The House of Père Eloi

Auvers-sur-Oise gave Van Gogh a subject he had been circling for years: the ordinary houses of ordinary people. In the summer of 1890 he painted the village over and over — its thatch, its garden walls, its kitchen plots — and Père Eloi's house was one of these. 'Père' was only the familiar way villagers named an older man, so the title records a neighbour, not a saint. Van Gogh had arrived that May, after a year in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and Auvers seemed to steady him. He set the house among heavy green foliage, the brushwork restless even on a quiet cottage. He would be dead within weeks of finishing it.