In the context of Landscape at Auvers in the Rain, explore the Subject of the Interpretations.
Landscape of Auvers in the Rain portrays the town of Auvers as well as the wheatfields that surround it. Art historians believe that van Gogh most likely created the painting in a field near Méry-sur-Oise, based on the angle of Notre Dame d'Auvers in the work. The view looks at the village from the perspective of a trail that cuts through the cemetery and fields surrounding the town. Notably, the houses of Auvers appear half sunken into the landscape surrounding the town, emphasising the natural world over the provincial town, as the buildings "rhyme with the diagonals of the hillsides outside their doors" bleeding into the countryside. Furthermore, it is notable that van Gogh chose not to populate the town in this image, largely erasing any form of topography or narrative. This leaves the viewer with the saturated, abstracted features of the sky, hills, town, and fields without a context, forcing them to confront van Gogh's intense brushstrokes and colours. However, critics note that "the loss of the particularity does not lead to mere pattern but to an unprecedented emphasis on the brute facts of the landscape and the viewer’s visceral relationship to it", revealing that by choosing to portray a town's close relationship to nature through an expressive, abstracted perspective, van Gogh is able to create a more unique, emotionally-engaging landscape than if he merely copied Auvers for artistic accuracy.Van Gogh used wheatfields as an important motif in Landscape at Auvers in the Rain, as "in these immense stretches of wheatfields under turbulent skies, he tried to express sadness and extreme loneliness, but at the same time how healthy fortifying the countryside was", in a sense combining his isolation and loneliness with the newfound freedom he found upon moving to Auvers. Naomi Margolis Maurer emphasises the spiritual and psychological resonance of van Gogh's illustration of the storm, noting that "van Gogh's association of wheat with humanity [leads to] his vision of the endlessly rolling landscape as a manifestation of infinity and eternity ... for him, these vast fields of grain represented the vulnerable existence of mankind, and the storm epitomized those fateful, uncontrollable, but passing catastrophes which sweep through people's lives". Van Gogh's choice of subject matter reflects his own personal struggles with human catastrophe, as he battled mental illness and self-doubt amid his desire to create great art. The crows fluttering upward towards the foreground of the image are also an important motif of van Gogh's Auvers period, notably from the image Wheatfield with Crows, which shows them as an "object of approaching menace and anxiety whose swift advance signifies the fleeting passage of time and the inexorability of death". Therefore, the wheatfields and crows that surround the town have a deeper meaning, reflecting the cyclical nature of life, sadness, and death, important themes that van Gogh contemplated throughout his career as an artist.
F Méry-sur-Oise Wheatfield with Crows