Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Garden of Saint Paul's Hospital
(a.k.a.
The Fall of the
Leaves,
1889)
“...a traveler going to a destina-
tion that does not exist....”
—Vincent van Gogh
The stark brown trees are blown by the
wind. A solitary figure (Vincent?) winds
along a narrow, snaky path as the wind
blows leaves on him. The colors are
surreal—blue, green, and red tree trunks
with heav y black outlines. A road runs
away from us, heading nowhere.
Wheatfield with a Reaper
(1889)
“I have been working hard and fast
in the last few days. This is how I try
to express how desperately fast things
pass in modern life.”
—Vincent van Gogh
The harvest is here. The time is short.
There's much work to be done. A lone
reaper works uphill, scything through
a swirling wheat field, cutting slender
paths of calm.
The Sheaf-Binder,
after Millet (1889)
“I want to paint men and women with that something of the
eternal which the halo used to symbolize....”
—Vincent van Gogh
Vincent's compassion for honest laborers remained constant fol-
lowing his work with Belgian miners.
These sturdy folk, with their curving
bodies, wrestle as one with their curving
wheat. The world Vincent sees is charged
from within by spiritual fires, twisting
and turning matter into energy, and vice
versa.
T The f its of mad ness ret u r ned.
During these spells, he lost all sense of
his own actions. He couldn't paint, the
one thing he felt driven to do. He wrote
to Theo, “My surroundings here begin to
weigh on me more than I can say—I need air. I feel overwhelmed
by boredom and grief.”
