Cabañas de Cordeville

Van Gogh painted this in the last weeks of his life. He had left the asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1890 and moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a village just north of Paris, where he worked at a furious pace, sometimes a canvas a day. Cordeville was a hamlet on its edge, a cluster of old thatched cottages. In a letter to his brother Theo he mentioned a study of thatched roofs with a field of peas in flower in front. What he did with that quiet subject is anything but quiet. The roofs heave, the tree branches twist upward, and the clouds turn to slow curls of paint. He would be dead within two months, in late July 1890.