Landscape with a Carriage and a Train

Van Gogh painted this in the summer of 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris where he spent the last weeks of his life. He was turning out canvases at a furious pace that summer, sometimes one a day. Across the middle of this one a little horse and carriage moves along a path while, behind it, a train trails its smoke past a line of poplars. He was drawn again and again to that meeting of the old rural world and the new machine age pushing into it, the fields worked by hand and the railway cutting across them. He died in Auvers in July of that year, only a few weeks after finishing work like this.