In 1890, just a few days before taking his own life, Vincent van Gogh painted "Wheat Field With Cypresses," a wonderfully abstract landscape van Gogh apparently felt would be the appropriate exit from his haunted existence. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this piece can be found between "Women Picking Olives" and "Olive Orchard," both of which display van Gogh's love of nature.
             "Wheat Field With Cypresses" is a grand landscape painted very abstractly, much like a daytime version of "Starry Night." The beauty shown in the clouds, trees, and wheat, all simultaneously blowing in the wind, draws the viewer in. In van Gogh's sky, he uses a broad mixture of blues swirling among the heavenly clouds. His trees and grass use a variety of shades of green as well, while the wheat field itself contrasts this as a rich golden-brown.
             Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter, whose work represents the archetype of expressionism, as well as the idea of emotional spontaneity in painting. Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, son of a Dutch Protestant pastor. His mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, who liked to sketch and paint wildflowers in her spare time as a hobby, was born into a family of art dealers. This combination of influences of art and religion had a profound impact on the masterpieces van Gogh would create as well as the passion he put into them.
             Early in life, he displayed a moody, restless temperament that was to thwart his every pursuit. With a passion for life great as a young man ever had, he failed miserably in love, friendship, career, and in the three relationships to which he was most devoted, his minister father, his church, and his god. He suffered from an illness characterized by numerous attacks of depression, as well as his bouts with epilepsy that would forever haunt him.
             By the age of 27, he had been in turn a salesman in an art
             gallery, a French tuto...