Two Children

Van Gogh's Auvers period from May to July 1890 was among his most productively humanistic — returning to figure subjects after the largely unpopulated landscapes of Saint-Rémy, he found in the village children of Auvers a grounding simplicity. These two children, painted in the final months of his life, belong to a group of portraits he made of local Auvers figures including Dr Gachet's daughter, local farmers, and unnamed villagers. He wrote to his sister Wilhelmina that he wanted his portraits to convey something beyond photographic likeness — something in the colour and expression that would speak to future viewers as old photographs already spoke to him. The blue and red clothing in these Auvers portraits reflects his final-period directness of colour: no longer the swirling Expressionist energy of Saint-Rémy, but a controlled, almost classical simplification of form and hue. Dr Gachet, who supervised Van Gogh's welfare, was himself an amateur painter and printmaker who moved in the same circles as Pissarro and Cézanne. Now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

The figures are rendered with crisp, simplified contours and vivid local colours — deep blues, strong reds — that reflect Van Gogh's Auvers period directness. Background colour is applied in broad, relatively flat zones rather than the swirling impasto of Saint-Rémy, suggesting a slight calming of the extreme surface tension of his asylum paintings.