Vincent van Gogh The Harvest June 1888 oil on canvas Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

The Harvest was one of Van Gogh's favorite paintings. In contrast to his images within the town of Arles -- The Yellow House and The Bedroom, his private space -- this work shows the plain of La Crau, just outside of Arles.

Van Gogh always felt a strong affinity with nature -- its power, beauty, and emotional tenor. He had an almost pantheistic belief: that nature itself was the greatest expression of God's creation. In this painting he composed a panoramic view that extends into the distance. This is unusual among Van Gogh's landscapes, which tend to focus on a small part of nature. Here the sense is of a vast, open space supporting a range of agricultural activities.

Typical of Van Gogh's landscapes, the human presence is subtle and understated. One has to search the scene to find the figure in the foreground, the laborers unloading a wagon beside the white house at the far right, the horse-drawn cart in the middle distance, and the figure plowing a field behind the haystack on the left. Van Gogh shows nature at its grandest; man does not dominate but is part of creation.

The harvest was a compelling theme for Van Gogh. Popularized in many of Millet's paintings, it suggests the joy of the harvest and the continuation of life through the reaping of nature's bounty. For Van Gogh the theme symbolized summer itself. While he was interested in the cycle of seasons, summer held a special appeal. He once wrote to Theo that he was excited by the parching of the landscape: "There's old gold, bronze, and copper in everything, with the azure-green of the incandescent sky, that gives a delicious, extraordinarily harmonious color." Seeing nature in terms of its artistic potential, he gives the richness of the colors an almost voluptuous quality and expresses a passion for nature and its incomparable beauty.

Over ten days between 12 and 20 July 1888 Van Gogh produced ten paintings and five drawings on the theme of the harvest, including this one. He completed it in a single, lengthy session, retouching it later. He was very proud of the work, telling Theo that this canvas outshone all the others. It is indeed magnificent. It captures the tawny golds of the fields of ripened grain and the exact hue of the summer sky in Arles.

Van Gogh's career was exceedingly brief, but extremely productive: over its ten-year period he painted more than two thousand pictures. His drawings are not as well known. Because of conservation requirements, they are not exhibited extensively or for prolonged viewings. But drawings such as The Harvest -- The Plain of La Crau testify to his technical originality. This work is not preparatory for the painting, but a drawing after it. Van Gogh made the drawing as a gift for an artist friend. It is a tour de force, with the coloristic effects of the painting conveyed purely through pen and ink with hints of graphite and an enormous variety of pen strokes: small, loosely arranged stipples in the foreground, dashes and longer strokes in the middle ground, and tense, tightly spaced stippling in the background. Just as Van Gogh juxtaposed planes of color to create a sense of depth in his paintings, he used the same principle in his drawings, combining pattern and texture to create spatial effects. The resulting variations make one aware of the artist's every touch.

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