Visiting Van Gogh

For the last few months of his life, the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh lived in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise. He had been discharged from the clinic at Saint-Rémy where he had been treated for mental disorder, moving to Auvers to be near to local doctor Paul Gachet and his brother Theo, resident in nearby Paris. The village had become a popular location for artists after French painter Charles Daubigny moved there. It was a congenial refuge. Van Gogh arrived on 20 May 1890, and died there just over two months later, on 29 July.

Auvers sits on the northern side of the river Oise. It is now a small town, with the village area as Van Gogh would have known it located on the eastern side. It is a peaceful place, or at least it was when visiting on a warm and sunny mid-August day. Sleepy roads lined with bars and leafy house criss-cross up a slope bisected by a tall wall, above which lies the Notre-Dame de l’Assomption church. Nothing is straight or plain; every angle entrances the eye, suggesting itself as a photograph, or painting. The place is the dream of itself.

The church is so familiar, painted by Van Gogh with such vivid, disordered reality in June 1890. He enjoyed a particularly prolific two months, responding to the light, colour and atmosphere of the place in over seventy paintings. The visitor is aided by billboards through the town that display a reproduction of the painting composed at that very spot. There is the church, there is the town hall, there is the wheatfield. Stand here and gain Van Gogh’s eyes.

The town celebrates Van Gogh’s brief time here thoroughly but appropriately. There are the billboards, a museum, an unlovely statue. At the heart of it all there is the Auberge Ravoux, where Van Gogh rented a small room, in which he died.

The Auberge looks much as it did in 1890. It is still serving food, albeit at somewhat grander prices. Behind is a restaurant extension, then a small square with a ticket office and a cosy building housing the Institut Van Gogh. Collectively the area is known as the Maison de Van Gogh.

Behind the Auberge a set of steps leads up to the room itself. The treatment of it is remarkable. Having purchased your ticket, you are allowed up in a small group to be led by a guide into the interior and the room. Photography is forbidden. Instead the website provides three images only – the wooden staircase; a reverent image peaking round the door, showing an empty corner with chair; the third outside the building at night, showing a lighted skylight.

Within you see mostly emptiness. Some picture frames rest against the wall on the right-hand side. There is a tiny window high up. The floorboards are bare. The guide gives you the story of Van Gogh’s final days – how on 27 July he had gone out, possibly to the nearby wheatfield that he had recently painted, and shot himself in the chest with a revolver, how he returned to the room to endure two days of pain as infection took over. Dr Gachet attended to him; Theo Van Gogh arrived the following day. Vincent died there in the early hours of 29 July.

The guide is skilful in conjuring up time, people and place. We ask a few questions but are mostly silent with the respect the place commands. We are then led into a second, larger room where there is a screening of an audiovisual presentation, In the Footsteps of Van Gogh, a mixture of stills, music and commentary, which tells us of Van Gogh’s fleeting time in Auvers. It is done well.

Then into the shops to buy postcards.

It is hard to escape the Christ-like way in which Van Gogh is commemorated in Auvers-sur-Oise. There is the (self-inflicted) crucifixion, the death on the third day, the sanctity with which the room is treated, the prohibition of photographs to protect the unphotographable. The aura is preserved. As the website puts it, “The room is empty. You cannot find the slightest relic to touch. You just stand there and feel … the presence of history” The room was left empty after Van Gogh’s death, not out of any early respect for the artist but through local horror at the idea of suicide. No one would now want to rent such a room. And so it remained, and has remained, Van Gogh’s.

The horror at the idea of suicide extended, naturally, to the local church, which refused to allow him to be buried there. Vincent was therefore buried in a cemetery on the outside of town, some five minutes’ walk up the hill from the church, close to the wheatfield where portentous crows once flew.

The sky is so blue, white clouds scudding across flat fields, the horizon lined with trees. In the bright light, the cemetery looks fresh, almost new. A wall surrounds it. The grave is not difficult to find, on the inside of the wall at the top of the slope, with a small group of people gathered there, as there probably always is. Vincent lies next to Theo. His brother, afflicted by syphilis and crushed by the death of his brother, died a few months later. His widow Johanna saw to it that Theo joined his brother for this eternity. Their joint grave has a blanket of green leaves. The gravestones are small and simple, giving only names and dates. All is restful.

Auvers-sur-Oise is like a painting. Time hangs still there. For all that it was home or familiar to other artists of renown, among them Dubigny, Camille and Lucien Pisarro, and Paul Cezanne, it is the moment when Vincent Van Gogh lived there that has left it forever in the sun. It is somewhere to contemplate what passes, and what must remain.

Links:

• The Maison de Van Gogh site provides information on the room, the Ravoux Inn, and the Institut Van Gogh. In English and French
• Van Gogh Route is an interactive map, with potted histories, of locations associated with Vincent Van Gogh, in Belgium, France, Great Britain and the Netherlands
• Photographs of our visit to Auvers-sur-Oise (the Van Gogh room naturally not included) are on my Flickr site under the album Visiting Van Gogh