In the fall of 1884, Vincent raved about the autumn effects he found in the landscape. He immortalized a long, golden-yellow avenue of trees in the painting Avenue of Poplars in Autumn. 'The last thing I made is a rather large study of an avenue of poplars with the yellow autumn blisters, where the sun here and there makes brilliant spots on the fallen blisters on the ground, which are interspersed by the long shadows of the trunks,' he writes to Theo, and specifies: 'At the end of the road a little farmhouse and the blue sky above it between the autumn blisters.
Vincent finds this spot in the village of Nederwetten, northwest of Nuenen. At that time, his painter friend Anthon van Rappard is visiting again and the two have "made great treks and entered house to house with the people - we have seen an immense amount of beauty, precisely because of the beautiful autumn scenery. He must have walked with Van Rappard from Nuenen up the long Broekdijk, a half-hour walk. The painted poplar avenue is an extension of that. The dirt road leads almost to the farm and bends to the right just before that, as historical maps show.
From the avenue, the side wall of the long farmhouse can be seen. On this end are only windows, the lower window on the right having been moved to the left over time. The farm was built in 1860 on the foundations of the Schoteldonkse Hoeve. This long-gabled farmhouse was the most common type in Brabant at the time. In Vincent's time, farmer Hendrikus Renders was the owner. In the painting the farm looks larger than it really was. In the foreground near the woman, Vincent paints the little bridge over the Hooidonkse beek.
