Vincent van Gogh was obsessed with cypresses. In the summer of 1889, locked inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, he wrote to his brother Theo that the trees were always on his mind. He wanted to do something with them like his Sunflowers, and he thought their lines and proportions were as beautiful as an Egyptian obelisk.
Most people associate the cypress with graveyards, and Van Gogh knew it. Yet he saw it as a dark, living flame, a rare black note in a bright southern landscape, and one of the hardest to capture. In Wheat Field with Cypresses it rises from the right, almost the same height as the sky itself, and the whole canvas seems to move around it. The clouds spiral. The wheat rolls in waves. The hills ripple like cloth.
He painted the view more than once that year, and he considered the wheat field series among the best of his summer landscapes. The Metropolitan Museum's version is one of them. The paint is thick, applied in short, ropey strokes, so heavily in places that it stands up from the canvas, and in a raking light you can see the ridges.
He was allowed to paint outdoors on good days, and the wheat fields lay just beyond the asylum walls. The wheat in this painting is ripe and golden, ready to cut, and he kept working through the heat.
Van Gogh lived for only a year after finishing it. For the viewer today, it is the energy that lasts: a hot, windy afternoon that has never stopped blowing.
Van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses appears on our: