The Farm

Every animal, tool, plant, and building of a Catalan farm is set out with hallucinatory, inventory-like clarity - a great central tree, a goat, a snail, a watering can, the farmhouse - each thing isolated and equally sharp against the ochre earth. Joan Miro labored over the Farm for months, distilling his love of his family's land into a picture poised between meticulous realism and dream. Now in Washington's National Gallery, it was once owned by Ernest Hemingway, who treasured it - the great threshold work between Miro's early naturalism and his coming Surrealist fantasy.