Welly the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak.
—LAST LETTER TO THEO, JULY 1890
ON HIS WAY to Auvers, Vincent stopped in Paris to meet Theo's wife, Jo, and his new nephew for the first time. Jo presumed Vincent would be frail and was surprised to see “the sturdy, broad shouldered man, with healthy color, a smile on his face, and a very resolute appearance.” In fact, she thought Vincent looked healthier than her husband.
Theo brought Vincent into the room where his namesake lay sleeping in a cradle. The two brothers, who had been through so much, stood side by side looking down at young Vincent with tears in their eyes. Then Vincent turned to Jo and pointed to the crocheted coverlet. “Do not cover him up with too much lace, little sister,” he said.
Jo wrote that the three-day visit was a happy occasion, but Vincent's letters afterward tell a different story, focusing on some unresolved issues. Nothing had been settled about his allowance. And seeing his paintings stored in the “bedbug infested hole” at Père Tanguy's upset him. On some of his canvases the swirling paint was half an inch thick, and stacking them in Tanguy's small spare room caused the paint to stick and crack. “By keeping them in good condition, there would be a greater chance of getting some profit out of them,” Vincent wrote.
From Theo's letters to Vincent, it is clear that he believed strongly in his brother's talent, but he was careful, almost reticent, about showing the work outside his apartment. There was no way Vincent would have exhibited at Goupil, Theo's gallery. After all, its stuffy director had once fired him. In addition, Theo, who was committed to the Impressionists, did not fully appreciate Vincent's generation of painters. Their raw colors and bold imagery put him off. Vincent, concerned about the sale of his paintings, told his brother not to compromise if he didn't feel the work was ready. Yet with practically every batch of canvases that Vincent sent to Paris he included a note about their commercial prospects, indicating how aware he was of the business of art.
Unsure of his finances, Vincent arrived in Auvers in late spring, settling into a little room on the third floor of an inn owned by the Ravoux family. Vincent described Auvers as “very beautiful, having among other things a lot of old thatched roofs.… It is real country, characteristic and picturesque.” The first day he set off down the long slope dotted with cottages to the Oise River to draw. The sky was filled with crows circling the wheat fields, and the pink-and-white almond trees were in bloom. Looking around, Vincent could understand why Auvers had attracted other artists, such as Cézanne and Pissarro.
Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, the physician recommended by his friend Pissarro, lived with his teenage son and daughter in a large villa “full of old things, black, black, black except for some impressionist paintings … a strange little fellow,” wrote Vincent. In his sixties with a mane of thick red hair and a long, sad face, Gachet fancied himself an artist and made etchings on his own press. Vincent's first impression was that the doctor seemed as distraught as his patients. Gachet invited Vincent for dinner and, much to his relief, offered to treat the fidgety artist if he should feel ill or depressed. Vincent complained that Gachet served too much rich food but found himself enjoying their conversation about art and literature. Over brandy Gachet invited him to paint in his home. This appealed to Vincent, who started the next day on a portrait of the doctor, in whose face he saw “the heartbroken expression of our time.”
This would be a modern portrait, said Vincent, one that didn't glorify the sitter as traditional portraits did. “I should like to paint portraits which would appear after a century to the people living then as apparitions. So I do not endeavor to achieve this by photographic resemblance, but by means of our impassioned expressions, using our knowledge of and our modern taste for color as a means of arriving at the expression and intensification of character. So the portrait of Dr. Gachet shows you a face the color of an overheated brick, and scorched by the sun.”
His deep blue suit and the lighter blue sky emphasize the doctor's pale face as he leans on his elbow at an angle, his expression melancholy. The yellow novels on the table represent the doctor's intellectual side, and the purple flower of a foxglove, a medicinal herb used to treat disorders of the nerves, indicates his profession.
Vincent said that he and the doctor were very much alike; Vincent not only related to Gachet's suffering and vulnerability but also had grown fond of him.
