Straße in Auvers-sur-Oise

Van Gogh painted this quiet village street in the summer of 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise, the small town north of Paris where he spent his last two months and shot himself that July. At the time almost no one wanted his pictures. Then in 1903 this canvas was sold to the Antell collection in Helsinki, and the Ateneum became the first museum anywhere in the world to own a work by Van Gogh, 13 years after his death, when his reputation abroad was only beginning to form. Look at the sky and you can see the picture was left unfinished, the blue laid down in loose dabs with bare canvas still showing between the houses.