From October 3, 2023, to February 4, 2024 the Musée d’Orsay presents “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. His Final Months,” an exhibition focusing on the final months of Vincent van Gogh’s life in the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise.

Image: “Wheatfield under Thunderclouds”, Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Auvers-sur-Oise, July 1890

“Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. His Final Months” arrives in Paris after its run at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it was on show from May 12 to September 3, 2023. According to the Van Gogh Museum, “in the exhibition, we follow Van Gogh from his arrival in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he optimistically and ambitiously set to work, through to his last works. By this time, feelings of failure, loneliness, and melancholy had gained the upper hand, but Van Gogh nevertheless continued to make enormously powerful works. The exhibition also explores Van Gogh’s significance as an artist at the time, and how his reputation grew in the initial years after his death.”

The Orsay states that “No exhibition has yet been devoted exclusively to this final, yet crucial, stage of [Van Gogh’s] career. In two months, the painter produced 74 paintings and 33 drawings, including iconic works such as ‘Doctor Paul Gachet’, ‘The Church at Auvers-sur-Oise’, and ‘Field of Wheat with Crows’. With some forty paintings and twenty drawings, the exhibition will highlight this period in a thematic way: early landscapes depicting the village, portraits, still lifes, landscapes of the surrounding countryside. It will also present a series, unique in Van Gogh’s work, of paintings in an elongated double square format.”

Interestingly, when “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. His Final Months” opened in Amsterdam last May, it did so just a few days before the Art Institute of Chicago presented the exhibition “Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape”. Now, the two exhibitions coincide once again, as the latter will be on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from 13 October.