La Maison blanche, la nuit

Van Gogh painted this on the 16th of June, 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris where he spent his last weeks. He shot himself about six weeks later. It is a plain white house at dusk, two of its windows glowing a hot red, a woman in the road, and above the roof a single bright point of light. For years people wondered whether that was a star or just a lamp. Two American astronomers worked out the answer. They checked the sky over Auvers for that summer and found that the bright object low in the evening was the planet Venus, meaning Van Gogh was probably painting around eight in the evening. The picture then went missing. After the Second World War it sat unseen in the Hermitage storerooms in St Petersburg for about fifty years, among works the Soviet army had taken from Germany, and only reappeared in public in 1995.