It was created towards the end of May or beginning of June 1890, shortly after he had moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town northwest of Paris, France.

His move was prompted by his dissatisfaction with the boredom and monotony of asylum life at Saint-Rémy, as well as by his emergence as an artist of some renown following Albert Aurier's celebrated January 1890, Mercure de France, review of his work.

In his final two months at Saint-Rémy, van Gogh painted from memory a number of canvases he called, "reminisces of the North," harking back to his Dutch roots.

Vincent van Gogh spent the early 1881–1885 years of his brief ten-year career as an artist painting in the Netherlands at Etten, The Hague, Drenthe, and Nuenen (his last family home).

[1] Following the death of his father in March 1885 and ensuing difficulties and quarrels with both his family and neighbours in Nuenen, Van Gogh moved first to Antwerp, Belgium, where he briefly studied at the Academy.

[A] Nevertheless, there are abundant sources to show that Vincent participated fully in the artistic life of the city, although never aligning himself with the Impressionist movement.

By the end of the two-year period, relations between the brothers had soured somewhat and Vincent resolved to leave Paris and settle in Arles in the south of France, where he conceived the project of starting an artists' commune with Gauguin.

Despite making a speedy recovery, Vincent voluntarily entered an asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence on 9 May 1889, where he was able to continue painting between relapses of mania (his exact medical condition is not known with certainty).

He is more explicit in a following letter to his mother and sister Willemien: "And while my illness was at its worst, I still painted, among other things a reminiscence of Brabant, cottages with mossy roofs and beech hedges on an autumn evening with a stormy sky, the sun setting red in reddish clouds.

[L 4] At the same time Vincent had become something of a celebrity in the art world following a very favourable review of his work by the critic Albert Aurier, who declared him a genius.

[9] Despite his misgivings, Theo followed advice proffered by Camille Pissarro and arranged for Vincent to work at the village of Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris under the supervision of Paul Ferdinand Gachet, a doctor.

Thus, his paintings of dwellings range from thatched cottages through to middle-class villas and finally aristocratic châteaus, and these are set within the social spaces of gardens, streets, and the vestiges of feudal domain respectively.

On his arrival on 20 May 1890, he wrote to his brother Theo and wife Jo Bonger that "Auvers is really beautiful – among other things many old thatched roofs, which are becoming rare.

"[L 6] In his letter the following day he adds, "But I find the modern villas and the middle-class country houses almost as pretty as the old thatched cottages that are falling into ruin.

"[17][L 7] Van Gogh lodged at the Auberge Ravoux, where he remained until his death in the early hours of the morning of 29 July 1890 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the stomach.

It belonged to a mason named August Lecroix and was the subject of an earlier 1873 painting by Paul Cézanne titled La maison du Père Lacroix.

[21] Van Gogh was generally meticulous in his depiction of street scenes, a fact that allowed the precise location of the F766 White House at Night to be ascertained, an Auvers painting that was once thought lost but re-emerged in 1995 in the collection of the Hermitage Museum.

[23] Pickvance notes the colour scheme is restrained in accordance with van Gogh's return to the North, but also in response to the weather conditions: the sky is laden with clouds and a poplar tree bends to the force of the wind.

[21] Van Der Veen & Knapp remark that at the time of writing (2010), the shutters still retained their original green colour.