Meditating with Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

After Provence and its sun, burning to the point of exhaustion, the painter Vincent van Gogh arrived on May 20, 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, a large town in Vexin, about thirty kilometers northwest of Paris. Time for one last conflagration, before his darkness overtakes him for good. Vincent comes to find Doctor Gachet there who invited him to continue his treatment, after his year of internment in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. This doctor specializes in the treatment of severe depression, which was still referred to as “melancholy”.

As in Saint-Rémy, between his painful crises, Vincent goes back to work. In seventy days, he painted 73 paintings, often taken from life in the middle of nature, to welcome the breath of this last spring. Even today, it is enough to go up the limestone hillside of the village nestled along the river to arrive very quickly, on the heights, in these large fertile plains.

There, in the middle of fields of wheat, barley or poppies, the sky and the earth seem to touch. No need for sun. Only the wind counts, a link and spirit that makes the clouds dance and the harvests wave. To the darkness of melancholy, the land of Auvers thus offers the green and yellow of its fruits and the blue and white of its cloud. Tenderness of a world where the human heart, alas, does not always manage to take root. The Dutch artist’s large strokes of paint are like so many fingerprints of a bile existence. But crossed by grace.