A Tortured Mind: van Gogh's Grapple with Death
Wheatfield Under Clouded Sky
After having seen the pieces of van Gogh’s idea of the journey through life at work in his individual paintings, we now put them together and examine the larger picture. This is exactly what Vincent did himself in Wheatfield Under Clouded Sky, one of his very last paintings. Completed in Auvers in July, 1890, just days before his death, it presents a complete overview of life’s entire journey, a combination of life and death, coexisting in nature. Here, the commotion of the daily world is in front, as the boundless field then stretches off into the distance until it finally meets the sky at the horizon. The painting highlights the infinite, giving us a limitless view of the fields and sky, with no tree or building to invade our vision. The sun, that Christian symbol for God, is placed far off to the left and covered by clouds, bowing to the higher authority that we see in van Gogh’s religious vision of the infinite. We find the same touches of comfort that appear throughout his works, only here on a larger scale. His emotion is all in his artwork, as Meyer Schapiro describes in his essay “On a Painting of van Gogh: Crows in the Wheatfield”:
When van Gogh paints something exciting or melancholy, a picture of high emotion, he feels relieved. He experiences in the end peace, calmness, health. The [act of] painting is a genuine catharsis. The final effect upon him is one of order and serenity after the whirlwind of feeling. (Welsh-Ovcharov 163)
As Schapiro explains, scenes of deep comfort give van Gogh more than just what we see in the final picture. Rather, the real product lies in the “genuine catharsis” of the experience, a feel van Gogh seeks to convey to his viewer. In Wheatfield Under Clouded Sky, dark brushstrokes of a cloudy day are curiously mixed with the sunlight and brightness of the clouds, giving us harmony and balance, and some intrigue, in the sky. Death and life, then, are able to coexist, and the comfort shines through.