Vincent Van Gogh: the verge of suicide

Whom the gods would

destroy they first make mad.

On May 16, 1890, after a year of confinement, Vincent Van Gogh was released from an insane asylum in Saint-Rémy, Provence.  He then moved to the attractive riverine Auvers-sur-Oise, 25 miles north of Paris and only an hour away by train.  The town was recommended by his painter friend Camille Pissarro and was the home of Dr. Paul Gachet, who specialized in treating mental illness.  He was also an amateur painter with a fine collection of contemporary art.  Though Van Gogh continued to struggle with feelings of failure, loneliness and melancholy, during the last 70 days of his life, from May 20 to July 29, 1890, he created an astonishing series of 74 paintings and 57 drawings.  Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: His Final Months — the excellent exhibition now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam until September 3 and then in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris until February 4, 2024 — focuses on his last paintings.

During this period, Van Gogh (who was born 170 years ago in 1853) worked outdoors in the morning and in the afternoon retouched his pictures in the back of the inn where he lodged.  He painted his crooked vision with a troubled mind, as if an electric current were shooting out of his brush.  The clashing colours on his canvas look as if they were squirted straight from the tubes.  His agitated and expressionistic art is wild, violent, chaotic—and exciting. There are almost no straight lines: the farmers’ ploughed furrows zigzag, a curvy staircase foreshadows the work of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi. Van Gogh’s spatially distorted and vertiginous last pictures portray fields of windblown wheat and flowers, broken-backed cows and dancing haystacks, twisted olive trees and whirling clouds, swirling stars and turbulent skies, as the tiny human figures disappear into the landscape.  His jagged brushstrokes and thick impasto, not traditionally smoothed over and hidden beneath a varnished surface, allow viewers to see clearly how the paintings emerged from the canvas and came to life.

The 13th-century Gothic Church at Auvers, with its swollen front and high pointed bell tower, is notably similar to Claude Monet’s steep medieval Church at Varengeville (1882) on the Normandy coast near Dieppe, but far more disturbing. Van Gogh’s tremulous structure stands uneasily under a stormy cobalt sky and next to a jagged V-shaped path, on which a small solitary woman seen from behind walks past (rather than into) the church.  Its tilted tower, wobbly red roof and bulging windows rest on an unsteady foundation, and the building seems about to collapse from intense internal pressure or topple over from an earthly convulsion. Threatening rather than comforting, the dark, closed, forbidding fortress-like church offers no refuge or relief.

The Church in Auvers-sur-Oise, View from the Chevet by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh’s late masterpiece, Wheatfield with Crows, a striking contrast to the limpid atmosphere and bright colors of his earlier Provençal landscapes, has been interpreted in terms of his impending suicide.  Divided horizontally between earth and sky, and with turbulent brushwork, it portrays golden wheat fields thrashed sideways by a strong wind, three divergent twisted paths that end blindly and a dark stormy sky about to burst into thunderous rain.   A massive army of ominous black birds, spread across the sky like figures of death, circle low while searching for their prey and flying aggressively toward the spectator.  Van Gogh considered the countryside “healthy and fortifying,” but this picture expressed his “sadness and extreme loneliness”.

Wheatfield with Crows by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh treasured depictions of people that brought him closer to and immortalised his subjects.  He declared: “What I’m most passionate about, much much more than all the rest in my profession—is the portrait, the modern portrait. . . . Making portraits is the only thing in painting that moves me deeply and that gives me a sense of the infinite.”  He hoped that his portraits “would offer solace in the struggle for life, and soothe our present weaknesses, our sicknesses, our confusions.”

In Adeline Ravoux, the 13-year-old daughter of his landlord at the Café de la Mairie is seated in profile on an orange chair, her spiky fingers folded on her lap.  Her sharp features stand out against a background of dark blue horizontal streaks, which are echoed in the vertical light blue streaks of her high-collared, white-buttoned dress.  Her blond pony-tail, decorated with a pale blue ribbon, is lined with black, her yellow face has delicately rouged cheeks, her eye is bright, her mouth thin and tight.  Her stiff pose and severe expression suggest that she was tense and nervous while posing for the excitable Vincent.

Adeline Ravoux by Vincent Van Gogh

The Country Girl with Straw Hat, which Van Gogh called “figure of a peasant woman”, is older than Adeline and painted more elaborately.  She sits before stalks of ripening wheat and rusty splashes of flowers.  She wears a high-crowned wavy yellow hat enhanced with a light blue ribbon, her best dress flecked with pretty red dots, a rough brown brooch on her collar and a tawny apron.  Seated with her farmer’s hands spread on her lap, she looks to the left.  Wisps of hair appear beneath her hat and a black mane falls down her back.  She has raised eyebrows, widely spaced grey eyes, smudged red cheeks, sharp nose and curved lips.  Van Gogh seems fond of both these patient models.

