Mädchen in Weiß

Van Gogh painted this young woman in white in 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris where he spent the last weeks of his life. In those two months or so he worked at an astonishing pace, making around 70 paintings, more than one a day, right up to his death that July. She stands against a field of loose green and yellow strokes, her plain white dress and hat left almost bare of detail, so the figure reads as a quiet pale shape in all that restless colour. Van Gogh never sold it. It stayed with his family until 1908, long after he was gone.