The Church at Auvers

Van Gogh painted this village church in June 1890, in the last weeks of his life. He had left the asylum at Saint-Rémy and settled at Auvers, north of Paris, under the eye of Doctor Gachet, and in about two months there he turned out some seventy canvases, more than one a day. He described this one to his sister: the building violet against a deep cobalt sky, the windows ultramarine blots, the roof partly orange. The odd thing is the light. The sky behind the church is night-dark blue, yet the path and the grass are lit as if by full day, and the whole church seems to lean and buckle as though the ground were moving. Weeks after finishing it he shot himself in the fields nearby, and the priest of this very church refused to bury him.