Daubigny's Garden at Auvers

Catalogue numbers: F 765, JH 2029.

Auvers had also been the home of a French painter of the generation before the Impressionists, Charles Daubigny. Van Gogh planned to paint a homage to the artist, who had figured so powerfully in his ‘mus�e imaginaire’ for the last two decades. He painted Daubigny’s house and garden twice on a horizontal canvas; one of these versions was going to be sent to his brother Theo in Paris as one of a trio which would convey to that harassed city dweller the calm and restorative forces of the countryside.

This unusual square canvas was possibly a study for those later versions. The format has the effect of precipitating the spectator into the garden and its riot of unkempt fertility. Yet the scale of the painting is such that the house itself seems very distant, almost screened off by the rows of trees, closed in on itself by its shuttered windows. This disordered space and uneven paint surface are none the less evocative. Van Gogh has almost used an Impressionist technique and palette to portray the garden of an artist who had been a bridge between the school of Barbizon and the early Impressionists. It was of Daubigny’s work of the late 1860s that a critic loudly complained at the lack of finish, the sketchiness: his paintings were too impressionistic.