"Yesterday I sent 2 canvases to Marseille,” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in the opening days of 1890. “I made a present of them to my friend Roulin, a white farmhouse among the olive trees and a wheatfield with a background of lilac mountains and a dark tree, as in the large canvas I sent you” (Letter 836, in L. Jansen, H. Luijten and N. Bakker, eds., Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, London, 2009, vol. 5, p. 179).
The second painting Van Gogh described is the present Champs près des Alpilles, which he had painted a few months earlier, in November 1889. Depicting an expansive vista that spans across a vivid green wheatfield, with rows of olive trees and the soaring peaks of the Alpilles in the background, this landscape embodies both the signature subjects as well as the radical, expressive handling that Van Gogh developed in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, his home for a year in 1889-1890.
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