Wheatfield with Crows

The answer

Was it his last painting?

No. The Van Gogh Museum, which holds the painting, calls the story a persistent myth and says Van Gogh made several other works after this one. ^[1]

The museum sums the story up like this: the menacing sky, the crows and the dead-end path are said to refer to the end of his life approaching. ^[1]

Its records name another canvas instead. Tree Roots, which he did not entirely complete, is probably his very last painting. ^[2] Andries Bonger, the brother-in-law of Van Gogh’s brother Theo, described it in a letter: “The morning before his death, he had painted a sous-bois [forest scene], full of sun and life.” ^[2]

In 2020 the museum reported that Wouter van der Veen, the scientific director of the Institut van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, had found the place where Tree Roots was painted, from a postcard dating from 1900 to 1910. He submitted the finding to the museum’s senior researchers Louis van Tilborgh and Teio Meedendorp, and the dendrologist Bert Maes was consulted. ^[3]

In his words

What he wrote

Around 10 July 1890 Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo and to Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s wife. Once back in Auvers, he said, he had set to work again and painted “another three large canvases”. ^{[4] [1]}

“They’re immense stretches of wheatfields under turbulent skies, and I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness.” ^[4]

He also hoped the canvases would tell Theo “what I can’t say in words, what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside”. ^[4]

The letter does not name the canvases. Its editors write that, judging by the description, the most likely are the paintings catalogued as F778 and F779, and that both have the same format as the third canvas he names, Daubigny’s garden. ^[4] F779 is this painting. F778 is Wheatfield under Thunderclouds, also in the Van Gogh Museum. ^{[1] [6]}

The museum reads the two halves of his sentence together. Van Gogh wanted his wheatfields under stormy skies to express “sadness, extreme loneliness”, and at the same time to show what he considered “healthy and fortifying about the countryside”. ^[1]

In a letter from the same days to his mother and his sister Willemien, he described “the vast expanse of wheatfields against the hills, large as a sea”, and said he was “wholly in a mood of almost too much calm”. ^[5]

Look closely

Three details

Three details, cut from a large photograph of the painting. The notes say what you can see. They do not claim to know what Van Gogh meant.

Compare

Two wheatfields

Wheatfield under Thunderclouds belongs to the same museum. Van Gogh painted it at Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, in oil on canvas, 50.4 × 101.3 cm. ^[6] This painting measures 50.5 × 103 cm. ^[1]

Things to look for

1. Find the horizon. In Wheatfield with Crows it runs above the middle of the canvas. In Wheatfield under Thunderclouds it runs well below the middle, so the sky fills more of the picture.
2. The museum calls the composition of Wheatfield under Thunderclouds simple: “two horizontal planes”. ^[6] It has no path and no birds. Wheatfield with Crows has three paths and many crows.
3. Compare the fields. One is yellow and orange wheat in heavy strokes. The other is bands of pale yellow and green, with a darker green stripe across it.

The photograph of Wheatfield under Thunderclouds is 3,508 pixels wide, against 7,762 for Wheatfield with Crows, so it looks softer when enlarged.

When checked on 26 September 2026, Wheatfield under Thunderclouds was on view at the Van Gogh Museum and Wheatfield with Crows was not. ^{[6] [1]}