MURA · THE COLLECTION · VINCENT VAN GOGH

Farms near Auvers

Farms near Auvers is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh from July 1890, made at Auvers-sur-Oise in his final month. It measures 50.2 by 100.3 centimetres, belongs to Tate (N04713, bequeathed by C. Frank Stoop in 1933) and hangs on loan at the National Gallery in London as L711.

Vincent van Gogh · 1890 · Oil on canvas · Post-Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

Thatched roofs, orchards and fields form a bright patchwork of yellow, green and blue. The National Gallery identifies the buildings as deteriorated cottages in rolling countryside near Cordeville, a hamlet outside Auvers, about 17 miles north of Paris. The gallery describes a high horizon and diagonals that lead the eye through the valley, violet shadows in the foreground and greeny-yellow sunlit fields beyond, painted with strong outlines and rapid brushstrokes.

Both the gallery and Wikipedia note that the picture looks unfinished: at upper right the rooflines merge with the landscape, and the sky is barely worked. The Commons record gives the alternative title Thatched Cottages by a Hill and the catalogue numbers F793 and JH2114.

How it was painted

Van Gogh arrived in Auvers in May 1890 after leaving the hospital at Saint-Rémy, and was looked after by the local physician Dr Paul Gachet. He was taken with the village at once. On or about 21 May he wrote to Theo and Jo: "Auvers is decidedly very beautiful. So much so that I think it'll be more advantageous to work than not to work." In the same letter he found the modern villas "almost as pretty as the old thatched cottages that are falling into ruin", and the letter's editors identify his first Auvers study as a picture of old thatched roofs with a field of peas in flower. Wikipedia quotes a letter to his sister Wil of the same day: "Here there are roofs of mossy thatch which are superb, and of which I'll certainly do something."

This canvas belongs to the elongated format he used for his late landscapes; the gallery gives it as roughly 50 by 100 centimetres and calls the horizontal rectangle unusual. It also regards the picture as potentially his penultimate work, dating it around 26 July 1890. He shot himself on 27 July and died on 29 July.

Where it went

The painting was bequeathed to the Tate collection by C. Frank Stoop in 1933 and is now shown in Room 43 of the National Gallery, on loan from Tate. The reproduction used here is the Commons file compiled from the National Gallery and Tate online records.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to the Van Gogh collection with a pastoral mood: an ordinary hamlet seen in the last days of his life, without drama.