Crows and ravens in art stand for omens, death and bad news in much of Western painting, but the same birds also feed prophets and decorate Japanese albums, so the meaning belongs to the picture and not to the bird. The best known of them are the black birds over the wheat in Vincent van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows, painted in July 1890.
Most people meet the bird there, over a yellow field and under a dark blue sky, and take it for a sign of what was about to happen to the painter. The painters before and after him used the same bird in very different ways.
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The crows are usually taken for a farewell. The Van Gogh Museum, which owns the canvas, calls the idea that it was his very last work a persistent myth, and says he made several other works after it. The sky, the crows and the path are said to refer to the approaching end of his life, but the museum gives that as a tradition and not as something known.
In the letter he wrote about his wheatfields that July, Van Gogh says he tried to express sadness and extreme loneliness. He then adds that the canvases would also tell what he considered healthy and fortifying about the countryside, and the farewell story has no place for that second half.
The habit of reading a black bird as a warning is far older than Van Gogh. The Bible gives the raven two opposite roles, and the first is not the one most people remember.
What does the Bible really say about the raven?
In Genesis, Noah opens the window of the ark and sends out a raven first…
What You'll Discover
What flies above Bruegel's hunters.
Why Japan painted a bird of ill omen.
Who drew the raven of Poe's poem.
What Van Gogh wrote about his wheatfields.