Wheatfield under Thunderclouds
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · July 1890
Two bands of colour fill a long, low canvas: a field of green and yellow wheat below, and a heavy sky of blue and white above, with the horizon drawn almost exactly halfway. There are no figures, no trees, no path. Vincent painted it on the plateau above Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, in the same days as Wheatfield with Crows, and it is the calm partner to that stormy picture. He told Theo that these vast stretches of wheat under troubled skies were an attempt to express sadness and extreme loneliness, but he also said the countryside was doing him good and the pictures show both moods.
The painting looks simple but repays a slow look. The wheat is made of hundreds of short horizontal strokes of green, yellow and a soft violet, placed in rows that grow smaller toward the horizon so that the field seems to recede for miles. The sky is thick with white paint dragged through blue, and the clouds sit low and heavy. There is a thin stripe of paler green at the far edge of the field where the light is coming through. The emptiness is the subject: it is a picture about looking at a great open space and feeling small in front of it.
The double square format, twice as wide as high, was something Vincent explored in a dozen canvases in his last month, treating the landscape as a frieze. Several of them are in this museum, and seeing them together shows how deliberate the series was. This one is often described as the most peaceful of them. It was painted less than three weeks before his death, and its stillness is part of what makes people stand in front of it for a long time.
Did You Know? Vincent said of these last wheatfield pictures that he almost thought the canvases would tell Theo what he could not say in words.
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