Wheatfield with Crows by Vincent van Gogh

Wheatfield with Crows by Vincent van Gogh

Wheat, sky and crows

Van Gogh painted this in July 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, where he spent the last weeks of his life. It is on a long canvas twice as wide as it is high, a format he used for several landscapes that summer. The paint goes on in thick, separate strokes: yellow and ochre for the wheat, deep blue and near-black for the sky, with two small white clouds. A red path edged with green runs from the foreground into the field and stops; two more tracks lead off to either side. The crows are a few quick black V-shapes scattered across the sky.

Not the last picture

In a letter to his brother Theo from these weeks he wrote of painting vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and of wanting to express sadness and extreme loneliness, but also what he found healthy and strengthening about the countryside. The canvas is often called his last painting, and the 1956 film “Lust for Life” shows him at work on it just before his death. It was not: other pictures, among them “Tree Roots”, came later.

Where it hangs

The painting is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and measures 50.2 by 103 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 7,762-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 51 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam · Wikidata Q634122 · Wikimedia Commons