Auvers-sur-Oise

A church was founded at Auvers towards the end of the 11th century beside a royal manor, which became part of the royal domain in 1081. King Louis VI often came to hunt there, and in 1131 his son Philippe, the heir to the throne, died after falling from his horse. From 1137 Louis's widow, Adelaide of Savoy, had the church rebuilt, a work that spanned the passage from Romanesque to early Gothic. Like the rest of the French Vexin, the village suffered in the Hundred Years' War and the religious wars, and in the early 17th century its people fortified the church and the churchyard as a refuge for themselves, their animals and their grain.

The railway from Paris to Lille, which followed the Oise valley when it opened in 1846, brought the capital within about an hour. From the late 1850s the landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny worked here from his studio boat, the Botin, and built a house and studio in the village in 1861–62. Corot, Cézanne and Pissarro followed, and in 1872 the physician Paul Gachet, an amateur painter and a friend of painters, bought a house in the village.

Gachet's presence brought Vincent van Gogh to Auvers on 20 May 1890. In the 70 days he lodged at the Auberge Ravoux he produced more than 80 paintings and 64 sketches, including the church and the town hall. He shot himself in late July and died in his attic room on 29 July 1890; his brother Theo died six months later and lies beside him. Painters kept coming in the 20th century, among them Otto Freundlich and the CoBrA artist Corneille, who is buried a few metres from Van Gogh. In 1948 part of the commune was split off to form Butry-sur-Oise.

Painting defines Auvers. Its people point out the places that appear on famous canvases — the church, now painted on a canvas in the Musée d'Orsay, the town hall, the fields above the village — and the village has built its tourism around this memory. Van Gogh's room at the Auberge Ravoux, never rented again after his death, was first shown to visitors by the family who then held the lease; it was later restored to its original bare state, and more than a million people have climbed up to it since 1993. A non-profit institute created in 1987 hopes one day to buy one of his Auvers paintings and hang it in the room.

The village also keeps the earlier painters in view. The Daubigny museum, set up in 1987 by a group of art lovers, shows works by Daubigny, his son Karl and other painters of the Oise valley, and Daubigny's own house and studio is a listed monument. A memorial to Daubigny by Léon Fagel has stood in the village since 1906, and the Absinthe museum recalls the drink that was the green muse of many 19th-century artists.

Music is the other strand. The Festival d'Auvers-sur-Oise, founded in 1979, brings chamber music and opera to the church each May and June; the Auvers'Jazz association has organised concerts since 1991 and a November festival since 1996; and a rock festival has been held each October since 2000.

Auvers had 6,863 inhabitants in 2023, a figure that has barely changed in recent years. It is largely a commune of detached houses, most of them owner-occupied, and its working population is made up mainly of office workers and professionals, typical of the outer suburbs of Paris. Many people commute towards Pontoise and Paris by train or along the D928, while the village itself lives from small shops, services and tourism.

The setting shapes the place. The commune stretches about seven kilometres along the right bank of the Oise, squeezed between the river and limestone cliffs, which were once quarried and held cave dwellings. The narrow strip limits new building: the commune faces a legal target of 25 per cent social housing that it struggles to meet, given the flood risk from the river and the protection rules around its many historic monuments.

Tourism is the main local issue. With about 300,000 visitors a year, Auvers is the leading attraction of the Val-d'Oise department, and its council has to manage the crowds of the warm season, coach parking in particular, so that the village remains a pleasant place to live.

Auvers has no dish of its own; it eats as the Paris region does, with bakeries, cafés and a few restaurants in the old centre. The most famous table is the restored dining room of the Auberge Ravoux, where Van Gogh took his half-board meals in 1890 and which now serves dishes inspired by 19th-century regional cooking.

The countryside around Paris supplies the region's best-known products: Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun, protected cheeses from the plains of Seine-et-Marne; the champignon de Paris, the button mushroom long grown in old quarries; and the Montmorency cherry, a sour cherry named after the Paris suburb and grown near the Montmorency forest since the 18th century. The everyday Paris repertoire — the jambon-beurre ham-and-butter baguette, the croque-monsieur, steak-frites — appears on village menus as it does everywhere in the region.

Absinthe has a special place in the village's story. The anise-flavoured spirit, made from wormwood with green anise, sweet fennel and other herbs and nicknamed la fée verte, the green fairy, was hugely popular among Parisian artists and writers in late 19th- and early 20th-century France, was opposed by social conservatives and prohibitionists, and had been banned in France by 1915. The small museum on the rue Callé tells its history.