Strohgedeckte Hütten in Jorgus

Van Gogh painted this at Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890, in the last stretch of his life, after he left the asylum at Saint-Remy and moved to the village north of Paris to be near the doctor Paul Gachet. He worked at a startling pace there, close to a painting a day through that early summer. Old thatched roofs like these pulled at him. He had painted them as a young man in the Dutch countryside, and finding them still standing among the fields of the Oise valley sent him back toward where he had begun. The brush is quick, the paint laid in short restless strokes. He died at Auvers that July, about ten weeks after he arrived.