View of the Field behind Saint Paul’s Asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

Suffering from increasingly acute attacks of mental illness, Vincent van Gogh voluntarily entered an asylum in the spring of 1889, just over a year before his suicide. The hospital of Saint Paul’s was in a 12th-century monastery in the countryside near Arles, in southern France. This view of wheat fields was likely the one van Gogh saw from his small cell in the asylum. He focused on the sparseness of the environment and texture of the wheat grass. Using the field’s walled enclosure and distant horizon, he convincingly structured the space in perspective and simultaneously evoked the vastness and loneliness of the rural landscape.