The Little Stream

Van Gogh painted this in June 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north of Paris where he had come to be near a doctor who took an interest in painters. He had left an asylum in the south only weeks before, and here he worked at a furious pace, finishing close to a canvas a day across his last ten weeks. Most of those late works are the well-known ones, the wheatfields, the church, the crows. This is one of the quiet pictures, a narrow stream running through summer growth, painted small and up close, with none of the turmoil people expect from this stretch of his life. He wrote to his brother Theo that the countryside around Auvers was seriously beautiful, and that the air was doing him good. On the 27th of July he walked into the fields and shot himself, and he died two days later, at 37.