Strada con cipresso e stella

Van Gogh made this in the middle of May 1890, in his last days at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy, where he had checked himself in a year earlier. Within days he would leave the south of France for good and travel north to Auvers, where he had only about two months left to live. He put a star and a thin crescent moon in the same sky at once, which no real night offers, and set two small figures walking the road beneath a cypress that Provençal people planted beside their graves. In a letter to the painter Gauguin, a former housemate, he called it a last attempt at a starry sky. It hangs now in the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, built around one of the largest van Gogh collections anywhere.