Wheat Field with Cypresses

In the pictureIn the foreground a golden wheat field bends in the wind; in the middle are olive trees and shrubs; at the right two dark blue-green cypresses shoot up into the sky like flames. Behind them the violet Alpilles mountains lie low, and white clouds swirl thickly across the sky, every brushstroke visible. There is no person anywhere in the picture, and everything seems to sway in the same wind.

BackgroundVan Gogh first painted this view in the summer of 1889, looking out from the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and that autumn he painted the same composition twice more indoors. This painting is one of them, and the artist himself wrote to his brother Theo that it was "the best of my summer canvases." Cypresses are planted in the cemeteries of southern France and so call death to mind, but Van Gogh said their form was "as beautiful as an Egyptian obelisk."

Puzzle tipIn this puzzle, the direction of the brushstrokes is the clue. The wheat field is short strokes lying sideways, the cypresses are strokes shooting upward, and the clouds are strokes curling round. First sort by color into yellow (wheat), green (shrubs), blue (sky), and dark blue-green (cypresses), then within each color place pieces by stroke direction. At 300 pieces the white cloud pieces are the most confusing; tell top from bottom by the curvature of the swirls.