Van Gogh spent the last few months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town just north of Paris, after he left an asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1890.[4] He made the painting in the week following his portraits of Dr. Gachet.[5] The viewpoint from above was a favourite perspective of his since his days sketching in the dunes of Scheveningen at The Hague with the aid of a perspective frame.[6]
Van Gogh described the painting in a letter to his sister Wil:[7]
Lately I’ve been working a lot and quickly; by doing so I’m trying to express the desperately swift passage of things in modern life.
Yesterday in the rain I painted a large landscape viewed from a height in which there are fields as far as the eye can see, different types of greenery, a dark green field of potatoes, between the regular plants the lush, violet earth, a field of peas in flower whitening to the side, a field of pink-flowered lucerne with a small figure of a reaper, a field of long, ripe grass, fawn in hue, then wheatfields, poplars, a last line of blue hills on the horizon, at the bottom of which a train is passing, leaving behind it an immense trail of white smoke in the greenery. A white road crosses the canvas. On the road a little carriage and white houses with stark red roofs beside this road. Fine rain streaks the whole with blue or grey lines