Daubigny's Garden

Van Gogh painted this in the last summer of his life, in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris, where he spent his final ten weeks before his death in July 1890. The garden belonged to Charles-Francois Daubigny, a landscape painter Van Gogh had admired since he was young and who had died a dozen years earlier. Painting the garden of the older man's widow was a quiet act of homage. He made three versions of it. This one, on a long double-square canvas, has a black cat crossing the grass in the foreground. On the 23rd of July he told his brother Theo it was one of his most carefully thought-out canvases. Six days later he was dead.