Paul Cézanne (1839-1906): "Auvers, Panoramic View", oil on canvas, 65.2 x 81.3 cm, 1873/75. The Art Institute, Chicago, USA.

  Vincent met with Dr. Gachet shortly after his arrival in Auvers. Although initially impressed by Gachet, Vincent would later express grave doubts about his competence, going so far as to comment that Gachet appeared to be "sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much". Only three weeks after his arrival, Van Gogh would write that he and Paul Gachet had become “great friends.” Van Gogh made a number of portraits of the doctor, a few paintings and an etching – a technique Gachet had taught him. He made a sketch of one of the paintings in a letter to Theo.

  Vincent's first weeks in Auvers passed pleasantly and uneventfully. On 8 June Theo, Jo and the baby came to Auvers to visit Vincent and Gachet and Vincent passed a very enjoyable day with his family. To all appearances, Vincent appeared quite restored--mentally and physically.

  Throughout June, Vincent remained in good spirits and was remarkably productive, painting some of his best known works. The initial tranquillity of the first month in Auvers was interrupted, however, when Vincent received news that his nephew was seriously ill. Theo had been going through a most difficult time throughout the previous few months: uncertainty about his own career and future, ongoing health problems and finally his own son's illness. Following the baby's recovery, Vincent decided to visit Theo and his family on 6 July and caught an early train. Very little is known about the visit, but Johanna, Theo's wife, writing years later, would suggest that the day was strained and fairly tense. Vincent eventually felt overwhelmed and quickly returned to the more quiet sanctuary of Auvers.

  During the next three weeks Vincent kept on painting and, as his letters suggest, was reasonably happy. To his mother and sister Vincent wrote: "For the present I am feeling much calmer than last year, and really the restlessness in my head has greatly quieted down." (Letter 650) Vincent was absorbed in the fields and plains around Auvers and produced some brilliant landscapes throughout July.

  In Auvers Van Gogh painted more then 70 pictures. During these last weeks of his life it was only due to his work that he could forget about his illness, and he painted as if possessed. Among the works of the period are a religious work after Delacroix, The Pieta, The Church of Auvers, multiple landscapes and portraits.

  On the evening of the 27th July 1890 Van Gogh went at dusk into the fields and shot himself. With all his strength he managed to drag himself back to the inn; here he died two days later in the arms of his brother, who had hurried to his side. Besides Theo and Dr. Gachet some friends from Paris, amongst them Bernard and “Père” Tanguy, took part in the funeral.

  Van Gogh’s death in 1890 provoked an outpouring of condolences and prompted discussions that revealed his place in the art world of his day. The great amount of literature subsequently published on the life and work of Van Gogh shows that Theo was right when he said: ‘He certainly won’t be forgotten.’

  6 Months after Vincent, his brother Theo, already weakened by a disease, died of grief in Holland. In April 1914 his body was exhumed at his widow Johanna's request so that he could rest beside Vincent in Auvers. Johanna requested that a sprig of ivy from Dr. Gachet's garden be planted among the grave stones. That same ivy carpets Vincent and Theo's grave site to this day.
 
  It's an emotional place of reflection, if you have the luck to be alone...

  On this page you find the works of art Vincent van Gogh created in Auvers. Also the relevant letters.
 

Although he always painted in front of the subject, the painting is a very personal vision of the landscape. Van Gogh transformed what he saw into something profoundly personal, giving visual form to the emotions which the landscape in front of him inspired in him. The fertile fields around Auvers produced conflicting feelings within him: the sensation of freedom which he had in front of these broad fields was counterbalanced by melancholy and a sensation of loneliness brought on by the sight of the wheat.
 

"Yesterday in the rain I painted a large landscape, showing fields as far as one can see, looked at from a height, different kinds of green growth, a potato field of a sombre green, between the regular beds the rich violet earth, on one side a field of peas in white bloom, then a field of clover with pink flowers and the little figure of a mower, a field of long and ripe grass somewhat reddish in tone, then various kinds of wheat, poplars, on the horizon a last line of blue hills, along the foot of which a train is passing, leaving behind it an immense trail of white smoke over all the green vegetation. A white road crosses the canvas. On the road a little carriage, and white houses with harshly red roofs by the side of this road."

 

‘A crepuscular effect: two pear-trees, wholly black, against a yellowing sky, with grain-fields; and, in the purple background, the castle, enfolded by dark foliage.’ This was how Van Gogh described his brother Theo in letter 644 (24 or 25 June 1890) the evocative landscape he painted shortly after sunset in the surroundings of the château at Auvers. During the final months of his life, Vincent painted a number of works in this striking format, twice as wide as they were high – ideally suited to broad landscape views.

  The three parts of the Drawing Course correspond to a widely accepted sequence of art education in the 19th century.
 
  Part I, Drawing After Casts (Modeles D’Après la Bosse) and
  Part II, Copying Master Drawings (Modeles d’Après Les Maîtres), began publication in 1868 and were intended for students of industrial and decorative arts—the very ones whose deficiencies argued so forcefully for the Course’s necessity—as well as beginning fine arts students.
  Part III, Charcoal Exercises in Preparation for Drawing the Male Academic Nude or Académie (Exercices au Fusain Pour Preparer a l’Etude de l’Academie d’Après Nature) presented charcoal sketches of the male nude.

