Plain near Auvers

By the summer of 1890 Van Gogh had left the asylum at Saint-Rémy and settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north of Paris where a homeopathic doctor named Paul Gachet kept a friendly watch on him. He worked here at an almost alarming pace, close to a canvas a day for about 70 days. This is one of the wide, double-square fields he laid out in those weeks, the horizon pushed high so the plain fills nearly everything and the sky is only a narrow band. He liked that format for the flat farmland around the village. He died in Auvers at the end of July that year, a few weeks after painting stretches of country like this one.