Van Gogh's painting of a church

The Church at Auvers

Vincent van Gogh Painting, Oil on Canvas
Auvers-sur-Oise, France: June, 1890
Musée d'Orsay
Paris, France, Europe F: 789, JH: 2006

The Church at Auvers was painted by Dutch post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh in 1890. The church is in Place de l'Eglise, Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

 History

The Church at Auvers — along with other canvases such as The Town Hall at Auvers and several paintings of small houses with thatched roofs — is reminiscent of scenes from the northern landscapes of his childhood and youth.^[1] A certain nostalgia for the north had already been apparent in his last weeks at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence: in a letter written a couple of weeks before his departure, he wrote "While I was ill I nevertheless did some little canvases from memory which you will see later, memories of the North"^[2]
He specifically refers to similar work done back at Nuenen when he describes this painting in a letter to his sister Wilhelmina:

I have a larger picture of the village church — an effect in which the building appears to be violet-hued against a sky of simple deep blue colour, pure cobalt; the stained-glass windows appear as ultramarine blotches, the roof is violet and partly orange. In the foreground some green plants in bloom, and sand with the pink flow of sunshine in it. And once again it is nearly the same thing as the studies I did in Nuenen of the old tower and the cemetery, only it is probably that now the colour is more expressive, more sumptuous.

- Source: Wikipedia