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Wheatfield with Crows

Vincent van Gogh - Auvers-sur-Oise - July 1890 - oil on canvas - 50 cm x 100 cm. .
The Van Gogh Museum's Wheatfield with Crows was painted in July 1890, in the last weeks of Van Gogh's life. Many have claimed it as his last painting, while it is confirmed that TreeRoots was his final painting. Wheat Field with Crows, made on a double-square canvas, depicts a dramatic, cloudy sky filled with crows over a wheatfield. A sense of isolation is heightened by a central path leading nowhere and by the uncertain direction of flight of the crows. The windswept wheat field fills two-thirds of the canvas. Jules Michelet, one of van Gogh's favorite authors, wrote of crows: "They interest themselves in everything, and observe everything. The ancients, who lived far more completely than ourselves in and with nature, found it no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things where human experience as yet affords no light, the directions of so prudent and sage a bird." Kathleen Erickson finds the painting as expressing both sorrow and a sense of his life coming to an end. The crows are used by van Gogh as a symbol of death and rebirth, or of resurrection. The road, in contrasting colors of red and green, is said by Erickson to be a metaphor for a sermon he gave based on Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress where the pilgrim is sorrowful that the road is so long, yet rejoices because the Eternal City waits at the journey's end.

Email: jancvanroekel@gmail.com