The painting's reputation as Van Gogh's last work is widespread but unproven. One biographer notes plainly that no reference to it can be found anywhere in his correspondence, unlike other Auvers landscapes he described letter by letter^[6]. The idea seems to rest on the painting's unsettled mood, a stormy sky and a road that appears to lead nowhere, rather than on any date, letter, or eyewitness account establishing it as the final canvas he touched.

Writing to Theo and Jo in July 1890 about the wheat field paintings he had made since his last visit to them in Paris, Van Gogh explained that he had not needed to go out of his way to express sadness and extreme loneliness, since the fields themselves carried that feeling. In the same breath, though, he told them he believed the canvases would show the health and restorative force he found in the countryside, a deliberate paradox rather than a simple confession of despair^[1][4]. A few days earlier, on July 14, he had described the same landscape to his mother and sister as a vast expanse of delicate yellow, pale green and violet, under a sky of delicate blue, white, pink and violet tones, hardly the language of a man only picturing catastrophe.

One later reading of the painting focuses on how thoroughly it undoes ordinary landscape conventions. The crows, rendered in the most elementary marks, could as easily be read as flying away from the viewer as toward them. The path that appears to run into the distance has, on a closer look, no vanishing point, and its flanking tracks lead to nothing rather than converging, so that what looks at first like an ordinary road through a field turns out to be a path to nowhere^[5].