Wheatfield under Thunderclouds

Wheatfield under Thunderclouds is one of the last oil paintings Vincent van Gogh made, in early July 1890, during the weeks he spent at Auvers-sur-Oise, only a few weeks before his death. Compared with the vivid colour of other canvases from those months, the scene is almost stripped back: a field of green and yellow wheat fills most of the picture, under a dark blue sky heavy with a few white clouds. The horizon sits roughly halfway up and splits the composition almost into two, earth below and sky above, and the unusually elongated format, close to a double square, stretches that sense of open space with very few landmarks.

The canvas belongs to a group of wheatfield paintings Van Gogh produced at Auvers, alongside Wheatfield with Crows. In a letter of around 10 July 1890 to his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo, he described these works as vast stretches of wheat under turbulent skies, and said he was trying to convey sadness and extreme loneliness. He added that he meant to bring them to Paris as soon as he could, since they would say what he could not put into words, and that he also saw something healthy and restorative in the countryside. That combination of melancholy and vigour makes the picture a telling record of his state in his final weeks.

After the painter's death the canvases passed to Theo and, when Theo died, to his widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who lent this one to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam from 1917 to 1919. It later went to their son Vincent Willem van Gogh and, in 1962, to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. Since 1973 it has been on permanent loan to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it is held today.

Painter

Vincent van Gogh

Date

1890

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

50 × 101 cm

Museum

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Genre

landscape painting

Depicts

Triticum, field, cloud

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