Garden in Auvers

Van Gogh painted this garden in the summer of 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris where he spent the last 70 days of his life and made close to one canvas a day. It is an ordinary walled garden, its paths and beds worked in quick vertical strokes. The stranger story came a century later. In 1989 France declared the picture a national treasure and barred it from leaving the country, which cut its market value roughly in half. The owner sued the state and was awarded 145 million francs, close to a full year of the national museums' acquisition budget. That case reshaped how France handles the export of protected art, and the garden itself has stayed in private hands, rarely shown in public.