In Dr. Gachet's Care

Vincent Van Gogh first mentioned to his brother Theo that he wanted to leave the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Remy in September 1889 and perhaps move in with his avuncular friend, the painter Camille Pissarro. When the latter's wife objected, Pissarro recommended Auvers-sur-Oise, a place where Vincent could live under the watchful eye of a medical man, Dr. Gachet. Being only an hour by train to Paris, he would be nearer his brother, who had meanwhile married and become father of little Vincent Willem. On May 17, 1890, van Gogh left Saint-Remy for Paris, spent a few days with Theo, and then set off Auvers-sur-Oise. The room that Dr Gachet had recommended to him was conveniently near his own house, but unfortunately too expensive for his patient. Van Gogh rented a small, cheap room in the Ravoux inn opposite the Town Hall, with the idea of renting a spacious house later.

The artist soon got in touch with Dr. Gachet, a medical man who also like art and was himself an amateur artist, and who had had Paul Cezanne, Camille Pisarro, and other artists to stay in his house and owned pictures by them. Unfortunately, like Dr. Payron in Sant-Remy, he could offer no specialist medical expertise that could have benefited van Gogh. His practice in Paris took up only a few days a week. Auvers was reserved exclusively for his artistic passions. One may assume that Gachet's initial willingness to take on van Gogh was that he would after all be hobnobbing with an artist recommended by Pissarro.

At first, contact was limited to Sunday lunch with Dr. Gachet. Their discussions of their mutual love of art, Gachet's commission for a portrait and his wish to see Vincent's pictures, soon generated a friendly relationship between the two men. Van Gogh descried his portrait painting of this period as a search for passionate expression with the help of color but without any pretension to photographic similarity. Beside the doctor, who was a widower, the house was home to his 17 year old son and a daughter of 20 or so, Marguerite, whom van Gogh likewise painted several times. The best known portrait shows Marguerite at her favorite occupation, which was playing the piano.

Van Gogh's last pictures are mostly landscapes: cornfields, whose autonomous brushstroke scarcely represent ears of corn or sky any more but dynamic rhythms of vigorous color energy, or broad, relief-like planes of color make up of short brushstrokes that articulate and move and are overarched by dominant stormy skies painted in virtuoso variations of dark blue. Landscapes like this he sent to Paris with the "reassuring" news that he saw in them something "healthy and invigorating."