White House at Night

White House at Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by Vincent van Gogh, made in June 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, about six weeks before his death; it belongs to the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Van Gogh arrived in Auvers in May 1890 and painted a series of pictures of the village houses. The Hermitage describes how the mood of these works shifted in June, from hope towards foreboding, and reads this canvas as one of the tense ones: its firm horizontals and verticals make the house look almost like a prison, the red patches in the windows at right are alarming, and the star is a sign of fate of the kind Van Gogh drew at moments of anguish. In a letter to his brother Theo of 17 June 1890 he described a white house among greenery, with a star in the night sky, an orange light in a window and dark greenery.

The canvas measures 59 × 72.5 cm. The astronomers Donald Olson and Russell Doescher of Southwest Texas State University identified the bright star as Venus. After locating the house in Auvers and the spot where Van Gogh stood, they calculated that Venus held that position at around eight in the evening on 16 June 1890, suggesting the picture was painted over an afternoon and early evening.

The painting was shown several times in Switzerland in the 1920s, then disappeared into the private collection of the German industrialist Otto Krebs at Holzdorf near Weimar, which Krebs kept out of sight during the Nazi years. Taken to the Soviet Union after the Second World War, it was long believed lost, and it spent some fifty years in the Hermitage stores before being shown publicly in 1995 in an exhibition of works seized at the end of the war, alongside other paintings from Krebs's collection.