Field with Two Rabbits

Van Gogh painted this work in the autumn of 1889 while a voluntary patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, one of the most productive yet psychologically turbulent chapters of his career. Confined largely to the asylum grounds, he turned the enclosed garden, the surrounding wheat fields and the rocky Alpilles hillsides into the raw material for an astonishing sequence of canvases. Post-Impressionism finds one of its most personal expressions here: the palette far exceeds what the eye would see under even intense southern light, color serving not description but inner sensation. Van Gogh was in active correspondence with his brother Theo and with Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin during these months, debating whether painting should move toward symbolic abstraction or remain rooted in observed nature; Field with Two Rabbits sits squarely in that tension, its rabbits observed with steady attention while the terrain around them pulses with an almost hallucinatory intensity. The picture is held in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, which acquired it as part of the foundational bequest of the artist's estate, and it has been discussed by scholars as an example of his interest in small, quiet animal subjects as an antidote to the grand, storm-driven canvases he was also producing at Saint-Rémy.