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| This is Page 4, the final page, of a website collating a series of posts
from the art blog Dali House corresponding to the dates of Vincent Van Gogh's
movements and activities in the final 30 months of his life.
View Page 1. View Page 2. View Page 3. |
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 | | "Bank of the Oise at Auvers" from July 1890 | |
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 | | The DAUBIGNY MUSEUM on rue de la Sansonne, not to be confused with Charles-François Daubigny's home and studio to the north, doubles as Auvers' Tourism Office. The building, with origins in the 14th century, when Auvers was known as Vexin, was formerly the Manoir des Colombières, a stronghold against the looting raids of militias from nearby Pontoise. The building today displays works by contemporary artists alongside those of Daubigny and other paintings and engravings from the 19th century. Just outside is a venerable stone stairway once painted by Van Gogh. | |
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 | | Sunday, July 27, 1890 Vincent has shot himself.
He went out right after lunch, not his usual custom, and
had still not returned by sunset. About 9 o'clock the innkeeper and his family were on the terrace when Vincent appeared, clutching his stomach. Madame Ravoux asked if he'd
had some problem.
"No," he replied with some difficulty, but I have …" He didn't finish the sentence, but went upstairs to his room. Ravoux, worried, followed him and, through the door, heard groans. He went in and found Vincent curled up on the bed. Vincent lifted his shirt and Ravoux could see a small wound by the heart. |  |
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"What have you done?" he cried.
"I have tried to kill myself."
It emerged that Vincent had gone to the wheat field where he liked to paint, behind the chateau of Gosselin, the Parisian. It's more than half a kilometre from the inn, up a hill. He leaned his easel against a haystack and then walked behind the chateau. He must have shot himself — using a pistol that Ravoux (or possibly Gachet) had loaned him that morning to scare off the crows pestering him while he painted — and then collapsed, Ravoux surmised, only to be revived by the evening's cool, then searched for the revolver to finish the job. Unable to find it, he headed
back to the hotel. | Tom Hirschig was dispatched to fetch the local physician but couldn't find him, so Ravoux sent him to get Dr Gachet. Gachet dressed Vincent's wound, but Adeline Ravouxs swears he declared the patient beyond hope and abruptly left. Emile Bernard, though, believes Gachet thought he could save him,
but Vincent merely replied, "Then it has to be done over again."
Ravoux and Hirschig remained at Vincent's side, repeatedly filling and lighting his pipe for him.
He often moaned in pain but also slept on and off. |  | |
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 | | "The Wheat Field", June 1890 | | Tuesday, July 29, 1890 Soon after the sun was up on Monday morning two gendarmes appeared at the inn and
asked Vincent if he was the one "who wanted to commit suicide".
"Yes, I believe."
"You know that you do not have the right?"
"My body is mine," Vincent replied calmly, "and I am free to do what I want with it.
Do not accuse anybody — it is I who wished to commit suicide."
Ravoux had determined that Théo Van Gogh worked for the Art Gallery of Boussod Valadon
on Boulevard Montmartre in Paris and sent a telegram. Théo arrived by train
by mid-afternoon and ran from the station to the inn. | | He immediately joined his brother and remained at his side. "I found him somewhat better than I expected," Théo wrote to his wife. The siblings spoke at some length, Théo urging him on but being spurned with the words, "The sadness will last forever." Then Vincent lapsed into a coma. They said the last words
he uttered were, "I wish I could pass away like this."
He died at 1.30 this morning. Ravoux signed a formal declaration of death at the town hall.
The priest at Notre Dame d'Auvers refused to say mass for a suicide. The windows of the hotel were shuttered and, in the afternoon, Vincent's body was bought downstairs to the lobby, which had been adorned with flowers by Hirschig,
mostly cheerful sunflowers. |  | | Dr Gachet's sketch of Van Gogh on his deathbed | Théo ringed the room with Vincent's paintings, among them "The Church of Auvers",
"Irises", "The Garden of Daubigny" and "Child with an Orange", the last one a portrait
of the two-year-old son of the village carpenter, Levert, who had built the coffin and provided
the supports on which it rested. At its foot were Vincent's palette and brushes.
