Thatched Cottages in the Sunshine

In the spring of 1890 Van Gogh spent about two months too ill to work outdoors, shut inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy in Provence. When he could hold a brush again he painted from memory, and what came back was the north. At the end of April he told his brother Theo that during the illness he had made a few small canvases, memories of the north. This is one of them, the mossy thatched cottages of the Dutch countryside he had painted in dark earth colours five years earlier, now under a low yellow sun with a single figure on the path. Within weeks he left Provence for Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, where real thatched cottages were waiting for him. That is why the picture has sometimes been taken for an Auvers scene, and when the Barnes collection toured in the mid-1990s it hung as Houses in Auvers.