Fattoria

In May 1890 Van Gogh left the asylum at Saint-Remy in the south and moved north to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town outside Paris, to be near his brother Theo and under the eye of a sympathetic doctor. He painted this thatched farmhouse in his first weeks there. After the cypresses and olive groves of Provence, the old thatched roofs of the north plainly caught his attention, and they turn up again and again in the Auvers pictures. These were astonishingly productive weeks. In just over two months he made more than 70 paintings, better than one a day. He shot himself in late July and died in Auvers, only weeks after this cottage went up on his easel.