Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. The final months

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Etablissement Public des Musées d’Orsay are organising an exhibition entitled Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. The final months on show at the Musée Van Gogh from 12th May to 3rd September 2023. This fall yet, it is hosted by the Musée d’Orsay, from 26 September 2023 to 28 January 2024. This is the first major exhibition devoted to works produced by the artist during the last two months of his life, spent at Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris. The exhibition is the result of years of research on this crucial phase in the artist’s life and will finally enable the public to appreciate its true importance.

Vincent Van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise on May 20th 1890 and died there on July 29th following a suicide attempt. Although the painter only spent a little over two months in Auvers, the period was one of artistic renewal with its own style and development, marked by the psychic tension resulting from his new situation as well as by some of his greatest masterpieces.

Sorely tried by the various crises suffered in Arles and then at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh decided to settle near Paris and his brother Théo in an attempt to find fresh creative energy. The choice of Auvers had much to do with the presence there of Dr Gachet, a physician specializing in the treatment of melancholia who was also a friend of the impressionists, a collector and an amateur painter. Van Gogh moved to the Auberge Ravoux in the village centre and explored every aspect of the new world in front of him, while struggling with the many anxieties connected with his health, his relationship with his brother, and his place in the art world.

No exhibition has previously been exclusively devoted to this final yet crucial stage in his career. In just two months, the artist produced 74 paintings and 33 drawings, including some iconic works: Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet, The Church at Auvers, and Wheatfield with Crows. Comprising some forty paintings and around twenty drawings, the exhibition will highlight this period thematically: first landscapes featuring the village, portraits, still lifes, and landscapes depicting the surrounding countryside. It will also present a series of paintings in elongated double-square format, unique in Van Gogh’s body of work.

Documentary sections put the painter’s work into context, showing the village as it was at the time, portraying the central figure of Dr Gachet and evoking the painter’s immediate posterity, with the repercussions of his death on the French and Dutch artistic communities in the last decade of the century. The exhibition Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. The final months is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring the most recent research on this important part of Van Gogh’s work.