VINCENT VAN GOGH claimed 38 addresses in four countries during his lifetime. The peripatetic Dutch painter’s last stop was the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, 20 miles north of Paris, where he lived for just over two months before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on July 29, 1890, at the age of 37.
A scenic village surrounded by wheat fields along the banks of the Oise River, Auvers delighted van Gogh, who captured it with zeal, painting almost 70 canvases during his brief time there. On the day he first arrived, in May of 1890, he wrote to his brother Theo that Auvers is “gravely beautiful, it’s the heart of the countryside, distinctive and picturesque.”
Though the village has grown in the 125 years since van Gogh’s death, it still has fewer than 7,000 people, and the wheat fields, irises and most of the buildings that he immortalized remain (his painting of the local church hangs in the Musée d’Orsay).