Stairway at Auvers by Vincent Van Gogh Placemat

The Vincent van Gogh's Stairway at Auvers (1890) famous landscape painting features expressive, swirling lines of the foreground road move backward to the center of the composition and join the base of a stairway on which an elderly man with a stick descends. Chestnut trees are in flower to the right and left, while two pair of women walk along the road. Vincent van Gogh’s work is of a compact, almost claustrophobic density and the sky is barely seen. In one of his final letters, Van Gogh described Auvers as “of a grave beauty, the real countryside, characteristic and picturesque.”