Fertile ground | Art Gallery of NSW

A person walks on one of two paths near a church surrounded by grasses and under a blue sky — Vincent van Gogh *L’église d’Auvers-sur-Oise, vue du chevet* 1890, oil on canvas, 94 x 74.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, photo: © Bridgeman images

The pretty little village of Auvers-sur-Oise is not quite 30 kilometres from the centre of Paris. Yet for centuries the small farming community nestled in the fertile fields of the Île de France – ‘the island of France’ – might as well have been in another universe: it was a day’s ride on horseback from the noisy crowded capital.

Despite its location in the heartland of the French kingdom, Auvers was only known to the great folk of France because, long ago, King Louis VI (Le Gros) had a hunting lodge near Auvers where, in 1131, his eldest son Philippe most unfortunately came off his horse and died. Some years later, Philippe’s grieving mother renovated the church at Auvers. It’s a mix of Romanesque and the emerging Gothic styles, but we would probably never have heard of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption had it not been for Vincent van Gogh’s electric painting of it (pictured) – all sharp shooting angles, under a brilliant lapis lazuli sky. For Auvers-sur-Oise is where Van Gogh spent the astonishingly productive last weeks of his short life before his death in a nearby field from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Van Gogh came to Auvers to stay near Dr Paul Gachet, an art-loving doctor and amateur painter who had much success in treating nervous complaints and was a great friend to the modern artists; Paul Cézanne had also stayed in Auvers for a time in the early 1870s, drawn there by Gachet’s company and support. Dr Gachet’s medical practice was in Paris, but he spent three days each week in Auvers with his family, and Van Gogh lodged nearby with the Ravoux family at their inn.

Artists from Paris started coming to Auvers-sur-Oise, and nearby towns like Pontoise, once the new train lines began to penetrate the countryside around Paris in the 1840s and 1850s. From 1837 onward, trains began to connect all parts of France to Paris, and this was to have a great impact, ironically enough, on areas closest to the capital. Escaping the city, on the weekend or for holidays, became hugely popular, and the impressionist painters were important chroniclers of the burgeoning leisure spots along the Seine Fertile ground and in the countryside close to Paris.

Whether picnicking or boating, drinking or dancing, the working classes of Paris populated the countryside to reward themselves after a week of toil. A century and a half later, a sunny afternoon at a guingette, one of the riverside taverns on the edge of the Seine made famous by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, has become popular again. Relaxing by the river with a cold beer, or a glass of wine, is still a simple pleasure in a complex world, as I can attest.

Soon after the trains started rolling through, artists settled in the affordable little country villages within easy reach of Paris. Beautiful sleepy Auvers proved irresistible. In 1861 the Barbizon School painter Charles Daubigny built a house there, and soon artist friends including Camille Corot, Honoré Daumier, Camille Pissarro, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot and Monet all came to visit. Corot took charge of much of the painted décor of the interior, and today, as Musée Daubigny, the beautiful house and garden still shelters the camaraderie that inspired the early years of the impressionist artists. Van Gogh thought his painting of Daubigny’s garden was one of his finest. But the area was changing rapidly: around the same time, Van Gogh remarked that thatched roofs, so attractive to painters of picturesque country scenes, were becoming rare. Van Gogh’s lovely Landscape with a carriage and a train 1890, now in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum, shows that modernity was just around the corner at Auvers, and nearby Pointoise, where Pissarro lived from 1872 to 1884.

When they needed to, the painters of the Île de France nipped back to Paris on the train to stock up on canvases and tubes of paints at the many art materials suppliers in the city. Professionally prepared canvases were now available in a variety of standard sizes. Small and light prepared boards that fitted into portable painter’s cases were very popular – just the thing for a day painting sketches outdoors, directly from nature. The white grounds of the prepared canvases, moreover, suited the newer style of painting colours directly onto the canvas, and paints now came in collapsible tubes. No longer was making colours an arduous business of grinding and mixing one’s own, and paint tubes were portable. Famously, informed by contemporary French scientific research into colour and light, the impressionists popularised putting complementary colours directly onto their canvases, a technique that eventually became the foundation of optical mixing, or ‘divisionism’ – Pissarro’s Peasants’ houses, Eragny 1887, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection, is a fine example of the method. It was painted in the heart of this rural artistic retreat, just ten kilometres from Auvers.

Trains, shop-bought canvasses, tubes of paint: these modern technologies delivered lovely Auvers-sur-Oise to the mass leisure market that sprang up at that time and persists today. In 1890, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: ‘Auvers … really it is profoundly beautiful, it is the real country, characteristic and picturesque.’ Today, Auvers-sur-Oise is a pilgrimage site precisely because Daubigny, Gachet, Cézanne and Van Gogh admired it. On Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays between April and October, trains go direct to Auvers from Paris: in only 20 minutes, you leave the bustling Gare du Nord behind you and alight in the countryside. It’s not as abrupt an instance of time-travel as that seen in 2010 in the BBC’s Dr. Who, when the Doctor and Amy Pond travel back in time to speak to Vincent; even so, the differences between city and country are still very marked. In April 2024, I will lead the Art Gallery members’ World Art Tour exploring sites of impressionism from Paris to Normandy. Now we, in our turn, can explore the terrain of that long-vanished world where Parisians played and painted 150 years ago.

Julie Ewington is a Sydney-based arts writer, curator and broadcaster, and the former head of Australian art at QAGOMA. She will lead a French impressionism art cruise from Paris to Normandy from 28 April to 8 May 2024, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the birth of impressionism. This is one of a series of World Art Tours for Art Gallery members.

A version of this article first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine