El jardín de Daubigny

Van Gogh painted this in July 1890, in the last weeks of his life. He had left the asylum in the south that spring and settled at Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north of Paris, partly to be near a doctor and partly because it was quiet. The garden is not his own. It belonged to Charles-Francois Daubigny, a landscape painter of the older Barbizon generation whom Van Gogh had admired since he was young, and whose widow still lived in the house. He went at it carefully, laying out the broad walls and paths and flower beds in a long horizontal sweep. In a letter to his brother Theo on the 23rd of July he called it one of his most carefully thought-out canvases. Four days later he shot himself in a nearby field, and died two days after that.