Late in 1888, his stay at Arles with van Gogh at an end, Gauguin, then forty, went for the first time to Le Pouldu, a village by the sea, south of Pont-Aven. Later, from the fall of 1889 to November, 1890, he and a friend, the Dutch artist Meyer de Haan, stayed at a small inn there and started on a plan to decorate the four walls of its dining room with their own work. Hay is one of those paintings. The surface of the earth, delineated in horizontal bands, was painted in consistent brushwork. The trees rising vertically generate a decorative effect.