In the spring of 1888, Van Gogh worked daily in the hot sun in the wheat fields around Arles. He was immensely productive, completing ten paintings and five drawings in just over a week, until a heavy storm brought the harvest season to an end. The Harvest is structured in layers, with mown wheat in the foreground and mauve-blue mountains, the Alpilles, in the background against a turquoise sky. It was not the idyllic landscape that drew Van Gogh, however, but the lives of rural people and their work on the land a recurring theme in his paintings. He depicted several stages of the harvest. Here we see a hayrick, ladders, several carts and on the right a man with a pitchfork.

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