During his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh had no inkling that his work would become one of the world’s most famous paintings. Far from it. During his brief, 10-year foray into painting, the Postimpressionist artist would often share his musings on art with friends and family. On June 5, 1890, Vincent van Gogh sat to write a letter to his younger sister, Wilhelmina. The Dutch artist was less than two months from a gunshot to the abdomen that would tragically end his life. But at the time he sat to write his sister, Vincent’s focus was squarely on the sites he intended to paint within the French town he’d recently moved into—and where, ultimately, he would be buried. “With that I have a larger painting of the village church—an effect in which the building appears purplish against a sky of a deep and simple blue of pure cobalt, the stained glass windows look like ultramarine blue patches, the roof is violet and in part orange. In the foreground a little flowery greenery and some sunny pink sand.” The church Van Gogh describes transformed into his masterpiece, The Church at Auvers (1890). Hordes of visitors travel to Paris’s Musée d’Orsay each day to see the famous painting. Yet what many of those visitors may not realize is that were they to take a train one hour north of Paris to the town of Auvers-sur-Oise, they could see the very church itself.
It’s not always so simple to pinpoint the location of famous paintings. Much of that is due to the fact that in the years leading up to Impressionism (1860s), portraiture was more in vogue than landscapes (think Jean-Léon Gérôme, and his painting Bashi-Bazouk). Add to that the fact that landscapes that were painted in the 19th century by such luminaries as Thomas Cole were more of a backdrop to a greater political message (as with Cole’s tour de force The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings depicting the rise and fall of an empire, witnessed through the unattached prism of nature). Ultimately, these well-known creatives were artists, not topographers.
Yet, with the founding of Impressionism, and the advent of the paint tube—an invention courtesy of the American painter John G. Rand—artists were afforded the ability to walk into nature to paint the very scenes we can venture into today. What’s more, with the invention and wide distribution of a small metal device called the ferrule, art was able to bend to the Impressionists’ wishes. Before the ferrule, crafting paintbrushes was a time-consuming and expensive operation involving the binding of hog, pig, boar, and horse hair to a wood handle. Now, the metal ferrule could be flattened, allowing for flat bristles that could create small, short, and dashing results on the canvas.
In the span of art history, however, the window of painting lush landscapes en plein air didn’t stay open for very long. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, Cubism broke away from conventions, forcing art toward abstraction, making the actual locations of any painting extremely difficult to discern.