All told he completed more than 150 paintings in Auvers. He still had plenty of material
from Théo to continue painting and he'd talked of new ideas he wanted to try.
In the end he must have simply panicked. |  | |
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 | | "Wheat Fields near Auvers" | | Wednesday, July 30, 1890 In the afternoon most of the members of Auvers' little artists' colony, some 20 in all, followed the casket out past Notre Dame d'Auvers, which wanted nothing to do with Vincent, to the farther cemetery. And there were Emile Bernard, "Pere" Tanguy, Lucien Pissarro, Théo, Gachet and his son teenage Paul, Ravoux and his wife and several other neighbours. Dr Gachet attempted a eulogy but didn't get far beyond "an honest man and a great artist", and this, presciently: "It is the art that he cherished above all else that will ensure that he lives on."
Back at the inn Théo offered Vincent's canvases to the guests in thanks. Gachet chose quite a few to add to his collection. Vincent had lived 70 days in Auvers-sur-Oise and completed 70 paintings. |  |  | |
The road to the cemetery was later named Rue Emile Bernard. Opposite the graveyard's
stone wall to the west is a sign suggesting that the cropfield there was where Vincent
set up his easel to paint "Wheat Field with Crows".
This past November in New York Sotheby's was shaken to its foundations when
the price range it put on "The Fields (Wheat Fields)" — $28 million to $35 million —
proved too high at auction. Touted as possibly Van Gogh's final work (no one
will ever know for sure), the painting was among those that witnessed
the gathering of mourners at the Ravoux inn.
The same sale saw "Te Poipoi" ("The Morning") by Vincent's friend Paul Gauguin
sell for $39 million. It had been expected to bring as much as $60 million. But Picasso's
sculpture of Dora Maar set a record for his three-dimensional works, at $29 million.
|  | Pictured at left, Dominique-Charles Janssens, the current owner of the Auberge Ravoux who founded the Van Gogh Institute to promote Auvers' connection to the artist (it also manages Gachet's house), had hoped to buy the painting with money raised online through a website called Van Gogh's Dream. He said later that the donations he'd received would instead be used to maintain Auvers as it was in Vincent's day, but he still wants an original painting for the inn — to be kept in a bulletproof-glass display cabinet already installed in what had been Vincent's bedroom. "Auvers is a place of pilgrimage," Janssens has been quoted as saying, "not a high tourist spot." | |
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 | | Aug 1, 1890 Théo has written to his mother: "One cannot write how sad one is, nor find solace
in pouring out one's heart ... It is a grief that will weigh on me for a long time
and will certainly not leave my thoughts as long as I live, but if one should want to say
anything about it, it is that he himself has found the rest he so much longed for.
If he could have seen how people behaved toward me when he had left us
and the sympathy of so many for himself, he would at this moment not have wanted to die." |
The grief did weigh heavily on Théo. He died the following January in Utrecht,
having long suffered with a kidney infection and then breaking down altogether
after his brother's death. He'd contracted syphilis as well,
then had a stroke and lapsed into a coma.
In 1914 his body was exhumed at his widow Johanna's request so that he could
rest beside Vincent in Auvers. Their graves are against the upper wall in the
Virtual Earth satellite images above, about halfway along, and just beyond that
of Norbert Goeneutte (1854-1894), the painter and engraver who was so much
admired by Manet, Degas and Renoir, and who did his own portrait
of Gachet the year after Vincent died. Goeneutte spent his last four years in Auvers. Théo and Vincent Van Gogh are linked in their graves, as the brothers were in life,
by a stout vine, this one of ivy from Gachet's garden, planted there at
the doctor's suggestion when Théo's remains were interred.
In his 10 years as an artist, Vincent Van Gogh produced nearly 1,500 paintings and drawings. |
 |  | | "Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul Hospital with a Reaper", September 1889 | |
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