Campo de trigo com corvos

For decades people told this as Vincent van Gogh's last painting, the one he set down before he walked into a field and shot himself. It is a good story, and a 1956 Hollywood film about him made it stick. It is also wrong. He painted this in the second week of July 1890, near Auvers, north of Paris, and he went on working for another 2 weeks after it. The letters he sent to his brother Theo place several canvases after this one. What is true is the mood he was in. He wrote to Theo that summer of vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and that he had not needed to go out of his way to express sadness and extreme loneliness. You can see him reaching for it here. Three rough paths run into the wheat and stop, going nowhere. The sky is a heavy churning blue, and the crows come up out of the grain toward you. He had left the asylum at Saint-Rémy that spring and moved close to a doctor who was meant to watch over him. He died on the 29th of July, a few days short of his 38th birthday.