The Harvest in Provence (June 1888) comes up for sale on 19 May at Sotheby’s in New York, with an estimate of $25m-$35m. Van Gogh painted the watercolour just a few days before making his magnificent oil painting of the same scene, The Harvest (June 1888).
Van Gogh’s The Harvest (June 1888)
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Van Gogh had actually made two watercolours of the wheatfields. The first, The Blue Cart (June 1888), belongs to the Harvard Art Museums. It is only rarely displayed (for conservation reasons), but will be going on show later this year in their exhibition On Location: Drawing the Outdoors (18 September-17 January 2027).
The first watercolour: Van Gogh’s The Blue Cart (June 1888)
Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts (bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.279). Photograph © President and Fellows of Harvard College
The second watercolour, the one to be sold at Sotheby’s, is larger (49 x 61 cm), more elaborate and is more colourful. In the middle distance of this composition, Van Gogh added two small horses and carts (one just to the left of the centre and the other outside the house on the right).
In The Harvest in Provence, Van Gogh first sketched the landscape in pencil, then used a reed pen and ink to outline the key elements, and finally applied at least eight different watercolours. Van Gogh had received the watercolour paints from Paris two weeks earlier. As Vincent then explained to his brother Theo, “I’d like to do some pen drawings, but coloured in flat tints like Japanese prints”. They were both admirers of the art of Japan.
An examination of the paper of the Sotheby’s watercolour reveals that it has a Whatman watermark, showing that it was made at a mill in Kent, England. A month after finishing The Harvest in Provence, Vincent wrote to his brother Theo to say that he was getting through “so many sheets of Whatman”.
As he had made the oil painting very soon after the watercolour, it might be assumed that the work on paper was a simply preparatory sketch for the oil, but this was not necessarily the case. The Sotheby’s watercolour is signed, which he only did occasionally, and is even titled in the lower-left corner (“La Moisson en Provence”), suggesting that he completed it as a standalone work of art. Indeed, Vincent proposed to Theo that the Paris art dealer Georges Thomas might be interested in selling it.
Vincent posted the watercolour to Theo on 15 or 16 June—just before he finished the oil painting. If he had regarded the watercolour primarily as a preparatory sketch, he would presumably have hung onto it a bit longer. But having worked on the watercolour, he had greater appreciation of the view, informing the final oil painting.
If you look closer, the compositions of the watercolour and the oil are slightly different. Most noticeably, the horizon is higher in the final oil painting and the view appears to be from a slightly more elevated position.
Van Gogh’s view was from the outskirts of Arles, facing north-east. Both the Sotheby’s watercolour and the oil painting appear to have been done from a raised point, which suggests that Van Gogh worked from one of the remaining windmills in the area, most likely the Moulin de Jonquet. This structure was depicted in another of his paintings (the mill’s base still survives at 27 Rue Mireille). In La Maison de La Crau (The Old Mill) (September 1888), the three buildings in the fields in the distance are likely to be those which appear in the centre of the watercolour.
Van Gogh’s La Maison de La Crau (The Old Mill) (September 1888)
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York State
Beyond the watercolour’s foreground lies a patchwork of fields in the plain of La Crau, with ripened wheat at harvest time. The line of isolated farmhouses gives depth to the composition and draws in the eye. In the upper left are the ruins of the ancient abbey of Montmajour. On the horizon are Les Alpilles (Little Alps) and, slightly closer on the right side, the Mont de Cordes.
A somewhat similar view was drawn in a much simpler style by the illustrator Albert Robida only a few years after Van Gogh. Artists were clearly attracted to this expansive landscape with its distant hills.
Albert Robida’s La Campagne d’Arles (The Countryside of Arles) (around 1890-92)
Albert Robida, La Vieille France: Provence (Paris, 1893)
Since Van Gogh’s time, the town of Arles has sprawled northwards, although some idea of his scene can still be glimpsed today. This photograph, taken from the tower of the LUMA Arles art centre, shows that, in the distance, most of the area still remains agricultural.
View from LUMA Arles towards the abbey of Montmajour, Les Alpilles and the Mont de Cordes
The Art Newspaper
Later story
Vincent was clearly pleased with The Harvest in Provence, which was among the works he suggested Theo show to a Paris dealer. He wrote to his brother that, “perhaps we’d pick up a few sous [small coins] from…Thomas” for a handful of works, including the harvest watercolour. Georges Thomas, an unconventional character who supported up-and-coming artists, apparently failed to sell the Van Goghs.
By 1899, the watercolour had been acquired by the Berlin-based, progressive art critic Julius Meier-Graefe. That year, he reproduced The Harvest in Provence as a lithograph for a portfolio. This was the first colour image of a Van Gogh work that was published anywhere. In the print, the outer edges (including the title) were omitted, but it gives a good impression of the artist’s original colouration.
Print after The Harvest in Provence (1899)
Germinal: Album de XX estampes originales (Paris, 1899), lithograph by Emil Rudolf Weiss
By 1930, The Harvest in Provence had been acquired by London and Rutland-based collector Anne Kessler after passing through several owners. Kessler was the niece of Dutch-born collector Frank Stoop, who in 1933 bequeathed four Van Goghs to the Tate Gallery.
Kessler died in 1983. There were hopes that The Harvest in Provence might also be bequeathed to the Tate, but that was not to be (although 14 of her other French pictures were given). The watercolour passed to a family trust and, in 1997, it was sold at Sotheby’s, going to a foreign collector believed to be a New York-based Austrian financier. Initially a UK export licence was deferred, to allow a British buyer to acquire the work, but the Tate never tried to raise the sale price of £8.9m.
The Harvest in Provence was sold again at Sotheby’s in 2003, fetching $10.3m. Since then, it has featured in several exhibitions, loaned via the Palm Springs dealer Heather James. This suggests that the present vendor may be American.
When The Harvest in Provence comes up at Sotheby’s for the third time on 17 May, it could well exceed the record price paid for a Van Gogh work on paper. In 2021, Wheat Stacks sold at Christie’s for $31m (totalling $35.8m with fees). Only five other works on paper by any European or American artist have sold for more than this: works by Munch, Raphael (two drawings), Picasso and Degas.
Martin Bailey is a leading Van Gogh specialist and special correspondent for The Art Newspaper. He has curated exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery, Compton Verney/National Gallery of Scotland and Tate Britain.
Martin Bailey’s recent Van Gogh books
Martin has written a number of bestselling books on Van Gogh’s years in France: The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh’s Masterpiece (Frances Lincoln 2013, UK and US), Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence (Frances Lincoln 2016, UK and US), Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum (White Lion Publishing 2018, UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln 2021, UK and US). The Sunflowers are Mine (2024, UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale (2024, UK and US) are also now available in a more compact paperback format.
His other recent books include Living with Vincent van Gogh: The Homes & Landscapes that shaped the Artist (White Lion Publishing 2019, UK and US), which provides an overview of the artist’s life. The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh has been reissued (Batsford 2021, UK and US). My Friend Van Gogh/Emile Bernard provides the first English translation of Bernard’s writings on Van Gogh (David Zwirner Books 2023, UKand US).
To contact Martin Bailey, please email [email protected]
Please note that he does not undertake authentications.
Explore all of Martin’s adventures with Van Gogh here
