![Vincent van Gogh - Wheat Field Under Thunder Clouds [1890]](http://farm1.staticflickr.com/569/23269822555_529f9cb5da_o.jpg)
In the last weeks of his life, Van Gogh completed a number of impressive paintings of the wheat fields around Auvers. He had grown so concerned about his financial and artistic status that the brush almost fell from his hand as he worked, he wrote on July 10, 1890. He sought in these ambitious works to express ‘sadness, extreme loneliness.’ The elongated format of Wheatfields under Thunderclouds is unusual: it emphasises the grandeur of the landscape and the menacing sky, as does the simple composition, consisting of two horizontal planes. The desolate feel of the painting is heightened by the absence of trees, birds or human beings.
[Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam - Oil on canvas, 50.4 x 101.3 cm]