Vincent van Gogh’s latest painting, Tree Roots, is a mess of colors and shapes: the knotted blue roots stand out from an abstract, sloping hill, and the bright green leaves seem to wave the breeze.
As Andries Bonger, brother-in-law of Vincent Theo’s brother, later wrote, “The morning before Van Gogh’s death, he had painted a sun and a small life (forest scene).”
Historians know that the troubled Dutch artist worked on the canvas on July 27, 1890, the same day he returned to his hotel in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, with a gunshot wound to his stomach. Two days later, Van Gogh died, leaving Tree Roots unfinished.
Now, through the encounter with an old French postcard, researcher Wouter van der Veen has discovered the precise plot of the road where Van Gogh produced his latest work. Experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam have corroborated the findings as “highly plausible,” according to a statement.
Van der Veen, clinical director of the Van Gogh Institute in France, made through reading a treasure trove of Auvers postcards from the early 20th century that he had borrowed from a prolific collector, informs Nina Siegal for the New York Times. One day, he looked at a 1905 map and made a double take, sure that he had seen the roots photographed before.
“The similarities were very transparent to me,” van der Veen told BBC News.
On the postcard, a cyclist topping next to a steep h covered with thick tangled roots. The position is about 150 meters from the hostel where van Gogh spent the last 70 days of his life.
“Every detail of this mysterious portrait is also explained through the postcard and its location: the shape of the hillside, the roots, its relationship with each other, the composition of the earth and the presence of a steep face of limestone.” van der Veen said in the statement. “The site may also be consistent with Van Gogh’s habit of portraying motifs from his immediate surroundings.”
Unable to make a trip of friends on the site due to coVID-1 blockade in France, van der Veen recruited Bert Maes, a dendologist who works on old plants and mavens of the Van Gogh Museum, Daniel Boffey reports to the Guardian. He also contacted the owner of the Van Gogh Institute, Dominique-Charles Janssens, who was in Auvers at the time, and asked him to stumble on the hill. According to the Times, Janssens temporarily showed van der Veen’s intuition.
Teio Meedendorp, principal investigator at the Van Gogh Museum, said van der Veen’s “remarkable discovery” was “most likely the right place.”
Meedendorp adds: “If this is your last painting, it makes it even more exceptional, even dramatic… He had to pass through the spaces behind Auvers Castle, where he painted several times during the last week of his life and where he would. dedicate suicide
Yesterday, before the 130th anniversary of the artist’s death on July 29, Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum, and Willem van Gogh, great-grandson of Vincent Theo’s brother, unveiled a commemorative plaque on the newly known site, Martin Bailey reports to the art newspaper.
Van der Veen published his findings in a new bok titled Attacked at the Root: An Investigation into Van Gogh’s Last Days. The text is lost to download the historian’s website.
Aleven, although Van Gogh’s death has long been told in pop culture and analyzed through academics, many of his last days are uncertain. Historians know that the artist suffered from acute intellectual disease for many years, a serious struggle that could have led him to cut off the component of his left ear in 1888, but descriptions of his symptoms are indistinct and new diagnoses vary, according to the Van Gogh Museum.
In 2011, art historians Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith made headlines through a controversial friend who theorized that Van Gogh’s death was an accident. But the Van Gogh Museum, Van der Veen and top historians who the artist shot himself in the stomach.
“Ending your life with this portrait makes a lot of sense,” van der Veen told the Times. “The portrait illustrates the struggle of life and an opposite struggle of death. That’s what he leaves behind. It’s a colored parting word.”
Researchers hope this new discovery will help tourists and art lovers better perceive the artist’s last days. As the Van Gogh Museum says in the statement: “From today, those whom Vi Auvers joins at Van Gogh’s play station will raise some other moving delight on their journey: [L] hey can stand in the precise place where Van Gogh The Last Brush touched the canvas.
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Nora McGreevy is a freelance journalist founded in South Bend, Indiana. His paintings have given the lok in Wired, Washingtonian, Boston Globe, South Bend Tribune, New York Times and more. It came through his website, noramcgreevy.com.