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| This is Page 3 of a website collating a series of posts
on the art blog Dali House corresponding to the dates of Vincent Van Gogh's
movements and activities in the final 30 months of his life.
View Page 1. View Page 2. View Page 4. |
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 |  | | "Village Street and Steps in Auvers with Figures" |
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 |  | The Auberge Ravoux as it was and as it appears today, still welcoming customers. In the middle photo,
Arthur-Gustave Ravoux sits on the left with his daughter Germaine, while his elder daughter Adeline stands in the
doorway with the son of the village carpenter who would soon enough be building Van Gogh's coffin. | | May 27, 1890 Vincent has arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise. He's found a room just at the top of the stairs on the second floor
at Arthur-Gustave Ravoux's inn, the Auberge Ravoux, where the rent is only three and a half francs a day.
He's setting up a little studio there. The room is only seven square metres, but he can paint in the lobby too.
Ravoux's daughter Adeline, who's 13, has remarked with a titter about his "uniform": a short, blue drill jacket
and no collar or tie, and a big, floppy felt hat with earflaps that he swaps for a gardener's straw hat
when he goes outside in the sun. She's noticed his wounded ear, as well, and of course that look he gives people, penetrating but still calm.
He doesn't say much to anyone but usually responds with a smile. His French is fine, the innkeeper finds,
and he doesn't appear to drink much, which is appreciated. There's certainly no sign
that he's spent time in a mental hospital.
His brother Théo had recommended Auvers, well out in the countryside and yet quite close to Paris.
Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley and Monet have all painted in the area, finding it perfectly rustic. It's healthy
and tranquil here and might well liberate him from whatever demons linger. He seems
enthusiastic and hopeful, ready to start afresh. At the moment
the chestnut trees are in bloom, pink petals fluttering in the breeze. He should do well.
Vincent likes Gachet very much. He wrote to his sister and said he was "a perfect friend and something like
another brother", though he's not too sure of Gachet's own health. "He's sicker than I am, I think," he says.
There is another young Dutch painter staying at the inn, named Tommy Hirschig, but Vincent has little to do
with him or the other artist who lives in Auvers, Martinez de Valdivielse, and he always eats his meals
after they're finished. De Valdivielse is a Spanish watercolourist who's fallen out with the politics
back home. He came in for his supper as usual one day and saw a painting and bellowed,
"What pig made that?" Vincent was standing right there.
"It is me, Monsieur," he replied. They've got along fine since then.
One member of the household has certainly won Vincent's affections — Ravoux's two-year-old, Germaine, who
he sits on his knee, drawing pictures for her on a slate, usually of the sandman spreading sand from his cart.
"Would it please you if I did your portrait?" he's asked Adeline, and she and her parents thinks it's alright. |  | Online sources are somewhat confusing about both the name and the location of the AUBERGE RAVOUX,
which appears in the Virtual Earth image above with a car skimming over the crosswalk just in front of it.
Opened in 1876, it appears to have originally been called the Café de Mairie, which makes sense since
it's opposite the town hall (mairie). Arthur Ravoux became the landlord in 1889 and stayed on another year
after Vincent's death. Today the inn is also referred to as the Maison de Van Gogh, Café Van Gogh and
Auberge Van Gogh. One address given is 52 rue Géneral de Gaulle, another 8 rue de la Sansonne,
around the corner. This appears to be an alternate entrance, facing the Tourism Office.
Though utilised as a location for Vincent Minnelli's 1956 film biography of Van Gogh. "Lust for Life",
starring Kirk Douglas, the auberge was largely ignored until this century. Current proprietor
Dominique-Charles Janssens has put it not just back on the map but at the forefront of Auvers' efforts
to be recognised as a community that has long nurtured great art.
