Houses in Auvers

On 20 May 1890, the day he arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village on the Oise north-west of Paris, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that the place was really beautiful, among other things for its many old thatched roofs, which were becoming rare. This canvas, painted there in the early summer, is full of them. On the left a huge thatch slopes almost to the ground, laid down in long, combed strokes, and behind it run the tiled roofs of the neighbouring houses. He looked at the scene from slightly above, which flattens all those roofs into a patchwork of colour. One small figure walks along the path, and the cottage throws a blue shadow across the yellow road. Van Gogh's sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger still owned the picture in 1905. It reached Boston in 1926 and came to the Museum of Fine Arts by bequest in 1948. In 2014, when the museum asked the public to vote for its favourite Impressionist works, this painting came first, with 4,464 votes.