The origin of the cornscapes is found by the author to be in an affair that Van Gogh had with an older woman who had nursed his mother. Van Gogh mentioned this affair in a letter to his brother in 1884. They were unable to marry and she attempted suicide by poison. When the affair ended all Van Gogh's hopes for marriage and a family were crushed. He wrote, 'generally speaking, society disappoints everybody in all sorts of behavior'. By 1889 his longing for and horror of death was clearly expressed in the series of cornscapes whose symbolic development goes from the beauty of nature to black crows portraying men as victims of death. After painting Crows Over the Wheatfield, Van Gogh succeeded in killing himself with a pistol obtained to shoot crows.