This was the director's mansion. Spender did not notice that, because of Oppenheimer's western connections, there was also the odd horse on the grounds. He continues: “He has beautiful paintings. As soon as we came in, he said: 'Now is the time to look at the van Gogh.' We went into his sitting room and saw a very fine van Gogh of a sun above a field almost entirely enclosed in shadows." At the end of my first interview with Oppenheimer, immediately after I had driven cross-country from Los Alamos in a convertible with a large hole in the roof and had been summoned to the interview while still covered in grime, he said to me that he and his wife had some pictures I might like to look at sometime. I wondered what he was talking about. Some months later I was invited to a party at the Oppenheimers, and realized that he was talking about a van Gogh. Some years later, I learned that this was part of a small collection he had inherited from his father to which he had never added.