Tulip Field at La Crau

• Van Gogh: “La Plaine de la Crau,” (1888)
• “The Painter on the Road to Tarascon,” (1888)
• Flowerbeds in Holland,” (1883)

In Arles, Vincent van Gogh produced many marvelous art works, among them the “Harvest Landscape” (June 1888). This exquisite painting has become one of the most successful and most popular images of Van Gogh, and appears in countless postcards and other reproductions.

Van Gogh composed two pen-and-watercolor drawings of the scene, before painting it in oil. On June 12, 1888, he wrote to Theo: “I have embarked on a new motif, endless green and yellow fields which I have already drawn twice and am not starting on again as painting” (Letter 496). Completed in the region of the Crau in the vicinity of Arles, Van Gogh’s “Harvest Landscape” is a panoramic view of pasture with gardens, haystack, houses, carts, farmers, and vast wheat fields extending to the chain of the Alpine Mountains on the horizon. It is warm in color and forceful in perspective. Because of the dry heat of June, the greenery was beginning to look parched. Vincent wrote, “In everything you would say, there is now old gold, bronze, copper, and that, with the greenish azure of a white-hot sky, gives a marvelous color, extraordinary harmony, with broken tints just like in Delacroix.”

In Chen’s version of the “Harvest Landscape” in la Crau, the golden fields of dry wheat and green brushes have changed suddenly into gorgeous tulip fields exploding in full bloom. Nostalgic, Vincent sees that the landscape in front of him has altered into a panoramic manifestation of color fields as familiar to him as home. The resplendent Dutch bulb-fields in full flowering appear as an ocean of abstracted coloring. Moreover, the enclosed garden at the forepart has changed into part of his “Flowerbeds in Holland” painted 1883 at The Hague, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (Collection of Mr. & Mrs. Paul Mellon). Still more astounding are the three windmills in view. The rest of the setting remains the same; however, deep in the tulip fields, we see a ghostly silhouette of Vincent in straw hat, roaming with his canvas.

The Buddhists believe that the universe can change according to one’s mental vision. Van Gogh had always been fascinated by the exotic Far East (such as Japan); perhaps like the Guddhists, our nostalgic Van Gogh has focused his mind of transform the Arlesian wheat fields into an ocean of tulips.

– T. F. and Julie Chen