MURA · THE COLLECTION · VINCENT VAN GOGH

Wheatfield under Thunderclouds

Wheatfield under Thunderclouds is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh from July 1890, made at Auvers-sur-Oise in the last weeks of his life. It measures 50.4 by 101.3 centimetres and belongs to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), object number s0106V1962, catalogued as F778 and JH2097.

Vincent van Gogh · 1890 · Oil on canvas · Post-Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

A wide band of luminous green wheat meets a vast blue sky streaked with cloud. The Van Gogh Museum describes the composition as two horizontal planes, an outspread field under a dark sky, and says the elongated format, which it calls unusual, emphasises the grandeur of the landscape. The Commons record gives the German title Weizenfeld unter einem Gewitterhimmel and the English alternative Wheat field under a stormy sky.

How it was painted

Van Gogh moved to Auvers in May 1890 after a year in the hospital at Saint-Rémy, and was looked after by Dr Paul Gachet. From June he worked on canvases about one metre wide and 50 centimetres high, cut from a roll; the museum counts thirteen. In the last weeks of his life he painted several of the wheatfields around the village on this format.

On or about 10 July 1890 he told Theo and Jo: "I've painted another three large canvases since then. They're immense stretches of wheatfields under turbulent skies, and I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness." He went on: "I'd almost believe that these canvases will tell you what I can't say in words, what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside." The letter's editors identify this canvas and Wheatfield with Crows as two of the three; the museum quotes the same passages on its page for the picture. Van Gogh shot himself on 27 July 1890 and died on 29 July.

Where it went

The museum's provenance places the painting with Theo van Gogh in Paris after mid-July 1890. After Theo's death on 25 January 1891 it passed to his widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, and their son, Vincent Willem van Gogh; Jo lent it to the Rijksmuseum from 1917 to 1919. Vincent Willem transferred it to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation on 10 July 1962, and it has been at the museum since it opened on 2 June 1973. The credit line the museum requires is "Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)". The reproduction on Wikimedia Commons is described there as a scan from an art book rather than a museum photograph.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to the Van Gogh collection with a vibrant mood: the companion to Wheatfield with Crows, simpler and calmer, with almost nothing but field and sky.

What you hear in the app

A stormy sky can make this painting feel like a prediction. But Van Gogh's own words suggest something more complicated.

He painted Wheatfield under Thunderclouds at Auvers-sur-Oise in July eighteen ninety. Around the tenth of July, he wrote to his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo about large paintings of wheatfields beneath turbulent skies. He said he had deliberately tried to express sadness and extreme loneliness. The editors of his letters identify this painting as one of the likely works he meant.

Then, in the very same passage, he described the countryside as healthy and fortifying. That matters. Distress and a sense of renewal could belong to the same landscape.

The painting's structure gives those feelings room. The original canvas is roughly a metre wide and only half a metre high. The Van Gogh Museum points to its two broad horizontal zones: land and sky. That unusually wide shape makes an ordinary field feel immense.

So there is another way to approach this picture. Rather than treating the weather as a code we have already solved, hold those two ideas together: loneliness, and the possibility of strength in nature. Both have a basis in what Van Gogh actually wrote.