Harvest at La Crau, with Montmajour in the Background

In 1888, during his stay in Arles, Van Gogh painted this view of the Crau plain with Montmajour hill in the background. The artist himself gave it the title «La Moisson», meaning harvest, and it belongs to a group of paintings of wheat fields and harvests that he began in June that year. Like many of his works, it was made outdoors, in front of the motif.

The composition draws the eye from the golden fields and sheaves in the foreground, across the flat land, to the distant hills and the blue sky. A fierce summer sun governs the scene, catching glints on the ears of wheat, the fences, the cart and the farmhouses. Van Gogh noted how hard it was to capture such intense light over so vast a plain. The white house at the upper right, which seems to reflect the sunlight from its facade, shows that problem tackled through contrasts of colour.

The painting also reveals the artist's admiration for Japanese woodblock prints, so much so that he called this Provençal landscape «my Japan». That influence shows in the simplified forms and the flat arrangement of the fields. Yet the work is more than a picturesque landscape. Van Gogh painted rural scenes throughout his career because he saw in farm labour, hard and poorly rewarded, a symbol of the spiritual work of humankind on earth. His aim was therefore not only to depict the countryside but to convey the essence of rural life.

Painter

Vincent van Gogh

Date

1888

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

73 × 92 cm

Museum

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Genre

landscape painting

Depicts

harvest, La Crau

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