Young Peasant Woman with Straw hat by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait depicts his high reddish hair, his trimmed red mustache and beard above a bulging neck.  His piercing eyes rest in triangular sockets, his nose is long and sharp, his mouth set in a rather grim, defensive expression.  He wears a mask-like face to meet the faces that he meets.  His vest and jacket over a white shirt have the same aquamarine color and swirling movement as the background, which suggests his inner turmoil.

Van Gogh self-portrait (1889)

Dr. Gachet thought he could “cure” Van Gogh and restore him to his “normal condition”—whatever that was.  But Vincent immediately perceived that the grief-stricken Gachet, still mourning for his wife, was himself melancholic.  The victim of “strained nerves”, he suffered from the same depression as his patient.  Gachet, in fact, was worse off than Vincent, and had an illness that could suddenly plunge him into an even deeper despair.

Van Gogh’s two masterful portraits of the 62-year-old Gachet reflect his own perilous condition.  The first was painted in five hours, interrupted only by a short break for lunch.  The second, similar but more detailed, is even better.  Nienke Bakker writes in the catalogue: “Both works show the doctor sitting at the red table in his garden, dressed in the dark-blue overcoat from his days as an ambulance man and his white cap.  He leans on the table with his head resting on his hand—the classic pose of the melancholic.  The foxglove (digitalis) on the table is an allusion to Gachet’s profession, as it was used in homeopathy to treat heart disease.”

Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent Van Gogh

The two books on the table are Germanie Lacerteux and Manette Salomon by Edmond and Jules Goncourt.  Bakker notes, “The first of these novels describes the emergence of neuroses and addresses the harshness of modern existence, while the second deals with the difficult Bohemian life led by painters in contemporary Paris.”  Gachet, who has the same red hair as Vincent, tilts his head to the left and has mournful eyes, deeply furrowed face and mouth twisted in despair.  Van Gogh described his subject, a contemporary version of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia, as “sad but gentle, clear and intelligent”.

In the claustrophobic Penitentiary, which recalls his asylum in Saint-Rémy, a defeated circle of men, casting eerie shadows, are trapped in a high, brick-walled dungeon with no relief from a skylight.  Hunched up, dressed in grey, watched by three chatting warders in top-hats, the isolados shuffle endlessly and circle hopelessly in the constricted space, like rats in a caged treadmill or condemned souls in Dante’s Inferno.

Prisoners’ Round (after Gustave Doré) by Vincent Van Gogh

The subject of Sorrowful Old Man is slumped over in a plain straw-bottomed brown chair on a sharply sloping floor and next to a glowing fire that affords no comfort. He wears rough blue peasant’s clothing and heavy brown boots, and his bald, grey-haired head, his features hidden, is bent over and supported by his clenched fists.  He seems to be weeping for his obscure but devastating suffering—as well as for Vincent’s—as he approaches imminent death.

Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate) by Vincent Van Gogh

On July 27, 1890 Vincent borrowed or stole a revolver “to shoot crows” and, in the wheat fields of Auvers, shot himself in the chest.  But he botched the attempted suicide and missed his heart.  Bleeding copiously, he staggered home, called for his soothing pipe and died two days later in severe pain.  Several modern artists committed suicide long after Van Gogh: Ernst Kirchner in 1938, Arshile Gorky in 1948, Nicolas de Staël in 1955, Mark Rothko in 1970 and R. B. Kitaj in 2007.  Artists who kill themselves have usually lost their ability to create.  But Van Gogh’s life ended with the same creative surge as Sylvia Plath’s last poems.  His pictures—like rockets that shot up, exploded and fell to the ground— raged against the dying of the light.

When Hemingway wrote three stories in one day in Madrid he said, “My luck, she is running good.”  But  Vincent didn’t feel that exhilaration.  Though he never stopped painting, he feared a recurrence of his epilepsy and psychotic attacks that would forever destroy his ability to create.  Summoned from Paris, his devoted younger brother Theo watched over him during the agonising death throes of his last 30 hours and sobbed during the funeral. Theo recalled that Vincent felt his life was unbearable, that he no longer had illusions about the future and that he would try to kill himself again if he recovered.

Theo soon compounded Vincent’s tragedy.  In October 1890 he had a mental breakdown and was hospitalised in Paris.  In November, entirely unresponsive, he was transferred to a clinic in Holland.  In June 1891, six months after his brother, he too was dead.  As an art dealer in Paris, Theo had loyally encouraged and supported Vincent with money and art materials throughout his brief career.  Vincent was just getting his first recognition and success when they both died.  His fame, like that of those other great sufferers Nietzsche and Kafka, was entirely posthumous.

Jeffrey Meyers will publish both James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath with Louisiana State University Press in 2024.

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