Touring Auvers-sur-Oise: Visiting Vincent Van Gogh’s Grave outside Paris by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Baby
Florence’s first outing when we lived in Paris was to visit Auvers-sur-Oise
outside Paris where Vincent Van Gogh had his tomb.
We
loaded Florence into her car seat and set out with several pit stops to give
Florence bottles of water. It was about
90 degrees out. I hoped we would not
melt in our car.
Auvers-sur-Oise
is a French “Main Street USA” type of village with a butcher, baker, and
candlestick maker. The brochure from the
local tourism office proclaims Auvers to be the birthplace of Impressionism.
Artists
such as Corot (1796 – 1875) and Daubigny (1817 – 1879) lived here and began to
research what primary colors blended together to give the impression of a
secondary color when seen at a distance.
(For example, red and blue blending to make purple.)
Other
luminaries who painted at Auvers-sur-Oise include: Gauguin (1848 – 1903), Cézanne
(1835 – 1906), and Pisarro (1830 – 1903).
When
Van Gogh came to Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890, no one knew he had seventy days to
live or that he would complete seventy paintings in those last days. These paintings are among his most famous:
Portrait of Doctor Gachet, Wheat Field with Crows, and the Church at Auvers.
The
Tourism Office Guidebook gave a walking tour all throughout town and the
countryside that passed by the vistas of all the famous paintings that had been
painted of them.
We
gave Florence more water and sprayed some vaporized Evian on us to beat the
heat. We walked from one end of town to
the other. When you look at the
silhouette of the church at Auvers, you expect it to quiver like the one in the
Van Gogh painting.
Vincent
Van Gogh’s grave is next to his brother Theo’s in the Auvers graveyard. I liked a collection of letters that Vincent
sent to his brother Theo called Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van
Gogh edited by Irving Stone that I read prior to visiting Auvers.
In
one of the letters that Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, he said
that he was happy with his work even if he had no commercial success. I was happy Theo supported Vincent, but still
resent that he sometimes had to pay for meals with his paintings.
I
liked how Van Gogh was able to find beauty in the ordinary objects and people
around him.
Van
Gogh’s landscapes are what moved me the most, because I know hard it is to just
organize, clean a house, and write let alone plowing, weeding, and harvesting
fields to look so neat and tidy.
I
was tired after our walk, but happy that I put in the effort to see these
places that Van Gogh painted.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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