Haystacks in Provence Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

A description of Vincent van Gogh’s painting Haystacks in Provence

1888; canvas, oil; 73.0×92.5; Kröller-Müller Museum.

The period of his life in Arles is characterized in Van Gogh’s work by an abundance of landscape painting. In his paintings he tried to capture the beauty of the surrounding nature, which needed no artificial grooming.

The painting Haystacks in Provence is simple in composition and charms the eye with its unpretentiousness. Rich yellow color fills the picture with warm summer glow. Two big stacks of harvested straw, which occupy the central place on the canvas, are painted in yellow. They seem to dominate everything else, their lush yellowness here and there diluted by shoots of green grass stowed in the stack at random.

Yellow is the color of the field, where the stacks are stacked, the road in the background, leading to the village. The large two-story house is yellow, as are the reflections on the roofs of the huts further away near the horizon. The contrast is created by the blue summer sky above, with reflections of purple visible in the wooden structures on the ground.

Small details further enliven the landscape: a woman with a bucket and a straw hat wandering along the road, ladders left by the workers at the second stack, clothes thrown over the straw. These traces of human presence are a reminder that the pastoral picture of rural nature is not created just to admire it. Behind all this is the work of people for whom all the splendor around them is not a work of art, but an everyday occurrence.