page_title: Houses at Auvers
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Houses at Auvers / Description
caption_attribution_description: English: A postcard showing a farmhouse in Chaponval before 1914.
context_page_description: Houses at Auvers is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh, painted towards the end of May or beginning of June 1890, shortly after he had moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town northwest of Paris, France.
  His move was prompted by his dissatisfaction with the boredom and monotony of asylum life at Saint-Rémy, as well as by his emergence as an artist of some renown following Albert Aurier's celebrated January 1890 Mercure de France review of his work.
  In his final two months at Saint-Rémy van Gogh painted from memory a number of canvases he called "reminisces of the North", harking back to his Dutch roots. The influence of this return to the North continued at Auvers, notably in F789 The Church at Auvers. He did not, however, repeat his studies of peasant life of the sort he had made in his Nuenen period. His paintings of dwellings at Auvers encompassed a range of social domains.
context_section_description: The central house was a townhouse in the hamlet of Chaponval, about a mile west of the Auberge Ravoux. It was situated at 5 Rue de Gré (49°4′16.02″N 2°8′48.94″E) and still exists, although renovated. It belonged to a mason named August Lecroix and was the subject of an earlier 1873 painting by Paul Cézanne titled La maison du Père Lacroix. Hulsker thought Houses at Auvers was painted shortly after van Gogh arrived. De La Faille thought it painted a little later at the beginning of June, citing a letter of 10 June 1890.
  The two thatched cottages at the left are set at right angles. They reappear in F780 Thatched cottages in Auvers (see below).
  Van Gogh was generally meticulous in his depiction of street scenes, a fact that allowed the precise location of the F766 White House at Night to be ascertained, an Auvers painting that was once thought lost but re-emerged in 1995 in the collection of the Hermitage Museum.
  Toledo Museum of Art, the holding museum, points to the structural juxtaposition of the blue-tiled roof and the adjacent thatched roof of the house. Vigorous brush strokes, varying in direction, are used to highlight the contrast and textures. By contrast, the trees and garden are represented in the characteristic swirling manner van Gogh developed at Saint-Rémy. Pickvance notes the color scheme is restrained in accordance with van Gogh's return to the North, but also in response to the weather conditions: the sky is laden with clouds and a poplar tree bends to the force of the wind. The paint is applied remarkably thinly in places, and there are bare patches of canvas. Van Der Veen & Knapp remark that at the time of writing (2010), the shutters still retained their original green color.
caption: A postcard showing a farmhouse in Chaponval before 1914.
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