Van Gogh: Wheat Field in Rain

By now you've worked out I'm a big fan of weather so, since its raining a lot right now, I've been rummaging round rain paintings. Its seems like there are a few standard approaches which almost everyone takes these days. Some paint the world in really bright colours despite the fact that falling rain mutes everything. Some paint raindrops on the canvas and in front of the scene as if they are looking through a window. Some paint everything in dull colours and pick a person or object out in a primary colour. Some have everything fading to grey. Etc etc etc... Do an image search on google for "rain painting" and see what I mean. Artists' lack of invention, thought and sensitivity when painting this most unpredictable of weathers is soul destroying. Where is the delicacy of drizzle? Where is the violence of the squall? Where is the poetry of a half-obscured landscape?

So it was quite a relief to find this painting by Van Gogh. It is well observed, clever and well painted. This is one of the most colourful painters of his time and, as it was painted in 1889, it was painted about the same time as some of the sunflowers and bright cornfields and yet our Vincent has toned his palette right down and judged his colours with a delicacy befitting the subject.

The manner of the painting itself is intriguing. He has found a way to make the distant mountains all but disappear in the rain without simply blending them away. The trick he uses for this is just so simple and elegant - he uses the same colours as the sky but changes the texture slightly and then draws the outline of the skyline on top in a related colour. The intermediate hills use the same idea but the colour is halfway between the foreground and the sky. The foreground itself is noteworthy too. Van Gogh's distinctive brushwork is used for the field as it would normally be, but it is juxtaposed with a very small number of raindrops which are indicated as simply as they can be with light and dark slashes. By carefully judging the angles of the two sets of marks - the perspectival and textural wheat and the dynamic rain drops - Van Gogh has multiplied the impact of both to add light, space and energy.

The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.