Farms near Auvers or Thatched Cottages by a Hill is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh that he painted in July 1890 when he lived in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. The painting is an example of the double-square canvases that he employed in his last landscapes.
Van Gogh spent the last few months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town just north of Paris, after he left an asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1890. Shortly after arriving at Auvers, Van Gogh wrote his sister Wil: "Here there are roofs of mossy thatch which are superb, and of which I’ll certainly do something." The painting appears to be unfinished. It is similar to Thatched Cottages and Houses, a painting thought to have been executed shortly after arrival at Auvers.
In 1933 the painting was bequeathed by C. Frank Stoop to the Tate Collection in London, where it currently resides.
Famous quotes containing the word farms:
“We noticed several other sandy tracts in our voyage; and the course of the Merrimack can be traced from the nearest mountain by its yellow sand-banks, though the river itself is for the most part invisible. Lawsuits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes. Railroads have been made through certain irritable districts, breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it has converted fertile farms into deserts, and the company has had to pay the damages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)