Wheatfield with Crows is one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings and probably the one most subject to speculation. It was executed in July 1890, in the last weeks of Van Gogh’s life. Many have claimed it was his last work, seeing the dramatic, cloudy sky filled with crows and the cut-off path as obvious portents of his coming end. However, since no letters are known from the period immediately preceding his death, we can only guess what his final work might really have been. Some scholars believe it was the Tree-roots, but we have no proof that this was the case.

Wheatfield with Crows painting is a July 1890 painting by Vincent van Gogh. You may see another version here. It is commonly but mistakenly stated that this was Van Gogh's last painting. Art historians are uncertain as to which painting was van Gogh's last as no clear historical records exist. A usual interpretation of this painting is that it shows Van Gogh's troubled state of mind with a dark, forbidding sky, the indecision of three paths going in different directions and the black crows overhead being signs of foreboding or even death. He wrote that he had made three paintings in Auvers of large fields of wheat under troubled skies.

The painting is held in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It was a central focus of an episode of the series Simon Schama's Power of painting Art, and the inspiration for the fifth segment of Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams. The painting is invoked in a scene in the 1990 film Vincent & Theo, when Vincent, played by Tim Roth, shoots himself.

In Auvers, Van Gogh painted a large number of landscapes painting with wheatfields, all on unusual, elongated canvases (50 x 100 cm). He wrote to Theo about two of these works: “They depict vast, distended wheatfields under angry skies, and I deliberately tried to express sadness and extreme loneliness in them.” But these pictures also had a positive side: “I am almost certain that these canvases illustrate what I cannot express in words, that is, how healthy and reassuring I find the countryside.” Was this also true of the Wheatfield with Crows? Unfortunately, this will probably always remain a mystery.