Daubigny's Garden

Daubigny's Garden of 1890, at the Van Gogh Museum, takes its subject from the house and garden of the landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny at Auvers, where the Barbizon artist had lived and worked and which remained in family ownership at the time of van Gogh's residence. Van Gogh had deeply admired Daubigny as one of the French landscape painters who paved the way for Impressionism, and painting his garden was an act of artistic homage as well as topographical observation. The garden — abundant with flowers including Daubigny's famous rose bushes — offered van Gogh the richness of colour and form that his best Auvers works deploy with such urgent energy. The black cat that appears in some versions adds a watchful still presence to the blooming abundance.

The garden's density is rendered through thick layered paint in multiple greens, yellows, and flowering colours applied with overlapping directional strokes that create a sense of organic profusion. Van Gogh does not organise the garden into pictorial order but rather lets the abundance of growth direct the composition, with the sky appearing as a narrow band across the top of the dense planting.