The inn today offers visitors a peek at Van Gogh's quarters, Room #5 upstairs, a traditional menu of regional fare common in Vincent's day, a good stock of wines and souvenirs and a short film about Van Gogh in Auvers. |  | | "Village Street In Auvers" | |
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 | A few doors east of the Auberge Ravoux on rue Géneral de Gaulle
is VAN GOGH PARK, which the town inaugurated on July 8, 1961,
with the unveiling of a statue of the artist by the celebrated
Belarussian sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967). Zadkine did three statues of Vincent. The others are in
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and Zundert, Holland, Vincent's birthplace
and childhood home. The latter also features his brother Théo. | |
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 | May 29, 1890 Vincent has done Adeline's portrait, all finished
in one afternoon amid several pipes of tobacco.
Having blue eyes, she put on a blue dress and put
a blue ribbon in her hair and didn't budge.
Vincent made the background blue as well. Privately she doesn't care for it — she doesn't
think it looks like her at all — but he made a
copy that he could send his brother, and
afterwards a third portrait without her even posing.
Every day after breakfast, about 9, Vincent heads outdoors with his easel and paintbox and comes
back at noon for lunch. He paints in his room
or in the lobby all afternoon, then sometimes
goes out for a walk, but he's always
back for dinner. At night he writes letters. He's very punctual about everything. |
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 | | "The White House at Night"
Letting their passion for the heavens mingle with an appreciation for art,
astronomers who noticed Venus in Van Gogh's depiction
of the sky of "The White House" have determined that it was painted
at around eight o'clock on June 16, 1890. The scientists, from Southwest Texas State University, knew from Vincent's letters that
the painting was completed before June 17 and, tracking down the house, stood on the spot
from which Van Gogh worked and witnessed the exact same lighting effect.
Noting the varying light tones and shadows, they calculated that the canvas
was painted from the bottom up during the course of an afternoon and early evening.
The painting was hidden from Nazi looters during World War II and then seized by Russian soldiers,
only to disappear until 1995, when it re-emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union. |  |
June 1, 1890 Van Gogh has begun a painting of Dr Gachet at his house on the north end of the village, a man whose own art collection he so admires — not for its "black antiquities", Vincent says, but the vibrant impressionist works he's amassed over the years.
Gachet is indeed a portrait-worthy character (Vincent has already done one etching of him). He is a healer of bodies and minds who wrestles with his own melancholy since the death of his wife. Behind a wall Gachet's villa hides not only his sorrow but his solitary immersion in his science, as well as his children Paul and Marguerite, all but grown up now, and cats and dogs, a goat, a pair of peacocks and a turtle.
In the picture Vincent is doing, the doctor wears a white cap on his lively head of red hair, looking like he's just come in from the vegetable garden. He looks as though he's masking his usual nervousness with his head crooked on one hand, but you can see his sadness clearly. Vincent seems to have composed him carefully, but the signs are everywhere, like the Goncourt brothers' books on the modern urban malaise and the drinking glass holding some foxglove, the herb they use to treat depression. | In May 1990, almost exactly a century after it was
painted, "The Portrait of Doctor Gachet" was auctioned
for $82.5 million in just three minutes.
"I painted a portrait of Dr Gachet," Van Gogh wrote
to his sister Wilhelmina, "with an expression of melancholy, which would seem to look like a grimace to many who
saw the canvas. And yet it is necessary to paint it like this,
for otherwise one could not get an idea of the extent
to which, in comparison with the calmness of the
old portraits, there is expression in our modern heads, and passion — like a waiting for things as well as a growth.
Sad and yet gentle, but clear and intelligent — this is
how one ought to paint many portraits ...
"At times this might make a certain impression on people. There are modern heads which people will go on looking at for a long time to come, and which probably they will mourn over after a hundred years." Dr Gachet, Van Gogh told his brother, was "as discouraged about his job as a country doctor as I am about my painting. Then I said to him that I would gladly exchange job for job." |  | | "Dr Gachet's Garden at Auvers-sur-Oise" |
Then Vincent wrote, "The moment when I shall need him may certainly come. However up to now all is well.
