Vincent van Gogh's spirituality and his intense identification with the energies of nature transformed his landscapes into powerful personal expressions. While voluntarily committed in an asylum in Saint-Rémy, fifteen miles northeast of Arles in southern France, Van Gogh found his greatest inspiration in direct contact with nature, and he created this image over several days, working just outside the hospital in October 1889.
Enclosed Field with Peasant is the most topographically accurate of four views of a walled Provence wheat field at the base of the rugged peaks of the Alpilles. The artist described this painting as a pendant to The Reaper (Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam), specifying that the predominant yellow hues of that landscape were the chromatic complement to the blue-violet tints of the IMA canvas. Charged by the picture's dynamic brushwork, the furrowed soil and craggy mountains of the painting seem to pulsate with a fertile inner life. At the center of the composition, a small figure carries a bundle of straw-a human element reinforcing the cycles of life that animate Van Gogh's art.
What can a person do when he thinks of all the things he cannot understand, but look at the fields of wheat. . . . We, who live by bread, are we not ourselves very much like wheat . . . to be reaped when we are ripe. . . .
-Vincent van Gogh, 1889
