The Church at Auvers — along with other canvases such as The Town Hall at Auvers and several drawing of small houses with thatched roofs — is reminiscent of scenes from his Nuenen period. A certain nostalgia for the north had already been apparent in his last weeks in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence: in a letter written a couple of weeks before his departure, he wrote "While I was ill I nevertheless did some little canvases from memory which you will see later, memories of the North." He specifically refers to similar work done back at Nuenen when he describes this painting in a letter to his sister Wilhelmina on 5 June 1890: The "simple deep blue" was also used in Portrait of Adeline Ravoux, painted in the same short period in Auvers-sur-Oise. The foreground of The Church at Auvers is brightly lit by the sun, but the church itself sits in its own shadow, and "neither reflects nor emanates any light of its own." After Van Gogh had been dismissed from the evangelical career he had hoped to continue in the Borinage, Belgium, he wrote to his brother Theo from Cuesmes in July 1880, and quoted Shakespeare's image from Henry IV, Part 1 of the dark emptiness inside a church to symbolize "empty and unenlightened preaching": "Their God is like the God of Shakespeare's drunken Falstaff, 'the inside of a church'" The motif of diverging paths also appears in his painting Wheat Field with Crows.
The Church at Auvers plays a prominent role in "Vincent and the Doctor", the tenth episode of the fifth series of the revived science-fiction television programmeDoctor Who in 2010, although the scenes at the church were filmed at Llandaff Cathedral in Wales. In this episode the painting depicts a strange, griffin-esque creature at a window of the church, which signifies to the show's time-travelling protagonist, the Doctor, that something evil was lurking in Auvers-sur-Oise in June 1890. Only when van Gogh himself, played by Tony Curran, defeats the creature at the church, does the painting revert to its original, unaltered, state. The krafayis is later revealed to have been blind, with blindness to the colors and shapes of the world and sky being a recurring theme of the episode.