And things may yet get better, I still think that it is mostly a malady of the South that I have caught,
and that the return here will be enough to dissipate the whole thing."
A few days later he informed Théo that Gachet might be able to arrange for him a few portrait models.
"In order to get some clients for portraits, one must be able to show different ones that one has done.
That is the only possibility I see of selling anything. Yet notwithstanding everything,
some canvases will find purchasers someday.
"Only I think that all the talk that has been started on account of the high prices paid for Millets, etc,
lately has made the chances of merely getting back one's painting expenses even worse. It is enough to
make you dizzy. So why think about it? — it would only daze our minds.
Better perhaps to seek a little friendship and to live from day to day." |
 | Seen here cloistered in greenery within its walls, the MAISON DU DR GACHET at 78 rue du Dr Gachet
has since 2004 welcomed visitors, who can walk in the garden and peruse documents and other
memorabilia concerning Van Gogh's stay in Auvers and the physician's own considerable involvement
in the avant-garde art scene of his time. The property is owned by the regional government
and managed by Dominique-Charles Janssens, owner of the Auberge Ravoux.
Paul-Ferdinand Gachet and his wife Blanche bought the house in 1872 and was visited here by Pissarro,
Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley and Guillaumin as well as Vincent and taught them all much about engraving in his
workshop in the back garden. At the rear rises a steep, ivy-draped limestone escarpment pocked with
deep crevices in which, so the story goes, Gachet hid more than 1,000 artworks
from the Nazis during World War II.
Paul Jr and Marguerite Gachet lived on in the house for many decades after their father's death
at age 80 in 1909 and gradually compiled a catalogue of his collection, which included Flemish
masterpieces, 44 works by Van Gogh, 42 by Cézanne and 13 by Pissarro. All were donated
to the Louvre starting in the 1940s.
Gachet maintained his medical practice in Paris even after moving to Auvers. He had entered
the field reluctantly, preferring art instead. He was a gifted painted, signing his work "P van Rijssel",
an allusion to the Belgian town of his birth, Rijssel, known as Lille in French. When he was 12 he leapt
from the top of the Lille rampart into a moat and limped on a fractured ankle for the rest of his life.
At 26 he contracted cholera while tending to those afflicted in an epidemic. He lived through
the Prussian siege of Paris and the mayhem of the Commune and its aftermath. The greatest blow
to befall him, however, seemed to be the death of Blanche in 1875, from which he never recovered,
as Van Gogh gave witness. |
 |  | For 18 months spanning 1872 to 1874, Paul Cézanne found a multitude of subjects to paint on his meanderings in
Gachet's neighbourhood, most famously with the home of his generous and insightful sponsor, as seen in
"Dr Gachet's House at Auvers", above left. Just to the west he depicted "Crossroad of the Rue Remy,
Auvers", below left and seen in a Virtual Earth image beside it.
He continued along rue François Coppée, past the turreted house of Eugene Murer, the pastrycook
and painter who used to host dinners in Paris for the impressionists every Wednesday night. Murer was also
buried in the Auvers cemetery when he died in 1906, having bequeathed to the community
a series of pastels that you can see in the Town Hall.
At the entrance to the rue de Chérielle Cézanne painted "The Hanged Man's House",
above right, which also still stands. No one was ever hung there; it may have been the home of
a Breton who was executed by the name of Penn'Du.
