Two Children

June 1890. Van Gogh had been at Auvers-sur-Oise for a few weeks, a village an hour north of Paris by train, and was finishing a canvas most days. Between the wheatfields and the thatched roofs he also painted the people around him, and here two small girls sit close up, seen from the waist and turned slightly, with a bare strip of landscape behind them, on a canvas about 51 centimetres each way. The painting then barely moved from the place it was made. It stayed with the family of Paul Gachet, the doctor who kept an eye on him in Auvers, hanging in their house for more than 60 years, until the doctor's son gave it to the French state in 1954 along with the other Van Goghs he had inherited.