Wheatfield with Crows

Under a heavy, storm-dark blue sky a windblown field of golden wheat seethes, a flock of black crows scattering upward, three rough paths diverging into the grain and leading nowhere. Van Gogh painted this turbulent, double-square canvas in his last weeks at Auvers, and it has often been read - perhaps too neatly - as a premonition of his death. Now in the Van Gogh Museum, Wheatfield with Crows is among his most intense and disquieting works, the brooding sky and surging field charged with a raw, ominous emotional power.