Vintage 1940s Van Gogh "Houses at Auvers" Art Print

A 12" x 9" reproduction of Vincent Van Gogh's Houses at Auvers as a part of a late 1940s collection of the "World's Great Paintings" with title and commentary on reverse.

Commentary on the work of art and artist at time of printing:

"The incidents of Van Gogh's short, impassioned life have become so familiar through popular books, and the paintings he left behind him like a cluster of stars in a brilliant galaxy have become so well known through popular prints, it seems a bit superfluous to write of this artist at the present time. In his own lifetime, only one of Van Gogh's paintings could find a buyer, only once was his work discussed in the public prints. What an irony that in less than half a century after his death reproductions of his colorful canvases should become practically a household commodity.

Van Gogh, that divine madman, was possessed of the desire to give himself utterly-patently a grave mistake in a world that does not know what to do with such people. In his young manhood it was religion, and he gave himself to the miners of the blighted Borinage in so complete a spirit of sacrifice that the church organization was embarrassed and dismissed him for his "excessive zeal." The same thing happened later when, as an art student at The Hague, he took upon himself the sole care of an ailing prostitute, as if his very salvation depended on it. And when, upon arriving at Arles in 1888, he began to paint almost the entire body of work for which we know him today, he gave himself to the sun, the fields, fowers, trees, houses, people with the same furious intensity. Within three years he was dead, by his own hand, but in that period of time he had crowded a lifetime of painting.

As his life drew to a close, Van Gogh became subject to fits of madness and had to be confined, for a time, at an asylum in Saint-Remy. The last few months he spent at Auvers and it was during this period he painted the canvas here reproduced. The original may be seen at the Toledo Museum of Art."