Musée d’Orsay Exhibition Spotlights the Last Two Months of Van Gogh’s Life, Bringing to Light His Final Obsessions

This year marks the 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s birth, but it is his final months that are now the subject of a major exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Organized in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the exhibition debuted earlier this year, “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. The Final Months” (through February 4, 2024) brings together 48 of the 74 paintings and 25 of the 33 drawings, many of which are being shown in Paris for the first time, that the Post-Impressionist made between May 20, 1890, when he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, and his death on July 29.

Van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a pastoral commune about 20 miles northwest of Paris, to be closer to his brother and art dealer Theo and his infant nephew, Vincent Willem, as well as to receive treatment from Dr. Paul Gachet.

The first gallery in the Orsay exhibition focuses on Gachet, who made a career out of treating melancholy, the focus of his thesis, and counted artists like Paul Cezanne, Armand Guillaumin, and Camille Pissarro as his patients. Gachet considered van Gogh both a patient and a friend, inviting the artist over for lunch on Sundays. Among the works on view are van Gogh’s portraits of Gachet, including the famed 1890 painting donated to the Musée d’Orsay in 1949, as well as the only etching that van Gogh ever made; Gachet had provided the artist with the materials to create it.

Divided into six thematic sections, like “‘Auvers is seriously beautiful…’” and “The modern portraiture,” the exhibition includes village scenes, still lifes of flowers, experimental portraits with weave patterns, tone-on-tone paintings, a series of fascinating double-sided sketches, letters from Van Gogh including one that he never sent, and 11 of the 12 double square landscapes (1 meter by 50 centimeters, around 3 feet 3 inches by 1 foot 8 inches) that were among van Gogh’s final obsessions before his death.

It is an exceptional display. “This room is an unicum,” said Emmanuel Coquery, the director of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the exhibition’s co-curator. “The public won’t see anything like it, before a very long time.” (Coquery said he did not request the 12th double-square landscapes, titled Daubigny’s Garden from the Hiroshima Museum of Art in Japan “for logical and ecological reasons”; its twin, however, is on loan from the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland.)  

Among the most famous works on view is Wheatfield with crows (1890), which has not left Amsterdam in nearly a century. The dynamic composition, with confident, visible brushstrokes, features ominous crows fluttering around a stormy sky, often interpreted as the artist’s awareness that his end was near.The painting has long been seen as Van Gogh’s ultimate work, but I much preferred Tree Roots (1890), which is believed to have been completed a few hours before the Dutch master shot himself in the chest. The seemingly abstract painting, with a hurried, almost unfinished appearance, shows a colorful entanglement of roots and tree trunks—the vision of all-mighty nature.

Van Gogh’s death, which has been subject to much speculation, is not extensively addressed in the exhibition, only in the catalogue. “We thought about it, but had no intention of adding fuel to controversies,” Coquery said. “We opted for the road of silence.” In an essay titled “A Short Biography of Unbearable Suffering: Van Gogh’s Self-Chosen End,” Louis van Tilborgh rejects the recent theory that van Gogh did not die by suicide but was murdered, writing, “A greater understanding of what motivated his tragic act can only be achieved when the process leading up to it is mapped out. … Without such analysis, interpreting Van Gogh’s work and life in his months remains somewhat arbitrary, and would amount to nothing less than a biographical misstep.”

Coquery added, “When a person feels compelled to end their own life, the least they deserve is to be heard with empathy.”

Van Gogh’s relationship with Gachet is further drawn out in the exhibition via the inclusion of the palette, now owned by the Orsay, that Gachet lent van Gogh (on June 27), so that he could finish the portrait of his daughter Marguerite playing the piano in a white dress against a red-spotted green background. As part of its efforts to include digitally focused programming for its exhibitions, the d’Orsay has also commissioned a 10-minute VR experience by Agnès Molia et Gordon that allows visitors to explore the contours and hues of this history-infused object.

“We did not want to alter Van Gogh’s works, whose proportions have been respected in the program, and we chose to work on his palette instead,” Agnès Abastado, head of the digital department at the Musée d’Orsay, said of the decision to not create an immersive experience of van Gogh’s paintings like those that have been popular over the past few years. Upon entering a re-creation of Gachet’s interior, Marguerite’s voice lulls you into having a look around, until a color-heavy piece of wood starts levitating toward you. “The perspective then changes,” said Coquery. “The palette becomes a landscape and the user a Lilliputian confronted to hill-sized impastos.”

Like the paint-covered palette, van Gogh’s final paintings are filled with brilliant colors. In Jardin à Auvers-sur-Oise (1890), showing a green-dominated view of Charles-François Daubigny’s garden, van Gogh combines various techniques—flurries of dots, loose or tightly packed strokes, aligned or swirling, neater contours—in such a way that the painting still thrums with life. Coquery said, “Van Gogh is always associated with color. We wanted to highlight the materiality, the thickness of his works.”