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

Vincent van Gogh

1889

Graphite on buff wove paper

Minneapolis Institute of Art

A graphite sketch depicts a fence line running horizontally across the middle ground, separating a field of tall grass in the foreground from a distant landscape with rolling hills and scattered trees. The sky is a pale, unadorned expanse. A graphite sketch depicts a fence line running horizontally across the middle ground, separating a field of tall grass in the foreground from a distant landscape with rolling hills and scattered trees. The sky is a pale, unadorned expanse. 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 sparsenes