Vincent quickly discovered other subjects in Auvers. With his shoulder bent slightly toward his wounded ear, he set off to paint each day just as the sun rose, returning late in the afternoon to the inn. The Ravoux family, who called him Monsieur Vincent, found him quiet and polite, with a gentle manner. After his evening meals, he played with their two-year-old daughter, drawing pictures of the sandman on a slate before she went off to bed. He also made a portrait of the family's thirteen-year-old daughter, Adeline. He painted it in one sitting, smoking his pipe, not saying a word until he finished. Although the Ravouxes were not very enthusiastic about the painting, Vincent gave it to them. In 1988 one of the two portraits Vincent did of Adeline was sold at auction for $13.5 million.
As his room was too small to use as a studio, Vincent mainly painted landscapes outdoors. He produced a remarkable amount of work, some seventy to eighty studies, during his stay in Auvers. A Dutch painter, Anton Hirschig, who also lived at the inn, recalled that Vincent piled his finished canvases casually in the corner of a hut where the goats were usually kept. No one seemed interested in looking at them. Vincent talked to Hirschig of his plans to exhibit the work in Paris and the possibility of taking a trip with Gauguin. Considering the fact that Gauguin had abandoned him in Arles after that terrible night, the idea was a credit to Vincent's good heart and his spirit of forgiveness.
In June Theo and Jo brought the baby to Auvers for a picnic. Vincent met them at the train station with a bird's nest for the baby and insisted on carrying his nephew around to show him all the animals at Dr. Gachet's: eight cats; eight dogs; numerous chickens, rabbits, and ducks; and even a peacock. When the loud crowing of a rooster frightened the baby, Vincent laughed, shouting, “The cock crows cocorico.” They had lunch outside and afterward took a long walk. “The day was so peacefully quiet, so happy that nobody would have suspected how tragically our happiness was to be destroyed for always a few weeks later,” wrote Jo. Vincent, elated by the visit, hoped they would see more of each other now that he lived so close to Paris. Yet there were some warnings in letters to Theo about Vincent's mounting despair. In one he wrote of his little nephew, “I should like him to have a soul less unquiet than mine, which is foundering.”
What happened in Auvers that sent Vincent on a downward spiral after weeks of productive work? He had been able to dedicate himself to painting without worrying because of Theo's support. Monthly and sometimes weekly checks arrived, along with extra art supplies whenever Vincent needed them. But in June a letter from Theo announced some disturbing news. The baby had fallen seriously ill, and Theo believed the illness was a reaction to the milk in Paris, which he described as poisonous. Jo, he wrote, was exhausted from the baby's crying, and he was beside himself with worry. He went on to tell Vincent that he was angry with his employers, whom he referred to as “those rats,” and was thinking of resigning. He mentioned he was short of money. Vincent responded to Theo's letter by urging him to come to Auvers, where country life would be healthier for his family.
When the baby's health had improved a little, Vincent insisted on going to Paris to visit Jo and Theo. He found the couple in the midst of marital problems, Jo exhausted from caring for a sick baby and climbing up and down the stairs to their fourth-floor apartment. His conversations with them were tense, and visits from friends left him jumpy. Quickly he returned to Auvers and wrote them a note:
My impression is that since we were all rather stupefied and perhaps a little overwrought, it matters little to any very clear definition of the position we are in. You rather surprise me by seeming to wish to force the situation while there are disagreements between you. Can I do anything about it—perhaps not—but have I done anything wrong, can I do anything that you would like me to do?
Jo tried to reassure Vincent that things would be all right, and Vincent replied:
It is no slight thing when we feel our daily bread is in danger; no slight thing when for other reasons we feel that our existence is fragile. Back here I also felt very sad and continued to feel the storm which threatens you to be weighing on me. I try to be fairly cheerful, but my life is threatened at the very root.… Being a burden to you, you felt me to be rather a thing to be dreaded.
This last line goes to the root of Vincent's worry, his sense of causing a hardship to Theo and his family. It also is likely that Theo told Vincent about his own health problems. In letters Vincent often expressed concern about Theo's chronic cough and other signs of his delicate condition. Vincent's anxiety grew worse, and he lost confidence in his own doctor. “I think we must not count on Dr. Gachet at all. First of all he is sicker than I am, I think, or just as much. Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don't they both fall into a ditch?”
