Houses at Auvers

Houses at Auvers
Artist	Vincent van Gogh
Year	Auvers-sur-Oise, June 1890
Catalogue	F759 JH1988
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	73 cm × 61 cm (19.7 in × 40.6 in)
Location	Toledo Museum of Art

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.

Vincent van Gogh spent the early 1881–1885 years of his brief ten-year career as an artist painting in the Netherlands at Etten, The Hague, Drenthe, and Nuenen (his last family home). It was in Nuenen that Vincent executed F82 The Potato Eaters, which he considered his first really successful painting, while other early paintings of the time, such as F83 The Cottage (left), attest his sympathy for peasants and their way of life.

Following the death of his father in March 1885 and ensuing difficulties and quarrels with both his family and neighbors in Nuenen, Vincent moved first to Antwerp, Belgium, where he briefly studied at the Academy, and then finally joined his art dealer brother Theo in Paris, France, in March 1886. His move from Antwerp was motivated by worries about his health, suffering a breakdown early in the year.

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