Daubigny's Garden

From the foreground to the back, a green lawn and flower beds spread out. At the center is a planting of white flowers, and beyond it a white-walled house and a church tower peek through. The trees and lawn are made of short brush marks layered like eddies and currents, so that the whole garden seems to sway.

On a long horizontal canvas 53.2 centimeters high and 103.5 centimeters wide, Vincent van Gogh fitted a broad garden. The eye flows naturally from the lawn in the foreground to the row of houses in the back.

Charles-Francois Daubigny was a landscape painter close to the Barbizon school who had settled in Auvers. Van Gogh moved to the village in 1890 and painted the garden of that house. It is a work from a few weeks before his death at the end of July.

A black cat was originally painted in this garden. It was later painted over and is no longer visible, but X-ray analysis has confirmed that the cat was painted directly on the canvas. This work is the signature piece of the Hiroshima Museum of Art, which the Hiroshima Bank opened in 1978 to mark its 100th anniversary.