Further along still are the scenes that inspired Van Gogh's "Houses at Auvers" and other
canvases by him and Cézanne, including the house of Pierre Lacroix's father. |
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| "The Church in Auvers" Today outside NOTRE DAME D'AUVERS
is one of the information signs that the town
has installed for tourists, in this case indicating
that Van Gogh famously painted the church. What is more difficult to explain is that,
in July 1890, the priest here refused to conduct
a mass for Vincent because he'd committed
suicide, a mortal sin, and for the same reason
denied permission for him to be buried
in the church graveyard. Much has been read into the way Van Gogh,
a failed evangelist, depicted the church, with the
sunshine somehow withheld from it even when
the lawn out front is brightly lit. The building, he
acknowledged, "neither reflects nor emanates any
light of its own". He had written to Theo
before about the darkness inside a church
symbolising "empty and unenlightened
preaching", and now added emphasis by
placing divergent paths in front of Notre Dame. Dr Gachet was the original owner of the painting. The church began as a modest structure until King Louis VI favoured it in the 12th century, bequeathing it to the abbey of Saint-Vincent de Senlis. The apse and bell tower were set up about 1170 and the nave by 1220, all under auspices of Notre Dame de Paris. In the nave are interred the remains of priests, lords and landowners, including Jean de Léry, the most prominent owner of the Château d'Auvers. |  |
 |  | | In the Virtual Earth aerial view at right can be seen a small triangular lot at lower left where a bronze bust of landscape artist Charles-François Daubigny rests on a pedestal. The artist, whose experiments with light and colour anticipated the impressionists, lived in Auvers from 1861 until his death in 1878. His remarkable house and studio are now open to visitors along with the garden twice painted by Van Gogh. The bust was made by Léon Fagel (1851-1913) in 1906. | |
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| June 15, 1890 Vincent has had a visit from Théo and his family,
and now he's more prolific in his work than ever.
The landscape around us, especially on the plain
above Auvers, has presented him with all kinds
of new ideas. He's fixing two square
canvases together to create one
wide one and to try and get it all in. At right is "Young Man with Cornflower". |  | |
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 | | "Landscape with the Chateau of Auvers at Sunset" | | The CHATEAU D'AUVERS was built in the 1630s for Lioni Zanobi, a banker to Marie de Médici. Guillaume Ange, a Parisian, bought it in 1655 but was driven out by creditors four years later, at which point it became the property of Jean de Léry, a one-time treasurer of France, and it is correctly called the Château de Léry. He expanded the estate to the proportions seen today, though in the mid-1700s the Espréménil family transformed it once more. The next owner, Prince de Conti, used the property only for hunting.
Father and son mayors of Auvers, the Chérons, came next, before it was sold to the Gosselin family into 1882, who remained until 1939. The château became public property in 1987 and was entirely restored, and since 1994 it has hosted the permanent multimedia art exhibition "Voyage au Temps des Impressionnistes".
Van Gogh is, of course, among the artists honoured in the exhibition, having included the building in several of his landscapes. It was purportedly in a wheat field behind the château where he fatally shot himself. |  | |
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 | On June 12 Van Gogh wrote
to his sister Wilhelmina:
Yesterday in the rain I painted a large landscape, showing fields as far as one can see, looked at from a height, different kinds of green growth, a potato field of a sombre green colour, between the regular beds the rich violet earth — on one side a field of peas in white bloom, then a field of clover with pink flowers and the little figure of a mower, a field of long and ripe grass somewhat reddish in tone, then various kinds of wheat, poplars, on the horizon a last line of blue hills, along the foot of which a train is passing, leaving behind it an immense trail of white smoke over all the green vegetation. A white road lies across the canvas. On this road a little carriage, and white houses with harshly red roofs by the side of this road. A fine drizzle streaks the whole
with blue and grey lines. | |
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| June 21, 1890 Vincent has done a portrait of Dr Gachet's daughter,
"Marguerite Gachet at the Piano", wearing a pink and
green dress. It's a picture of springtime's youth. | 
| | June 29, 1890 Another painting of Marguerite Gachet, this time showing her
all in white in the flower garden.
