Volta
Culture29 July 1890

The Last Days at Auvers and Van Gogh’s Death

Having painted more than seventy works in his last seventy days at Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, Van Gogh died in July 1890, aged 37 — he had sold only a handful of paintings in his lifetime.

The Church at Auvers (1890, Musée d’Orsay)
The Church at Auvers (1890, Musée d’Orsay)

Vincent van Gogh · Public domain · Source

In May 1890 Van Gogh left the asylum for Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north-west of Paris, where Dr Gachet looked after him; he painted nearly a picture a day — wheatfields, thatched cottages, the village church.

On 27 July he came back with a gunshot wound, and two days later, on the 29th, he died at 37 with Theo, who had rushed to his side. That he took his own life is the accepted view, though there are others. He had sold only a handful of paintings in his life, but Theo — who died six months later — left a widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who safeguarded the paintings and letters and made them known. The nearly 900 letters he left are a precious record of a painter’s thoughts.

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The map in 1890

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States at the time
France
Places
Auvers-sur-Oise

People

  • Vincent van Gogh1853 – 1890

    key figure · Dutch painter who in little more than ten years made over 2,000 works, some 860 of them oil paintings, whose vivid colour and brushwork shaped modern art

  • Theo van Gogh1857 – 1891

    related figure · Vincent’s younger brother, an art dealer in Paris who supported him with money and letters all his life; he died six months after Vincent

Before and after

Earlier
1889 Van Gogh’s The Starry Night
Later
1894 Founding of the International Olympic Committee

Themes that include this event

  • Vincent van Gogh1853 – 1890

    How a pastor’s son who decided at 27 to become a painter moved from the dark fields of Holland to the colours of Paris and the sun and stars of southern France, leaving over 2,000 works in ten years