Several days after returning from Paris, Vincent showed up at Dr. Gachet's house and flew into a rage for no good reason. A painting he admired of a woman lying on a couch with a Japanese fan had not been framed. In a loud voice he accused the kindly doctor of gross neglect. His abrupt manner frightened Dr. Gachet's children, who wrote later that they stood “rooted to the spot.” After a stern look from the doctor, Vincent turned, leaving the house without another word.
He threw himself into his work, “though the brush almost slipped from my fingers.” Writing to reassure his mother that he was “in a mood of calmness,” he described his efforts to capture the delicate blue and violet skies and the immense wheat field against the hills.
Wheatfield with Crows, a dark and somber painting, indicates that his mood was far from calm. In this brooding work, one of his last paintings, there are turbulent skies, crows flying wildly toward the viewer, and a field of overripe wheat bisected by a road seeming to lead nowhere. A dirt path in the foreground curves off the sides of the canvas. The horizon seems to roll forward, as if the world is closing in with no escape. The artist, who in his darkest moments had created optimistic paintings celebrating life, had lost hope.
In his last letter, possibly a draft of one he'd sent to Theo earlier, he began, “There are a lot of things I might write you about but to begin with the desire to do so has so much left me, and I feel the uselessness of it.” He went on to tell Theo how important his part had been in his painting: “Through me you have your part in the actual production of some canvases that will retain their calm even in the catastrophe.… Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it … but what's the use?” Perhaps knowing the letter sounded too much like a goodbye note, he stuffed it in his smock, where it was found a few days later.
On the morning of Sunday, July 27, almost ten years to the day since he had begun his artistic journey in the Borinage, Vincent set out for the wheat fields with his easel. At some point he took out a revolver (supposedly purchased to frighten crows), put the gun to his stomach, and shot himself. This was not a moment of insanity or a seizure; it was an act of considered despair. Like the reaper of his paintings, he faced death in the wheat fields under the burning sun.
It was dusk when Vincent returned to the inn. The Ravoux family, sitting on the terrace of the café after the busy Sunday meal, noticed he was bent over, stumbling. Mrs. Ravoux asked, “Monsieur Vincent, we worried, we are glad to see you come home. Has anything unfortunate happened to you?”
“No, but I …,” said Vincent without finishing the sentence.
Mr. Ravoux followed him upstairs and found him in bed with his face to the wall. Vincent showed him his wound, saying softly, “I wanted to kill myself.”
Gossip about Vincent's attempted suicide spread around town, and the next morning the police arrived and demanded to see for themselves. There were French laws against suicide.
“You know you don't have the right to do so?” one told the dying man.
Vincent said in his quiet voice, “This body is mine and I am free to do with it what I want.”
When Dr. Gachet heard the news, he quickly sent Hirschig to Paris with a letter for Theo that began, “With greatest regret, I must bring you bad tidings.” Rushing to Auvers, Theo found Vincent with Dr. Gachet and another physician from the village. Vincent lay in bed smoking his pipe, saying nothing until Theo knelt down near him. As Vincent was conscious, Theo assumed his brother would pull through, but it was not to be. Vincent van Gogh died of infection from the unremoved bullet on July 29, 1890. His last words were “I wished I could pass away like this.”
Emile Bernard traveled from Paris for the funeral of his friend. He wrote, “On the walls of the room where the body lay, all his last canvases were nailed, forming a sort of halo around him, and rendering his death all the more painful to the artists who were present by the splendor of the genius which radiated from them.” His coffin, placed on the billiard table at the inn, was covered with white linen and strewn with yellow sunflowers and dahlias. Yellow was the color he had chosen to express his deepest emotions—“the high yellow note.” His brushes and easel were placed in front of the coffin.
Vincent was buried in Auvers, in the little cemetery behind a stately Gothic church he had painted. Artists, family, and friends gathered for the funeral. In his eulogy on the hill of the cemetery, with the blue sky and the wheat fields beyond, Dr. Gachet said through his tears, “He was an honest man and a great artist. He had only two goals, humanity and art.”
Theo, broken with grief, wrote this poignant letter to his mother after Vincent's funeral: “One cannot write how grieved one is nor find any comfort. It is a grief that will last and which I certainly will never forget as long as I live; the only thing one might say is that he himself has the rest he was longing for.… Life was such a burden to him; but now, as often happens, everyone is in praise of his talents.… Oh Mother, he was my own, own brother.”