Blossoming Chestnut Branches

When Van Gogh reached Auvers in May 1890, the town was full of blossom and he threw himself into painting its gardens and flowering trees. A storm knocked several chestnut branches down, and instead of leaving them he carried them indoors and set them against a bright blue ground. In a letter to his brother he called this canvas perhaps the best and most patient work he had ever done, made, he wrote, with calm and greater determination. He said it only weeks before he took his own life that July. The painting had a strange afterlife too: thieves stole it from a Zurich collection in 2008, and it was found nine days later in a parked car.