A day trip to Auvers-sur-Oise (Van Gogh country)

Posted 5/21/2014

Auvers-sur-Oise is a small town north of Paris which once attracted many Impressionist painters, including Van Gogh, who spent the last 70 days of his life there.  We had a couple of travel misadventures* along the way, but the sights in and around the town were well worth the trouble.

Van Gogh was highly inspired by the beauty of the village and countryside, producing a painting a day, and he was under the care of a compassionate doctor who lived in the village.  Nevertheless, he died there, from a gunshot wound generally believed to be self-inflicted.

We walked through wheat fields depicted in some of his paintings, including one of his last and most well known paintings, "Champ de blé aux corbeaux" (Wheat field with crows).  (It is also believed that he shot himself in the wheat fields.)




[from Wikipedia article on Van Gogh]

For us, it was probably not the time of year for crows to be interested in the wheat; we saw one or two crows, but more often we saw flocks of birds that looked more like swifts.  (I didn't get any in my photos, though.)

  

You'll have to imagine the green wheat rippling in the breeze:

We had first walked through a adjacent field to the cemetery where Van Gogh and his brother Theo are interred next to each other.  (I didn't take a picture of the graves.)

As you can see, we had a beautiful day for this outing.

There was a red rose growing by itself not far from the road:

The town itself has retained quite a bit of country charm (with lots of well maintained shutters!):

and sidewalk cat art!

...and a cat!!

Now, when IS this door going to open??

We saw two other cats when we visited the home of Van Gogh's doctor, Dr Gachet, who was also a patron of the arts and an artist in his own right.  We were petting a friendly tabby cat in the garden when the woman who had let us in warned us that "the other one is very jealous!".  Suddenly a rascally black cat appeared and chased the tabby away!  Both of them disappeared for a while, but we were able to get the attention of the black cat a little later.  (Oh, and the house was very nice.)

We also visited the town's "chateau".  I wondered aloud what distinguishes a large country house from a "chateau", but in any event, this was a nice spread:

The grounds also included a hedge maze (not too challenging):

and you must have irises!

We also observed, on the chateau grounds, some kind of game involving one of those bouncy houses that you rent for kids' parties, but these were grown adults, and some were protected in bouncy clothing... We didn't stay long enough to figure out the rules.

On a more serious note, we visited the boarding house (Auberge Ravoux) where Van Gogh lived and died; they have maintained his room in its original condition.  It is extremely tiny, with a single skylight for a window.

Finally, here is the town church, also featured in one (or more?) of Van Gogh's well known works.  Most people were photographing the church from the same angle as the painting, but I had to be different.

[also from Wikipedia article on Van Gogh]

*Travel misadventures:   We had no trouble taking the RER to Pontoise, which is not far from Auvers.  But after finally finding the right bus stop at the Pontoise train station, we got on the bus going the wrong way -- that was my fault.  We had to use another ticket to correct that error.  Then on the way back from Auvers, I was looking for the wrong stop, because our guide book misidentified the train station stop as "Chemin de la Gare" (which does sound like a train station). This caused some confusion when we sailed past that stop, but (as Marilynd pointed out), we clearly had not reached the train station yet, and it was obvious when we eventually reached it.  She is going to write to the guide book author so he will correct the information in the next edition.  (To make things even trickier, the stops on the bus are not announced, nor are they posted, and the signs on the stops themselves are very difficult to read from inside the bus. Ack. A train or taxi may be better, unless you already know where you are going.)