Vincent’s Room: An Artist’s Legacy

One very warm late summer day many years ago I took a train to the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, some 20 kilometres northwest of Paris: the village where Vincent van Gogh spent the last two months of his life. I went into a randomly-chosen café/bar for lunch, over which I asked the owner if she could direct me to the place where Vincent died. To my astonishment she pointed to the ceiling, then directed me up two or three narrow flights of stairs to the attic room in which he breathed his last. In the room there was a narrow iron-framed bed with a bare mattress, and a cupboard, a simple wooden chair, and a large easel. Through the skylight in the sloping roof I saw black birds wheeling and diving across the dazzling blue sky. I made some pencil drawings in the room, one of them while sitting on the bed that the owner assured me was the one Vincent died in. This picture is a painted, chopped-up and reassembled adaptation of one of the drawings I made that day.