Postcard helps Van Gogh family reveal exact spot where artist painted hours before his death
An art expert has pinpointed the exact spot where Vincent van Gogh was painting just hours before he shot himself, museum officials announced on Tuesday at a ceremony commemorating the 130th anniversary of his suicide.
The picture, Tree Roots, was identified as the Dutch post-impressionist painter’s last work a few years ago. Now, an early postcard has made it possible to locate the scene it depicts in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north of Paris.
Willem van Gogh, the great-grandson of the artist’s brother Theo, and Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, unveiled a plaque at the spot, which will soon be opened to the public.
It is a short walk from the Auberge Ravoux, the former inn where Van Gogh spent his last 70 days before dying in his garret room on 29 July 1890.
Wouter Van der Veen, scientific director of the Vincent Van Gogh Institute at Auvers-sur-Oise, said he found the location partly thanks to the coronavirus lockdown.
“I was stuck at home, like everyone else, and I started tidying up my things,” he said. “A few years ago I had digitised some old postcards dating between 1900 and 1910 that belonged to an elderly lady in Auvers. I had one on my screen showing a cyclist stopped beside a path, which today is Rue Daubigny. My eye was drawn to the foreground, which showed a tree with its roots. Suddenly I realised I had already seen this image.”
Mr Van der Veen spent two days comparing the postcard photo to the painting. “The more I looked, the more I saw that the images matched.”
Dominique-Charles Janssens, head of the Vincent Van Gogh Institute, said: “I knew the spot, 150 metres (164 yards) from the Auberge. Incredibly, almost nothing had changed since the postcard photo was taken. All we had to do was a bit of digging to uncover the tree roots and we realised Wouter was right.”
Mr Van der Veen believes Van Gogh completed the painting on 27 July before shooting himself that evening beside wheat fields on the edge of the village. He is then presumed to have returned to the auberge, where he died of his wound two days later.
Some researchers have controversially suggested that the death was not suicide, but murder or a tragic accident, a claim discounted by Mr Van der Veen.
A 2018 film, At Eternity’s Gate, dramatised the theory that the fatal shot was accidentally fired by two teenagers playing with hunting guns.
The Auberge Ravoux is now a restaurant, where visitors are allowed to see Van Gogh’s bedroom, with its period furniture much as it was when he stayed there.
