MURA · THE COLLECTION · VINCENT VAN GOGH

Wheatfield with Crows

Wheatfield with Crows is an oil painting made by Vincent van Gogh at Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, in the last weeks of his life. It measures about 50 by 103 centimetres and belongs to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it is held for the Vincent van Gogh Foundation as object s0149V1962.

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

What you are looking at

Golden wheat and branching paths sweep beneath a deep blue sky crossed by black crows. The museum describes the colour scheme plainly: the blue sky is set against yellow-orange wheat, and the red of the path is intensified by green bands of grass.

The picture is often called Van Gogh's last painting, with the sky, the crows and the dead-end path read as signs of his approaching death. The Van Gogh Museum calls this "a persistent myth" and states that he made several other works after it; Wikipedia lists Auvers Town Hall on 14 July 1890 and Daubigny's Garden among them.

How it was painted

Van Gogh left the psychiatric hospital at Saint-Rémy in May 1890 and settled in Auvers, north of Paris, under the care of Dr Paul Gachet. From June that year he worked on a run of canvases roughly one metre wide and 50 centimetres high; the museum counts thirteen of them.

On or about 10 July 1890 he wrote to his brother Theo and sister-in-law 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 added 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 two of the three as this painting (F779 / JH2117) and Wheatfield under Thunderclouds. Van Gogh shot himself on 27 July 1890 and died two days later.

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, who lent it to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 1931 and transferred it to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation on 10 July 1962. It has been at the museum since it opened on 2 June 1973. In 1991 it was stolen with nineteen other works and quickly recovered, sustaining severe damage; at the time of writing the museum reports it is undergoing conservation and not on display. The reproduction comes from the museum's own photograph as published on Wikimedia Commons.

Why it is in Mura

It anchors the Van Gogh collection and sits in the vibrant mood: the strongest colour contrast in his late landscapes, on a canvas shaped for a wide screen.