  It was completed in 1871 and intended for fine art students only—drawing live models was discouraged if not forbidden in most European and American schools of design. Published without instructive text because they were meant to be used primarily in art schools, the Drawing Course sold briskly from its first publication, and continued to do well for at least three decades, with individual plates made available by Goupil & Cie and its successors until the firm’s final dissolution in 1921.

  Its primary purchasers were institutions: the city of Paris ordered a special printing for its schools almost immediately after the first plates were finished, and the Drawing Course was adopted in Great Britain by the extensive system of schools and academies supervised by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). Its influence was also widespread in America -- the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, for example, bought Parts I and II of the Drawing Course in 1876, the year Thomas Eakins began teaching there. Self-trained artists could also easily make use of the plates, progressing in an orderly, rational sequence through a program designed to develop their technical skills, while mature artists would use the plates to hone their skills, as a trained pianist might return to the discipline of Czerny’s piano exercises.

  Vincent van Gogh copied the plates of Part III many times during his career. Letters to his brother Theo underscore the hold that the “Bargues” had on the artist. In 1881, he wrote to Theo, “Careful study & repeated copying of Bargue’s Exercises au fusain have given me a better insight into figure-drawing. I have learned to measure and to see and to look for the broad outlines so that, thank God, what seemed utterly impossible to me before is gradually becoming possible to me now…I no longer stand as helpless before nature as I used to do.

  Van Gogh’s interpretation of Bargue's "Seated Nude", (Part III) is reproduced here.

 

It emerged that Vincent had gone to the wheat field where he liked to paint, behind the château 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 château. The popular theory is that shot himself — using a revolver (according to Adeline Ravoux) that Ravoux (or possibly Gachet) had loaned him that morning to scare off the crows pestering him while he painted — and then collapsed, Ravoux supposed, only to be revived by the evening's cool, he headed back to the inn.

According to the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hoving (Art for Dummies), he didn't commit suicide, but fell against a shotgun which accidently discharged. If Vincent had committed suicide he probably had shot in his head, not in his stomach or chest.  

A theory that Vincent was murdered, but covered the offender, is possible, too. If he committed suicide, there has to be a weapon, but Adeline Ravoux says in her memoirs that the weapon was never found. So somebody took the weapon and that is suspicious.

If one person is a possible suspect, we need to mention Dr. Paul Gachet. Vincent was getting much better in Auvers, everything was going forwards, he sold his first painting (The Red Vine), also got a very positive review in a Paris art paper, by the art critic Albert Aurier. So why killing himself then? He didn't owned a gun, either!
Ten years before the Gachet family were implicated in a murder...

When Vincent was wounded, Dr. Gachet only cleaned the wounds and let him smoke his pipe, waiting for the moment he died. He called Theo, brother of Vincent Van Gogh, and they waited until Vincent died. He did not do anything to help him. Vincent paid for his so-called medical treatment with Gachet in invaluable paintings and after the funeral the doctor took a lot of paintings with him. He was an art-connoisseur and knew, as one of the few in the world, that he added masterworks to his collection, and that for free!

Probably one day the mortal remains of Vincent van Gogh will be exhumed. A DNA-test should be possible and we shall know more about his diseases and, too, there still has to be the bullet that remained in the body and the bullet could tell us a lot...

Tom Hirschig was dispatched to fetch Dr. Mazery, the local practitioner, but couldn't find him, so Ravoux sent him to get Dr Gachet. Gachet dressed Vincent's wound, but Adeline Ravoux 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." The bullet in Vincent's chest was not removed.

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.

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 Theo van Gogh worked for the Art Gallery of Boussod Valadon on Boulevard Montmartre in Paris and sent a telegram. Theo 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," Theo wrote to his wife. The siblings spoke at some length, Theo 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.

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.  He still had plenty of material from Theo to continue painting and he'd talked of new ideas he wanted to try.

Wednesday, July 30, 1890

In the afternoon the funeral procession, 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, Père Tanguy, Lucien Pissarro, Theo van Gogh, Dr Gachet and his son Paul, Ravoux and his wife, Lauzet, the Dutch painter Van der Valk, Hirschig, Léonide Bourges and Mlle Mesdag and several 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."

Adeline Ravoux: "On the return, Theo, Tom, Dr. Gachet and the latter's son, Paul, who may have then been sixteen, accompanied Father. They entered "the painters room " where the coffin left from and where the canvases were on display.
Theo, wanting to thank those that had helped his brother, offered them to take, in memory, some canvases of the departed artist. Father was content with my portrait and the Town Hall of Auvers that M. Vincent had given him when he was alive. When the proposal was made to Dr. Gachet, the former chose many canvases and passed them to his son Paul: "Roulez Coco", telling him to make a parcel. Then Theo took my sister Germaine to choose a toy: this was a basket of intertwined shavings containing a small iron kitchen utensil. Finally, Theo took his brother's belongings. We never saw him again".