Van Gogh: the artist’s last 70 days in an exhibition

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In collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is organizing an exhibition on the last seventy days of Vincent van Gogh’s life, spent in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise (20 May – 29 July 1890). A period in which he was extremely productive and created some of his greatest masterpieces, including the famous Wheatfield with crows (1890) and the portrait of Doctor Paul Gachet (1890).
The exhibition, ”Van Gogh in Auvers. His last months” is the second of this 2023 and was organized as part of the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Van Gogh Museum.

Obsessive productivity

Thanks to numerous loans from museums and private collections, it offers for the first time an important overview of Van Gogh’s work in the last two months of his life, initially marked by great enthusiasm and almost obsessive productivity (74 paintings in seventy days). With an itinerary that alternates works and descriptions of real life, the exhibition follows the artist from his arrival in Auvers, where he had arrived with new hopes and ambitions, up to his last weeks of life, when, again attacked by feelings of failure, solitude and melancholy, however, continues to create works of enormous power. In the period spent in Auvers, Vincent often paints quickly and shows a wide variety of styles: from large panels to the famous convoluted shapes to waves and spirals, even more first he focuses on composition and color and above all he wants to regenerate himself in nature, capturing the essence of rural life described with bright colors and a predominant green, and expressing deep human feelings in his works.

Auvers

Vincent arrives in the quiet village of Auvers-sur-Oise, about thirty kilometers from Paris, on May 20, 1890 at the invitation of his brother and after a year spent in a clinic for mental illness in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France. The picturesque village on the banks of the River Oise attracted many artists and was well connected to the capital, where his brother Theo lived, by a railway line. The hope was that a new environment and above all the closeness of the family bond could alleviate his psychic suffering. The choice of that village was not accidental, Dr. Paul Gachet (1828-1909), specialized in melancholic states (we would say today depressive), had his country house there, the doctor was a friend of many artists, including Renoir, Cézanne and Pissarro, whose works he collected, and painted himself in his spare time. Van Gogh rents a small room on the top floor above the Café de la Mairie and at first glance this choice seems to be the ideal solution and the painter immediately begins to paint first views of the village and then panoramas of the surrounding area, above all the extensive fields of grain, within a short radius of just 500 meters from his room. But he soon began to focus on portraits as he was convinced that the portrait ” with the thoughts, the soul of the model inside ” would become the future of pictorial art. And color becomes of primary importance as in the portrait of Doctor Gachet, who appears in the typical melancholy pose, or in that of Adeline Ravoux, in which she underlines the natural shyness of the twelve-year-old. His paintings of young people, especially women and children, portrayed in the open air, were a true ode to village life. In fact, Van Gogh thought that the little ones could grow up much better in the countryside and often pushed his brother Theo and his sister-in-law Jo to come to Auvers with the very young Vincent. A period of great productivity and enthusiasm that unfortunately lasted very little: Vincent van Gogh took his own life on the following 29 July.

The exhibition

The exhibition displays 50 paintings and over 30 drawings from his short period in Auvers, including eight important loans from the Musée d’Orsay from the legacy of the descendants of Paul Gachet himself and never left the Parisian museum, including ”The Church of Auvers-sur-Oise” (1890) such an exceptional loan that Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum, defined the exhibition as ”once in a lifetime”. In addition, the aforementioned portrait of Adeline Ravoux, daughter of the owner of the hotel where Van Gogh lived, from a private collection and visible for the first time since 1955.

”Van Gogh in Auvers. His Last Months ”, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, until 3 September