Daubigny's Garden

Van Gogh painted this in the last summer of his life, in Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris, where he spent his final ten weeks. The walled garden belonged to the house that the landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny had built in the village in the 1860s. Daubigny died in Paris in 1878, and in 1890 it was his widow who was still living there. Van Gogh had admired him since his years in Holland, and he took the garden on three times, first in a smaller study, then on two wide canvases twice as broad as they were tall. This is the one with the black cat crossing the grass in the foreground. In the other large version, now in Hiroshima, that cat was covered over with paint. On the 23rd of July Van Gogh sent Theo a sketch of the picture and called it one of his most carefully thought-out canvases. Six days later he was dead.