'Ploughed Fields (‘The Furrows’)' by Vincent van Gogh’

Ploughed Fields (’The Furrows’) 
Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
INTRODUCTION

Vincent van Gogh’s Ploughed Fields (’The Furrows’) is one of his most striking meditations on soil, season and the painterly trace. 

Painted in Arles in September 1888, this canvas compresses an immense field of turned earth into a compact, shimmering action of brushstrokes: ridges and clods rendered in color, rhythm and sculpted paint. 

It is a work that moves from agricultural specificity — a record of furrowed ground after ploughing — to a deeply felt pictorial exploration of texture, color-contrast and human labour’s imprint on the landscape. This essay narrates the painting visually, explains its artistic specialities, traces its provenance and conservation history, summarizes its market context, and critically compares it with two contemporary artists whose recent landscape works resonate with van Gogh’s concerns: David Hockney and Peter Doig.

Seeing the painting: composition, color and movement

At the center of Ploughed Fields is the field itself — not an abstract pattern but a field made of countless clods and furrows. The composition is dominated by the linear rhythm of the ploughed lines, which run diagonally across the canvas toward the horizon. 

Van Gogh organizes the picture plane through this network of converging furrows so that the viewer’s eye is guided across the surface: the foreground is a compact, tactile mass of earth; the middle ground opens toward a line of dark trees and small houses; above them the sky arcs with rapid, cloud-flecked movement. The sense of depth is achieved not through traditional aerial perspective but through the interplay of color temperature and directional brushwork.

Color is both descriptive and expressive. Van Gogh paints the soil in an ashy violet and warm brown — a surprising but deliberate choice that establishes an optical counterpoint to the high, “forget-me-not” blue of the sky he described in a letter. Midtones of green and blue define distant hills and vegetation, while flashes of orange and ochre suggest roof tiles and human presence. The palette does something more than describe: it sets up complementary tensions that make the earth hum. 

Each brushstroke is purposeful; the paint often sits in short, energetic dabs and ridged impasto that model the soil’s volume and convey the tactile quality of furrowed ground.

In short, the painting reads as a choreography of mark and hue. The ploughed rows form both an organizing geometry and a tactile topography; the paint’s physical presence turns representation into an encounter with touch.

Ploughed Fields (’The Furrows’) 
Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Artistic specialities: technique, motif, and van Gogh’s visual logic

Ploughed Fields exemplifies several of van Gogh’s signature advances at this stage of his career:

  1. Impasto as topography. Van Gogh uses thick paint to model the clods and ridges. The impasto is not decorative: it becomes literal topography. With each short, pressed stroke the ground acquires a ridged, almost sculpted surface. The paint’s physical volume mirrors the furrows’ volume, inviting a tactile reading of paint-as-earth.

  2. Directional strokes and rhythm. The repetitive, rhythmic strokes echo the plough’s action. They are not merely descriptive; they are performative — the brush records the motion of labor, the repeated gesture of the farmer’s tool echoed in the painter’s hand.

  3. Color re-orchestration. Rather than reproducing exact natural tones, van Gogh repurposes color to create optical resonance. The violet-tinged furrows set up a complementary relationship with the warm sunlit sky and the green-blue distant hills, reinforcing depth and mood.

  4. Human labour as subject. Although no workers appear in the canvas, human activity is the painting’s animating cause: the furrows themselves are the evidence of labor. This approach aligns with van Gogh’s sympathy for rural life and manual labor — the landscape is both record and tribute.

  5. Integrative framing. The horizon line, cluster of dark trees and tiny roofed houses anchor the distant plane and provide human scale without dominating the field’s sculptural drama. Van Gogh’s composition balances monumental earth with small human traces, producing an image that feels both vast and intimate.

These technical and thematic choices make Ploughed Fields a paradigmatic example of how van Gogh turned an agricultural scene into a study of gesture, texture and chromatic intensity.

Provenance and conservation: from Arles sketchbook to museum wall

The painting was executed in Arles in late September 1888 and was part of van Gogh’s series of autumnal land- and field-studies; he made a sketch for it and discussed it in his correspondence, describing the furrows’ color “like an old clog” against a “forget-me-not” blue sky. 

The canvas remained in the artist’s hands and was sent to his brother Theo in Paris. After Vincent’s death it entered the collection stream that would eventually lead to the holdings of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it is today part of the institutional collection. 

The work’s museum stewardship has allowed both scholarship and conservation to deepen: a significant restoration project has removed a later, non-original glossy varnish layer that had dulled the impasto and altered color perception. Conservation research and cleaning have helped return the painting’s tactile texture and brighter chromatic balance closer to van Gogh’s original intent. 

Two facts stand out in the painting’s modern history. First, unlike several canvases van Gogh hoped might find buyers, Ploughed Fields was never sold in his lifetime. He described his intention to make works attractive to buyers, yet this particular canvas remained in his circle after he painted it. Second, the museum’s restoration work — which removed an earlier varnish and addressed a lining used in a prior intervention — revealed how much a non-original surface layer can change the viewer’s experience of an impastoed painting. The cleaned surface allowed scholars and the public to better appreciate how van Gogh intended contrast and texture to function across the field. 

