Vincent van Gogh arrived in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, a famous artists’ colony just northwest of Paris, on May 20, 1890. Exactly 70 days later he was dead, succumbing to the after-effects of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. During this final period of 10 weeks, after leaving behind the emotional and physical trauma of his time in Arles, nearly 500 miles to the south, Van Gogh worked furiously, producing more than 70 paintings in a glorious coda to his troubled, eventful career.
This intense time—which produced masterworks including Wheatfield with Crows, The Church at Auvers, and two portraits of his doctor Paul Gachet—is the focus of “Van Gogh in Auvers: His Final Months,” a new exhibition that opened yesterday at the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam, home to around 200 of the artist’s paintings. The museum’s researchers have put considerable effort into establishing the exact order in which the Auvers paintings were created, scanning meteorologic reports, noting seasonal variations, and deciphering time-sensitive clues in the subjects themselves. In 2012, the museum even identified Van Gogh’s final work—a study of knotty, gnarled tree roots—which he painted on the morning of the shooting.
