Vincent van Gogh - View of Vessenots Near Auvers 1890

View of Vessenots Near Auvers 1890
View of Vessenots Near Auvers
Oil on canvas 55.0 x 65.0 cm. Auvers-sur-Oise: May, 1890
Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

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From Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid:
On 20 May 1890 Vincent van Gogh left Paris for Auvers-sur-Oise, a small village thirty-five kilometres north of Paris where other artists like Charles Daubigny and Paul Cézanne had sojourned before him and the place of residence of Doctor Paul-Ferdinand Gachet , the physician and art collector to whom Theo van Gogh entrusted the care of his brother Vincent’s health at the recommendation of Camille Pissarro. Despite lasting scarcely two months, the Auvers period was extremely productive. During what would the last weeks of his life, Vincent painted a few portraits and numerous landscapes including “Les Vessenots,” the area of Auvers where Doctor Gachet , the first owner of the painting, lived.
As in other paintings from this final period, the artist combines a composition with a high horizon featuring a group of old country houses, some with thatched roofs, vast cornfields and a few swaying trees, with a reduced palette of luminous greens and yellows and agitated, nervous brushstrokes applied in an undulating, repetitive pattern. As Guillermo Solana noted in his study on the painter’s final period, the high horizon is what distinguishes these Auvers landscapes from those of possible forerunners like Daubigny and George Michel and from seventeenth-century Dutch painting and furthermore constitutes “a general characteristic of the advanced landscape painting of the second half of the nineteenth century.”
Although Van Gogh painted from life, with the subject before him, he shows us an absolutely personal vision and gives visual form to his impressions of what he gazes at. The fertile meadows around Auvers aroused conflicting feelings in him: the sensation of freedom inspired by these broad fields contrasted with the melancholy and feeling of loneliness they brought on. It would be one of these corn fields that he repeatedly painted during the final weeks where, overwhelmed by contradictory feelings and suffering another relapse in his deep-seated depression, Van Gogh put an end to his eventful existence by shooting himself on the morning of 27 July 1890. He died alone and tormented although, as we read in the last letter he wrote to his brother, he retained a glimmer of hope in his oeuvre up until the end: “the truth is we can only make our pictures speak.”
Paloma Alarcó

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Jo van Gogh-Bonger to Vincent van Gogh. Paris, Wednesday, 29 January 1890.
Dear Vincent,
I’ve been meaning to write to you day after day since Christmas — there’s even a half-finished letter to you in my writing-case — and now — if I don’t make haste to write this note you’d get the news that your namesake was here — before then I just want to bid you good-day.
It’s just midnight — the doctor’s sleeping for a while because he wanted to stay here tonight. Theo, Ma and Wil are sitting at the table with me — awaiting the things that will come — it’s a strange feeling — always that wondering — will the baby be here tomorrow morning? I can’t write much — but I so much wanted just to talk to you for a moment.
This morning Theo brought in the article in the Mercure, and after we’d read it Wil and I talked about you for a long time — I’m so longing for your next letter, which Theo is also looking forward to. Shall I read it? But everything has gone so well up to now — I’ll just keep my spirits up. This evening — all these last few days in fact — I’ve thought about it so much, whether I really have been able to do something to make Theo happy in his marriage. He’s done it for me. He’s been so good to me; so good — if things don’t go well — if I have to leave him — you tell him — for there’s no one in the world whom he loves as much — that he must never regret that we were married, because he’s made me so happy. It sounds sentimental — a message like this — but I can’t tell him now — half of my company has gone to bed, him too because he was so tired. Oh if only I can just give him a dear, healthy little boy, wouldn’t that make him happy? I’ll just close, because I keep having waves of pain which mean that I can’t think or write properly. When you get this it will all be over.
Believe me, your loving
Jo