Ploughed Fields (’The Furrows’) 
Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Auction history and market context

Because Ploughed Fields is in the permanent collection of a major museum and was never part of a post-19th-century large-scale sale, it has not itself appeared as a market lot in modern high-profile auctions. 

However, canvases of similar date and subject by van Gogh — farm scenes, ploughed fields, wheat studies and related Arles works — have consistently performed strongly on the auction market, shaping the price environment for the artist’s agrarian subjects. 

The strong museum presence of key works also strengthens their cultural value: the painting’s role in exhibitions, catalogues raisonnés and scholarship enhances its immaterial marketability even when the canvas remains off-market. In other words, Ploughed Fields contributes to van Gogh’s market narrative through provenance and exhibition rather than through hammer-price spectacle. 

Comparative analysis: David Hockney and Peter Doig

To situate Ploughed Fields in a larger conversation about how artists have treated fields, furrows and the tactility of the earth, we can compare van Gogh’s canvas with two contemporary practitioners who have made similar motifs central to their work: David Hockney and Peter Doig. Both artists, in different ways, pick up van Gogh’s interest in seriality, surface and place; each translates aspects of the furrowed field into a modern register.

David Hockney — serial vision and the seasonal road

David Hockney’s multi-part series The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate (2011) — originally made as many iPad drawings and later translated into large-scale printed and painted works — investigates the shift from winter to spring through repeated views of a tree-lined lane and surrounding fields. Hockney’s method is explicitly serial: he made dozens of studies of the same stretch of countryside, privileging temporal change and the optical phenomenon of seeing across time. Where van Gogh compresses a ploughed field into sculptural strokes, Hockney flattens and reconfigures observation through bright, often saturated colors and linear mark-making that retain the immediacy of digital drawing. 

Both artists are fascinated by repetition — van Gogh in his clusters of field and orchard canvases, Hockney in his daily, cumulative iPad studies — but their media produce different sensations. 

Hockney’s color fields are often cleaner and more diagrammatic, his surfaces smooth and deliberately graphic, whereas van Gogh’s oil impasto invites touch and tactile perspective. Still, they share an interest in how repeated looking can transform a landscape into a chronicle of sensation and time. Hockney’s lane and van Gogh’s furrowed rows both become music: patterning that articulates seasonal passage.

Peter Doig — memory, texture and the haunted field

Peter Doig’s landscapes — notably The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991) and subsequent wooded and pond works — often envelop viewers in layered, memory-tinged space. Doig’s paint-hand combines velvety washes, scraped passages and repeated mark-making that produce both depth and a partial disintegration of form. 

The result is a landscape that is at once topographic and dreamlike. Comparing Doig to van Gogh makes apparent the different stakes each artist sets: van Gogh’s furrows are tactile evidence of labor and a specific moment of cultivation; Doig’s fields and woods more often seem like fragments of remembered place, where texture and atmosphere accumulate into a filmic palimpsest. 

Yet both artists share a concern with the materiality of paint as a means to conjure place: van Gogh’s dense ridges and Doig’s layered surfaces both convert paint into an archive of making. Doig’s work can feel more enigmatic and psychological; van Gogh’s, by contrast, insists on the concrete presence of earth as the result of human action and seasonal labor.

Synthesis: what each approach reveals

  • On seriality: van Gogh and Hockney both use repetition to capture time — van Gogh via closely related studies and Hockney via near-daily digital drawings. This repetition turns landscape into diary and exploration.

  • On materiality: van Gogh’s impasto converts paint into topography; Doig’s layering suggests memory’s sediment. Hockney’s digital-to-print process intentionally privileges color clarity and serial display, rather than painted tactility.

  • On human presence: van Gogh’s ploughed ridges are traces of labor — the human hand at work. Hockney’s lanes record human movement across time; Doig’s landscapes preserve the residue of habitation and recollection.

These comparisons show that a single subject — the ploughed field, the lane, the ravine — can yield multiple modern interpretations depending on an artist’s medium, tempo and psychological horizon.

Ploughed Fields (’The Furrows’) 
Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Ploughed Fields continues to matter

Ploughed Fields (’The Furrows’) matters for several reasons. It is a masterclass in how paint’s physicality can parallel the physicality of the subject; by making paint mimic furrows and clods, van Gogh dissolves the boundary between representation and material. 

It articulates his humanist interest in work and rural life: the field is evidence of human labor and seasonal return. Its conservation history underlines the importance of sensitive restoration for understanding an artist’s technique and intended surface quality. 

And its presence in a major museum collection embeds it in the cultural memory of modern painting — not as a commodity to be bought and sold on a single day at auction, but as a sustained object of study, display and public encounter.

Finally, the painting functions as a node in a larger dialogue that stretches into contemporary practice: from digital, serial color studies to layered, memory-laden canvases, artists keep returning to the ploughed field because it so powerfully combines geometry, time, labor and the tactile facts of the earth. Van Gogh’s furrows teach later artists how stroke and color can be enlisted to make earth speak.

Sources and further reading (web sources consulted)

Below are the principal web resources used for factual details about the painting’s date, dimensions, ownership, conservation and the comparative artists mentioned. (Per your request, these site names and links are listed here rather than in the essay body.)