Reminiscence of Brabant

Reminiscence of Brabant of 1890 is among van Gogh's final paintings made at Auvers-sur-Oise in the last weeks of his life, and its subject — thatch-roofed cottages in a landscape — deliberately invokes his Dutch origins in the province of Brabant where he was born and made his early dark studies of peasant life. By 1890, van Gogh had been in France for nearly four years, but his final canvases at Auvers return insistently to memories of the Dutch countryside, as if the end of his life called up images from its beginning. The Van Gogh Museum holds this work as part of the most concentrated collection of his paintings in the world, where its nostalgic subject matter can be read against the more turbulent Auvers views made in the same weeks.

The thick swirling brushwork of van Gogh's Saint-Rémy period continues at Auvers but with a different emotional register: the strokes are turbulent but organised, the sky described in broad rolling marks that give it movement without the vertiginous instability of his most anxious Saint-Rémy paintings. The cottages are rendered with warm yellow and brown tones that contrast with the blue-green field.