In his last letter to his mother and his sister Wil, written from Auvers-sur-Oise
just days before his death, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) described what he
was working on: "I myself am quite absorbed," he wrote, "in the immense plain
with wheat fields against the hills, boundless as a sea, delicate yellow,
delicate soft green, the delicate violet of a dug-up and weeded piece of soil,
checkered at regular intervals with the green of flowering potato plants,
everything under a sky of delicate blue, white pink, violet tones." Around
the same time he also wrote to his brother Theo of "two big canvases" he had
just finished, "vast fields of wheat under troubled skies." A few days later,
on July 23, Vincent again wrote to Theo and enclosed sketches of two canvases
he had done "representing vast fields of wheat after the rain."