Vincent van Gogh's final painting sheds light on the painter's last hours

"Roots", the final painting painted by Vincent van Gogh has revealed its secret: an old postcard was found showing a thicket where the same roots appear, revealed, Tuesday July 28, the scientific director of the Van Gogh Institute from Auvers-sur-Oise.

The discovery was made while he was quietly filing documents at home during lockdown in April, Wouter van der Veen said. "My eye was caught by a detail on a postcard, a detail that appeared on Van Gogh's last painting," he says. "The configuration of the roots and trunks on the postcard matched that on the painting."

The postcard dating from 1900-1910 shows a hill covered with a copse with trunks and roots. This Van Gogh expert then backed up his finding in a book, "Attacked at the Root". It took a few weeks for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for experts to conclude that this is "very likely" to be the right place.

On Tuesday, in the presence of Emilie Gordenker, Director General of the Van Gogh Museum, and Willem van Gogh, great-grandson of Theo, Vincent's brother, the site was inaugurated. Protected by a temporary wooden structure, it could thus become a place of pilgrimage, just 150 meters from the Auberge Ravoux where the Dutch painter had resided for 70 days, suffering from fits of madness.

This canvas "had given rise to all kinds of theories, on the fact for example that he would have signed a painting marking the beginning of abstract art, of new art", noted the researcher.

"This painting, painted shortly before he shot himself in the stomach on July 27, 1890, was indecipherable, because the place of the realization had remained impossible to locate", he said.

Van Gogh, seriously injured, was to return to the inn in the night and die two days later after a long agony.

"A farewell letter"

Some "wanted Van Gogh to be the victim of society rather than the author of his life and death," observed the researcher, alluding to theses questioning this hypothesis.

In 2011, American researchers had defended a hypothesis according to which Vincent van Gogh would have been injured by an accidental shooting of young people who played with a weapon.

Now this painting is "a testament, a farewell letter. For him, the thicket symbolizes the struggle of life. The trunks are harvested and, from the stump, new shoots appear ..."

“In this painting, there is a coherence, affirms Wouter van der Veen: it is the theme of life and death dear to Van Gogh. For a year, suicide was an option for him. It eliminates all these crappy theories, which have done no good in his memory, such as that claiming that he was killed by accident by kids, "said the Dutch expert.

"The sunlight painted by Van Gogh also shows that he applied his last brushstrokes towards the end of the afternoon, which tells us about his schedule during this dramatic day", underlined this specialist. by Van Gogh.

For Teio Meedendorp, researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, this last work was "carried out in an environment which he had already documented before with other paintings". Van Gogh "must have often missed the location on his way to the fields that stretched behind the Chateau d'Auvers, where he was painting during his last week."

"What is extraordinary is that the main stump that we find on the painting is still visible today in the thicket", 130 years later, wonders Wouter van der Veen.

Like Rimbaud or Baudelaire, Van Gogh is one of those 19th century artists whose particular talent and destiny fascinate the whole world. Thus a rusty revolver, found in 1960 in a meadow and which would have been used by Van Gogh to commit suicide, had been auctioned to a private individual in June 2019 for 162,500 euros in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot.

With AFP

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