Landscape with three trees and houses

Van Gogh painted this in May 1890, in his first days at Auvers-sur-Oise, the small town north of Paris where he spent the last weeks of his life. He had just come up from Provence and was working at a furious pace, often close to a canvas a day, taking in the northern light, the thatched roofs and the gardens of the village. This is one of those Auvers landscapes, a cluster of houses among trees, built up in thick, restless strokes of green. After a year shut inside an asylum in the south he was out in the open again, painting ordinary countryside close to houses and people. In the roughly two months he had at Auvers he made around 70 paintings.