View of Vessenots Near Auvers

Van Gogh left Paris on 20 May 1890 for Auvers-sur-Oise, a village about 35 kilometres to the north, where a doctor named Paul Gachet had agreed to keep an eye on him. In the roughly two months he had left to live, he painted furiously, often more than one canvas a day. This is the district of Les Vessenots, close to where Doctor Gachet lived: old cottages set below a high horizon, and beneath them wheat fields worked in restless, rippling strokes of green and yellow. He wrote that these wide fields gave him a feeling of freedom and, at the same time, of loneliness. The picture's first owner was Gachet himself.