The precise place where Dutch master Vincent van Gogh painted his most recent paintings is known after being hidden in plain sight for years amid a tangle of roots next to a rural alley near Paris. Experts say the discovery sheds new light on the intellectual state of the distressed painter on the day he is suspected of committing suicide.
A Dutch researcher learned that the scene depicted in the latest paintings by the artist in difficulty, “Tree Roots”, visual on a faded postcard depicting a boy next to a bicycle in an alley in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, 35 kilometers (21 miles) north of Paris. Van Gogh spent the last weeks of his life in the village and painted dozens of paintings there. Fortunately, the map even included the street call.
READ ALSO: Postcard shows Van Gogh’s ‘colored farewell word’ before suicide
The discovery of Wouter van der Veen, clinical director of the Van Gogh Institute in France, gives a new vision of the artist in his last hours. This means that art historians can now see that Van Gogh worked on the portrait until last afternoon, spent much of the day focusing on the canvas.
“There have been many hypotheses about his mood, but one thing is very transparent is that he spent a little more time running in this portrait the afternoon. We know this thanks to the gentile who fell at work,” Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday. “Then, you know, it actually worked to the end.
The painting, which is not finished through Van Gogh, is hung in the Amsterdam Museum. Gordenker said his composition and execution, a narrow focus on the knotty roots on a hill, led him to be known as an “omen of abstraction.”
Van Gogh could never expand his taste for painting again.
According to the van Gogh Museum of Life, after running at Tree Roots, the artist entered a nearby wheat box later that day and shot himself in the chest with a gun. He died two days later, on 29 July 1890, at the age of 37. Two American authors questioned the theory in 2011, suggesting that the artist shot dead through two teenagers.
Van der Veen believes that the edition of the museum of occasions and that his new discovery shows that Van Gogh had his brains on him and was methodical in his thinking before pulling the cause to devote himself to suicide.
“So the final steps were also anything he thought conscientiously,” he said. “So it’s a lucid decision. It’s not compatible with madness.
The new discovery made partly thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.
While stranded at home during two months of lockdown in France, Van der Veen took advantage of the additional time to organize his files and documents on Van Gogh, adding the digitization of photographs such as the former Auvers-sur-Oise postcard.
One day last April, in a phone conversation, he saw the card on his PC screen and suddenly hit while searching for the location of “Tree Roots”. Next to the boy and his bike, the roots and trees are obviously visible.
“It’s a revelation, ” he said. “A Revelation”.
He could not stop at the site for several weeks, however, showed a friend the village and also took a virtual street using Google’s Street View.
Villagers know the location and the main root of the tree, even calling it “the elephant” because of its shape, Van der Veen said.
“It was hidden in plain sight and was even a little disguised because it had adopted another identity,” he added.
The researcher says that while his discovery has given art historians more to reflect on Van Gogh’s last day of work, it also provides tourists with a more detailed explanation of why to make a stopover in Auvers-sur-Oise. The French people already attract tens of thousands of climbers a year because of their ties to Van Gogh, who spend his last weeks there and are buried in the village cemetery with his brother Theo.
“They’re a lot for an explanation for why, to follow in Vincent van Gogh’s footsteps, and now they can be in the same place where he painted his last painting,” Van der Veen said. “And it’s a very moving thing for a lot of people. So I’m very pleased to be able to share this with everyone who loves Van Gogh.”
(This article was published from a firm thread without converting the text. Only the name has been changed).
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