Harvest at La Crau with Montmajour in the Background

About this work

Van Gogh wrote to Theo that this was the best thing he had made, that it "kills all the rest". He painted the plain in a burst of about a week in June 1888, in short, dense chips of colour.

Here Rami Alon did something he did in no other work in the exhibition: he set the stones with no grout between them. This is the only piece here in which stone touches stone.

The result is a surface with no separating grid, only blocks of colour pressed against each other — exactly the logic of Van Gogh’s brushwork. The choice makes it unlike everything else here, and the difference answers the original painting directly. Rami Alon spent six times as long on it as Van Gogh did.