On his daytime outings, when the sun seems not right, Vincent ventures into the forests. He's done a study of two lovers strolling among poplars, and delved into botany with a canvas called "Roots and Trunks of Trees". |  |  | |
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| | "Thatched Cottages by a Hill" This was evidently among the paintings Van Gogh was working on
when he died, since there are patches of bare canvas. | 
| | "Wheat Stacks with Reaper" |
| June 30, 1890 Théo has written to Vincent: "You have found your way, old fellow, your carriage is steady on its wheels
and strong ... Take it easy, you, and hold your horses a little, so that there may be no accident." | 
| | "Wheat Fields with Auvers in the Background" | 
| | "Plain Near Auvers" | |
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| July 5, 1890 Vincent has three new canvases to show, two of them portraits of the same young woman. One he's called "Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat", with the model, one of the local women, in a pale gown and yellow straw hat, surrounded by poppies. The other is "Young Girl Standing Against a Background of Wheat". They're very
youthful pictures.
Another painting, "Women Crossing the Fields", shows a pair of colourfully dressed women out among the potato fields with a country villa in the background. He loves the waving seas of wheat and the checkerboard pattern of the potato fields.
Vincent is off to Paris tomorrow to visit Aurier and Lautrec and have a look at Gauguin's new paintings. | 
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| July 10, 1890 Vincent, who's only just returned from a one-day visit with his brother in Paris, has written to him in alarm at the prospect of Théo being forced out of his job at the Boussod & Valadon art dealership. Théo has an infant son to support — as well as Vincent. Théo had talked of leaving the firm before and going into business for himself, and warned his brother that they'd have to tighten their belts.
Vincent tells his brother that he's just finished three paintings of the farms above the village. The midsummer weather has been unsettled, and the gloom shows up in the pictures. "They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to express sadness and extreme loneliness. I believe these paintings say what words cannot. I hope you see them soon."
Vincent has seemed somewhat disoriented lately, and that shows up in the canvases as well.
He has also been again to visit the widow of Charles-Francois Daubigny, whose work he's admired since his youth, and which certainly shows some influence in what he's doing now. Daubigny lived at times right in the village, and when he died 12 years ago his wife moved to another house he'd built near the church, not far from the inn. Vincent painted a corner of her garden in June, and he's just finished two more studies to show her.
The widow is even in one of them herself. |
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| July 14, 1890 Vincent has painted the Auvers Town Hall directly across from the auberge, all decked out for Bastille Day with lanterns in the trees. He's given it to his landlord, as he did the portrait of Adeline, though no one seems to really care for the pictures. | | The Ravoux family kept these paintings for years, taking them with them when they moved to Meulan and opened a café. Opposite was the Hotel Pinchon, home to several artists who learned about the works of the late Van Gogh and insisted on having them. Ravoux sold them for 10 francs apiece. | |
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| | July 23, 1890 There are sketches and half-completed paintings of wheat fields and crows all around the hotel.
Vincent has written to Théo, mentioning his new projects — "Daubigny's Garden" and
"Cottages with Thatched Roofs". But, he adds, "There are so many things I would like to write to you, but I feel it is futile ... There are many
things I would rather write to you about, but the desire to do so is completely gone,
leaving me to feel it is useless."
Another letter, to his mother and his sister Wilhelmina, says he is enjoying "a mood of almost too much serenity". | |
 | Both of the paintings here are entitled "Daubigny's Garden".
The one at the top was done in July, this one in mid-June. |  | The MAISON-ATELIER DE DAUBIGNY at 61 rue Daubigny is today open to visitors though it remains in the family. As well as Van Gogh, the home of Charles-François Daubigny welcomed Camille Corot and Honoré Daumier in the 1870s. They helped him with the décor "on rainy days", including a fine mural by the former in the high-ceilinged studio.
Daubigny was an impressionist before there was such a thing. He was the first of his generation to paint in the open air and used to sail his floating studio down the Oise, from which he and his comrades tried to capture the effect of light on water.
The house dates to 1861. It was ultimately restored and classified as an historic building in 1991, with care taken to preserve the entrance adorned by Daubigny and others, daughter Cecile's bedroom with murals of childhood joy and the dining room featuring four large panels depicting rabbits, corn, vines and an underwater river scene. | |
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