Church at Auvers

Baldus’s prodigious and compelling documentation of French historic buildings earned him recognition as one of the first great French architectural photographers. This image of Notre-Dame at Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, is from a sequence of 50 views of the railroad stations and principal sites along the route between Boulogne-sur-Mer and Paris. This Gothic-style village church was once a chapel for a manor house that has since disappeared. Almost 35 years after Baldus’s composition, and only a short time before his own suicide, Vincent van Gogh painted a large, bold canvas of the church’s apse and bell tower.