Remembering Vincent Van Gogh

‘Sunflowers’ Vincent Van Gogh c 1888

Summer has finally arrived and with it beautiful sunflowers exploding in our garden. Sunflowers that never fail to make me think of Van Gogh. Especially today.

It was on this day in 1890 that the artist died in Auvers, outside of Paris of an apparently self inflicted gun shot wound two days earlier. He was 37 years old. His brother Theo and his friend and host Dr. Gachet were with him when he died. They buried him in a casket covered with sunflowers.

When one ponders the premise that creative geniuses are tinged with madness or wired differently, Vincent Van Gogh is often the first name to jump to mind. Details of one of the world’s most famous artist’s mental health are the stuff of legends. He is believed to have suffered from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, manic depression. Some say his proclivity to drinking absinthe altered his vision, and theories abound that the lead from his paints poisoned his senses. Whatever the causes, his stormy, dramatic, poverty-stricken and tragically short life has provided much fodder for romanticized novels, movies and even a popular song by Don McLean “Starry Starry Night,” immortalizing one of his most well known paintings, ” Starry Night.”

This celebrated masterpiece was painted during the year (1889 -1890) Van Gogh had voluntarily confined himself to the mental hospital at the former monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy de Provence. A sacred spring at the nearby ancient Romanesque site at Glanum held a spiritual and healing reputation since the 4th century BC. During Medieval times, Christian pilgrims came to invoke Valetuda, the goddess of health, and in the 11th century a Romanesqe-Provencal priory was built on the spot. Around the 12th century Saint-Paul-de-Mausole became a monastery with the hospital building later added into the complex.

The inner sanctum of the monastery has a lovely cloister with a central garden of flowers celebrated in Van Gogh’s painting, ‘Garden in the Saint-Paul Hospice.’ The surrounding countryside is dotted with groves of gnarled olive trees, fields of wheat shimmering in the sun, cypress trees twisting towards the sky, and the ubiquitous sunflowers. In the year he was confined at the asylum Van Gogh produced art at a ferocious pace creating more than a 150 of his now most famous paintings: ‘Irises,‘ ‘Vase with Iris,’ ‘The first steps,’ ‘La sieste,’‘Wheat field with Cypresses,’ ‘Wheat field with a reaper,’ ‘Olive Orchard,’ ‘Mountainous landscape behind Saint-Paul Hospital’ and of course ‘Starry Night.’ What is astonishing is he painted these while confined to two small rooms with bars in the window.

He left the asylum for Auvers in May of 1890. Van Gogh sold only one painting (‘Red Vineyard at Arles’) during his lifetime. The nine hundred plus oils and drawings he has bequeathed to the world were created in a span of a mere ten years.