Van Gogh, 'A Wheatfield with Cypresses'

Van Gogh's bright, bold paintings are surprisingly fragile. The director asks David Bomford, Head of the Conservation Department, how they are preserved.

Transcript

Charles Saumarez Smith
This animated landscape is by Vincent Van Gogh. He painted it while living at the asylum of St. Rémy in Provence in 1889.

The bright colours convey the intense sunlight of the south of France, while the lively brushstrokes capture the effect of the wind, particularly on the rippling wheat fields and windswept clouds.

It looks so fresh, it could almost have been painted yesterday. But David Bomford, Head of our Conservation Department, told me that the painting isn't as robust as it looks.

David Bomford
"Van Gogh's paintings are very difficult to look after, because they're very fragile. The canvases are often rather thin and weak, because he wasn't able to afford very expensive materials, and of course we have the problem that his paint is very thick in some areas, like in the wheat field itself, and in some of the swirling lines of the clouds.

It's rather thin in other areas, the green of the sky is rather thin and flaky, and you can see in some patches of the sky and at the edges, there's no paint at all."

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