Wheat Field with Crows, made on a double-square canvas, depicts a dramatic, cloudy sky filled with crows over a wheat field.[1] A sense of isolation is heightened by a central path leading nowhere and by the uncertain direction of flight of the crows. The wind-swept wheat field fills two thirds of the canvas. Jules Michelet, one of van Gogh's favorite authors, wrote of the crows: "They interest themselves in everything, and observe everything. The ancients, who lived far more completely than ourselves in and with nature, found it no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things where human experience as yet affords no light, the directions of so prudent and sage a bird."[4] Kathleen Erickson finds the painting as expressing both sorrow and a sense of his life coming to an end.[5] The crows are used by van Gogh as a symbol of death and rebirth, or of resurrection.[6][7] The road, in contrasting colors of red and green, is said by Erickson to be a metaphor for a sermon he gave based on Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" where the pilgrim is sorrowful that the road is so long, yet rejoices because the Eternal City waits at the journey's end.[8][9]