View of Semur

Semur-en-Auxois stands on a pink granite spur inside a loop of the river Armançon, in Burgundy. Its walls and round towers went up in the 14th century, when the Duke of Burgundy strengthened the site during the Hundred Years' War. The tallest of them, the Tour de l'Orle d'Or, still rises about 44 metres, with a crack down its side that opened in 1602. Bernard painted the town in 1930, at 62. By then he was living in Paris on the quai de Bourbon on the Île Saint-Louis and earning more from wood engraving than from his canvases. That same year Ambroise Vollard published the two volumes of Homer's Odyssey he had cut the blocks for. This view belongs to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, the family collection that sits at the centre of this museum.