Detail of flowers

Detail of blue flower

Van Gogh came to Auvers-sur-Oise, a little village around 30 kilometers from Paris, on May 20, 1890. “Auvers is very pretty,” he wrote to Theo, “there is countryside all around, typical and picturesque.” Auvers was an artists’ village, where painters such as Armand Guillaumin, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne had already worked. Charles Daubigny, a painter Van Gogh much admired, had also moved there around 1860. At the time of Van Gogh’s arrival, his widow still occupied their house.

Daubigny’s Garden
Daubigny’s property included a large garden which Van Gogh would eventually paint a number of times. This impressionistic view depicts only a small part of the enclosure, and is a study for two larger paintings he later made of the whole terrain. He made a little sketch of it for Theo, with a description: “In the foreground green and pink grass […]. In the center a rose bush, to the right a little gate […] [and] a row of yellow lindens. The house itself is in the background, pink with a roof of bluish tiles.”