The Church at Auvers

The Church at Auvers is an oil painting on canvas by Vincent van Gogh, made at Auvers-sur-Oise in early June 1890 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. It measures about 94 × 74 cm.

After Arles and a year in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh settled at Auvers, north-west of Paris, on 21 May 1890, where Dr Paul Gachet, himself an amateur painter, agreed to look after him. In the roughly two months before his death on 29 July he produced around seventy canvases, but he painted the village church only once, between about 4 and 8 June. The building is the Gothic church of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption, seen from the east end with its apse and small side chapel.

On 5 June he described the picture to his sister Willemien: the building appeared violet-hued against a sky of simple deep blue, pure cobalt; the stained-glass windows looked like ultramarine blotches, the roof was violet and partly orange, and in the foreground were green plants in flower and sand with the pink flow of sunshine. He added that it was almost the same thing as his Nuenen studies of the old church tower and cemetery, only the colour was now more expressive and more sumptuous. Several of his Auvers works show this nostalgia for the north. The lighting is contradictory: the foreground lies in daylight while the church sits in its own shadow beneath an almost nocturnal sky. Wavy contours and broken perspective make the building seem to move, and a path forks around it, a motif also found in Wheatfield with Crows. A peasant woman in grey-blue walks away along the left-hand branch.

The painting passed to Dr Gachet and then to his son, who gave it to the French national collections in the early 1950s; it was shown at the Jeu de Paume and moved to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. It appears in the 2010 Doctor Who episode Vincent and the Doctor.