Auvers-sur-Oise (France)
Vincent Van Gogh & Me
In 1890, Vincent Van Gogh spent his last 70 days in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village to the north-west of Paris. He was 37, and in his short 10 years as an artist, he created more than 870 paintings, not counting watercolours, drawings and etchings. A great admirer of this amazing Artist, I have been following Vincent Van Gogh, geographically speaking, for nearly 20 years. By chance, this pilgrimage has also been chronological.
In 1990, I was in England when the Van Gogh Centennial Exhibition was in Amsterdam. I rang the advertised London number for tickets, and was told that there was a 6-week wait to even know if any tickets were available. So I got on a bus and went to Amsterdam. Next morning, I went to the exhibition venue, bypassed the long queues of ticketed people waiting to get in, and stood at the front doors. Within minutes, someone had a ticket to sell. I was in. I followed the same procedure each day, with the same results. It was fantastic….130 of Vincent’s paintings, and about 250 drawings, all on show in one place for the first time ever, and probably the last.
While there in Holland I took the opportunity to go to Vincent’s birthplace of Zundert, and then Nuenen, where he later lived. To my delight, the Nuenen Church that Van Gogh painted and the house of the “Potato Eaters” were still there.
1998: I flew to England, bought a motorbike, and rode to the South of France. The day I left England, the weather was grey, wet and depressing. It took me 9 days to reach the Mediterranean, mainly because of my cautious approach to this large, unfamiliar motorbike, combined with never having ridden or driven anything on the right-hand side of the road before, not being able to speak French, and being just one person trying to navigate/ride/survive all at the same time. Each day that I slowly moved southwards, the weather gradually improved, until suddenly the Impressionists’ love of the ‘Southern Light’ made sense. Being Australian, I had never been without sunshine and strong light for long, and that ‘Southern Light’ business was hard to comprehend. But my 9-day ride turned out to be an important factor in understanding those painters of a century ago, and the pleasure they must have derived from not only the stunning visual difference with the sunlight, but also the physical warmth, and the freedom of being able to paint outside whenever they chose. Imagine what vivid blues, yellows, purples and oranges Vincent would have found in Western Australia’s landscape, with the sky and sunlight being the clearest, sharpest and most intense I have ever seen.
I stayed in Provence in the south of France for 3 months, painting, riding my bike, and walking in the steps of the Masters. Most moving of all was my pilgrimage to Van Gogh’s life in Arles. In 1888, after two years in Paris, Vincent moved to Arles with the hope of beginning an artists’ colony in his Yellow House. I walked where he walked, stayed where he stayed, painted where he painted, imagined the understandable antagonism he must have endured from the locals because of his ‘madness’, and marvelled at the incredible paintings and thinking of this extraordinary man.
Vincent Van Gogh moved from Arles back to Paris in May 1890, where he stayed briefly with his now-married brother and family in Montmartre before moving north to Auvers-sur-Oise (“Auvers-on-the-River-Oise”, pronounced ‘O-vere-sur-whah-z’). I was in Paris during May and June this year (2007). After a while, like Vincent, I was keen to move out of the city and into the countryside, so I got on the train, as he did, and went to Auvers.
There is nothing like being in the same place where your hero lived and breathed and worked. Auvers-sur-Oise, a country village when Vincent was there, is now commuting distance from Paris. However, many of Vincent’s painting subjects still remain, as does the village atmosphere. The Town Hall (Mairie) that Vincent painted is still the focal point of the village square, opposite the Ravoux family’s Auberge (inn) where Vincent stayed. The Artist’s famous wheat field is still there behind the wall of Vincent’s final resting place in the Auvers cemetery, and his equally-famous Church is nearby. Many other buildings and views that Vincent painted remain, including the cottages (although slates and tiles now replace the thatch), the fields, the railway, Dr Gachet’s house, the Chateau and the White House.
After walking, reading and investigating Auvers-sur-Oise until I felt I had absorbed as much as possible, and a long chat with Vincent up in the cemetery, I settled down to paint. Sometimes I organized myself to sit exactly where Vincent would have sat while painting a particular subject, like ‘The Church of Auvers’. Other times I deliberately chose the same subject, but viewed from a different angle, or chose to paint something else connected with Vincent and his work, like the Auberge Ravoux, a vase of flowers, local characters in the street, and a cat in the garden.
In this collection of paintings, I have investigated Van Gogh’s dramatic use of complementary colours, studied his compositions, and used his subject matter to explore and enjoy Auvers-sur-Oise. As well as a prolific painter, Vincent was a copious letter-writer. Where relevant, I have linked my paintings to excerpts from his letters, as well as notes I made and conversations I had with Vincent, while he and I walked and painted around Auvers-sur-Oise. Enjoy!