Vincent van Gogh
Dutch, 1853–1890

In the figure of the reaper, Vincent van Gogh expressed his own symbolic, almost religious, view of nature and of those who worked close to it. In a letter to his sister in 1889 he wrote:

. . . for aren’t we, who live on bread, to a considerable extent like wheat, at least aren’t we forced to submit to growing like a plant without the power to move, by which I mean in whatever way our imagination impels us, and to being reaped when we are ripe, like the same wheat?

Painted in the month before his death, this canvas represents a culmination of van Gogh’s astonishingly brief artistic career. Only four years earlier, he had moved from Holland to Paris where he first encountered Impressionism. Later, working at Arles, Saint-Remy, and finally Auvers, van Gogh transformed the Impressionist technique into thick, staccato brush strokes and intense colors to express the intensity of his private visions and emotions.

Oil on canvas, 1890
Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1935.4