Young Man with Cornflower

By the time Van Gogh painted this in June 1890, he had about six weeks left to live. He had reached Auvers-sur-Oise that May, a village of thatched cottages north of Paris, placed under the eye of Doctor Gachet, a physician who painted a little himself. In roughly 70 days there Van Gogh finished something like 70 canvases, working at a speed that still seems hard to credit. This is one of them: a young villager, a cornflower held loosely, the blue of the flower picked up again in his collar and in the strokes behind him. We do not know the sitter's name. Van Gogh was dead by the end of July, the paint on this face barely a month old.