowers far more dominant.

Its later history is also notable. In 1911 Gustav Pauli, director of a German museum and a supporter of modern art, bought it for the Kunsthalle Bremen. The purchase drew criticism from German artists, including Carl Vinnen, and led to the so-called Vinnen Protest against French modernism. After the Second World War, in 1948, the painting was returned to Dutch ownership, having been acquired by the Nazis. It is now on long-term loan to the Kunstmuseum in The Hague.

Its interest lies in the combination of pure colour and an almost abstract composition, in which the landscape works more as a mood than as a description.

Painter

Vincent van Gogh

Date

1890

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

73 × 92 cm

Museum

Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands Art Collection, Amersfoort

Genre

landscape painting

Depicts

Papaver rhoeas, field

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