Houses at Auvers

Houses at Auvers of 1890, now in the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, depicts the thatched and tiled cottages van Gogh found throughout the Auvers countryside — modest structures whose organic integration into the landscape contrasted with what he perceived as the alienating modernity of urban life. Van Gogh painted village houses at Auvers repeatedly, attracted to their warm domestic presence and the way their architecture organised the surrounding fields and gardens. The Toledo Museum's holding of this work is one of several important van Gogh paintings that American institutions acquired in the early twentieth century when major European collections were dispersed, building the strong American holdings of his late work that persist today.

The thatch roof is treated with particular attention to texture: van Gogh builds the roofing material from dense directional strokes of ochre, gold, and brown that create a physically convincing surface of compressed straw. The surrounding vegetation is rendered with similar density, the garden and field pressing close against the cottage walls and threatening to absorb the human structure into natural growth.