Ploughed fields

Ploughed Fields (The Furrows), painted in August 1888 and now at the Van Gogh Museum, was produced during Van Gogh's most intensively creative Arles summer — three months of extraordinary productivity in which he painted some of his most celebrated works. The subject of ploughed fields was central to his vision of agricultural landscape: the transformation of earth by human labor, the rhythmic order imposed by plowing visible in parallel furrows running toward the horizon. For Van Gogh this subject carried both aesthetic and moral weight — the landscape of human work dignified by serious artistic attention. The Arlesian summer light gives the subject an intensity utterly different from his earlier Dutch peasant subjects.

The composition deploys the ploughed furrows as a powerful perspectival device — parallel rows converging toward a distant vanishing point, creating a dramatic spatial recession. Van Gogh renders the furrowed earth with strokes that follow the direction of the furrows themselves, making his mark-making structurally analogous to the landscape's own geometry. His palette deploys the deep blues, vivid greens, and warm ochres of the summer Arlesian landscape. The sky above is pale and luminous, contrasting with the deep colors of the worked earth.