Bord de l'Oise à Auvers

Van Gogh reached Auvers at the end of May 1890, out of the asylum at Saint-Remy and an hour by train from his brother in Paris. He painted something like 75 canvases in the 70 days he had left. Most of them are wheat, roofs and Doctor Gachet. This is the other thing Auvers had, the Oise below the town, where Parisians came out on Sundays to row. The boats are drawn in long unbroken strokes and the water in short flat ones, and the far bank sits there as a band of green with nothing happening in it. He painted it in July. Robert Tannahill, an heir to a Detroit department store fortune, bought it in 1935 and left it to the city's museum.