Auvers-sur-Oise: Vincent van Gogh and the Lost Phone–November 9, 2023

Catchy title, right? So, without further adieu, Doug lost his phone today on our bus trip to Auvers-sur-Oise to see the last place Vincent van Gogh lived the few months before he shot himself on July 29, 1890. On our two hour walk, Doug pulled his jacket out of the backpack he was carrying and the phone must have dropped out on the ground. We pinged it to no avail. So, Doug’s phone and Vincent van Gogh are both dead and buried in the same little town in France, just 20 miles north of Paris. (Apologies for the lame puns).

We actually visited two small towns in France today, La-Roche Guyon and Auvers-sur-Oise. We were confused because we walked around in La-Roche Guyon and saw the Chateau La-Roche in the morning, then started on our bus tour to Auvers at 1:45 PM, the same time our boat was supposed to leave port. No one explained the situation to us, but apparently we made the same trip by land and ended up where the boat had moored for the night just 10 miles up the Seine, if that makes any sense at all. Probably not.

Our tour guide today didn’t have a lot of material, because van Gogh (pronounced van Gog in French) only lived in Auvres for a couple of months before he committed suicide. So, the tour was basically the Auberge Ravoux (the inn where Van Gogh stayed), his table in the corner at the inn, his tiny room at the inn, the local church he painted and the town cemetery where he was buried. Van Gogh was quite a prolific painter–his average was one painting every four days. So he did paint several amazing pictures there. These are two of my favorites:

Our tour guide (I think his name was Emmanuel, but that doesn’t seem very French, so maybe not) told us all the lore surrounding Van Gogh’s death. The official story is that he went out in a field by a stand of trees where he was painting and shot himself in the stomach. He then walked a mile back to the Auberge Ravoux and went up to his room on the third floor. The innkeeper called a doctor, but it was too late. He died two days later. Some scholars have questioned that his death was more likely to have been an accidental shooting by locals, because he didn’t have gunpowder on his hand, it was an odd angle, etc. I kept wondering how he could have walked a mile with such a grave injury. All pretty confusing. He was 37 years old when he died. His brother, Theo, is buried next to him. Theo died just a year later from the effects of syphilis, according to Emmanuel (?). Pictures from today: