Ploughman in the Fields near Arles

Vincent van Gogh

National Gallery of Art

Drawn with brown ink on tan paper, fields stretch away from us toward three farm buildings and a man walking behind a plough pulled by a horse in this horizontal landscape. The grass and plants in the field closest to us are suggested by tightly packed clusters of parallel, short, vertical strokes and curlicues. Just beyond it is a gap, suggesting a road, and another field made up of rows of short strokes angled slight to the left or right that recede toward the man and buildings. Two twisted trees, each with a gnarled trunk and spiky branches, stands to our left and right where the more distant fields meet the road, near the sides of the paper. The trees reach high into the blank sky above them. Farther back and to our left, the man and horse are drawn with only a few strokes each, shown facing our right in profile. Beyond them, vertical lines of varying heights, with some intersected by horizontal lines, separate the field from the farmhouses. We see the top level of the three loosely drawn buildings along the horizon line, which comes just under halfway up the composition. The largest is a long rectangular structure just right of center with a few windows scattered across its facade. To the left, beyond the horse and ploughman, is a smaller square structure with a peaked roof. On the far left, the third building has two dots suggesting windows. More thin, vertical strokes appear beyond the buildings, and a low bank of puffy clouds hovers just above the horizon on the right side. Some outlines in graphite are visible under or near the ink lines.