About this work
*Green Wheat Field with Cypress* is an oil-on-canvas painting completed in June 1889, made during Van Gogh's stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France.
The composition centres on a field of largely green wheat, parts of it ripening to yellow,
with a towering cypress tree standing as a sentinel, its dark silhouette cutting sharply through the azure sky.
At the end of the field, a small pink house nestles against purplish and bluish hills, while the forget-me-not blue sky is streaked with pink — pure tones set in deliberate contrast to the already heavy, scorched ears of wheat.
The entire landscape seems to tremble with the summer mistral, the strong cold wind of southern France — everything rendered in powerful rhythmic lines and swirling brushstrokes that convey nature's raw vitality.
The heavy impasto technique layers paint thickly, achieving a textured surface that gives the composition remarkable depth and physical presence.
The painting was made during a period of frantic productivity, shortly after Van Gogh completed *The Starry Night*, at a time when he was intensely preoccupied with the cypress.
On 25 June 1889, just one month after admitting himself to the asylum, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: "The cypresses still preoccupy me, I'd like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers."
He compared the cypress's form to that of an Egyptian obelisk and described it as "a splash of black in a sunny landscape."
Van Gogh regarded this work as one of his "best" summer landscapes, and was moved that September to make two studio renditions of the same composition.
Beyond an aesthetic fondness, Van Gogh held a special affinity for wheat fields, depicting them dozens of times — to him, they symbolised the cycle of life and death, and he found in them both solace and inspiration. The painting is currently held by the National Gallery Prague, displayed at the Trade Fair Palace in the district of Holešovice.
On the wall, this painting rewards a room that can hold its energy — a generous living room, a wide hallway lit with natural light, or a studio where the day moves through. The palette of rich greens, yellows, and blues commands attention without harshness, and the canvas's horizontal sweep gives it a landscape-window quality, as though looking out onto the Provençal countryside itself. It
