Voila Vincent: Voila Vincent!

We visited Saint Remy-de-Provence where Van Gogh sequestered himself after his harrowing experience in Arles. Even today, Saint Paul de Mausole, is a calm, healing sanatorium, sited opposite crumbling old Roman ruins. Vincent often wandered across to these columns and arches and rocks of Glanum when he felt well enough, carrying his pots and easel, motivated still, in these last months of life, to capture his scattered scrambled thoughts onto stark still pieces of blank canvas.

He was given three rather lovely stone rooms entirely to himself: one his bedroom – as simple as he preferred; another, across a passage, a bathroom and dressing room; and the third: larger, vaulted, filled with yellow light streaming through the window, he kept for his work: his oils brushes, cleansers, canvases.

Sister Epiphane, and the nuns who looked after him, must have been kind: they feel peaceful, these rooms, even reflective. Though there were, even then, bars on the windows. “From an iron-barred window I can see a square of wheat in an enclosure, a Van Goyen perspective, above from which I can see the sun rise in all its glory, ” Vincent wrote from this very room.

Down a flight of wide worn stone stairs from his rooms he wandered directly into the most beautiful cloister: all healing light, colour and hope. He would have sat here for hours with peace soothing his soul.

A few steps on is the garden bordering the fields, where stands the olive grove he painted, and wrote of to his sister, Wilhelmena: “I don’t know whether you can understand that one may make a poem only by arranging colours.” I wonder if Vincent suspected that his poem making was nearly at an end.

On 17 May, he left St Remy and visited Theo in Paris. There he met Theo’s new wife and brand new son, who was named Vincent, after him. He is said to have looked robust, healthy, with colour on his face, and a solidity about him. The nuns appeared to have done well with their charge.

On 19 May, he moved into lodgings at a café in Auvers-sur-Oise, leaving the balm of sunflower suns of Provence behind.

On 8 June, he admitted to his mother that he was lonely.

On 6 July, he again visited Theo and his new family in Paris.

On 27 July in Auvers, he was heard to shout something. He then rushed out of the café into a field and with a gun in his hand shot himself in the chest.

On the 29 July, Vincent died in Auvers-sur-Oise in Theo’s arms. He had rushed there on hearing of the disaster.

Dr Gachet drew Vincent on his deathbed. Vincent was an unknown painter, a virtual stranger, yet this good doctor felt compelled to take a piece of charcoal and record the deeply etched lines that cut across this dead man’s forehead. Such a sweet homage to a tormented soul. Dr Gachet, I think, sensed greatness. His drawing of Vincent is simple, beautiful.

The local paper reported Vincent’s death in a terse tidy summary. “On Sunday July 27 a Dutch man called Van Gogh, 37 years old, a painter staying at Auvers at the moment, shot himself in the fields and being only injured he went back to his room and died two days later.”

On Tuesday, that 'man called Van Gogh' died...

But, Vincent lives on. His swirling poems grace countless walls for all to see in their colourful glory. And will forever. Voila Vincent!