“Roots“, the last painting Vincent Van Gogh painted on the day of his death, revealed its secret: an old postcard was found showing a thicket with the same roots, revealed Tuesday the scientific director of the Van Gogh Institute in Auvers-sur-Oise.
The discovery was made as he was quietly filing documents at home during lockdown in April, Wouter van der Veen explained: “My eye was caught by a detail on a postcard, a detail that appeared on Van Gogh’s last painting. The configuration of the roots and trunks on the postcard matched that on the chalkboard“.
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On the postcard dating from 1900-1910, there is a hill covered with a thicket with trunks and roots. This Van Gogh expert then backed up his finding in a book, “Attacked at the root“. It took a few weeks at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to validate the discovery.
This painting, painted shortly before he shot himself in the stomach on July 27, 1890, was indecipherable because the place of the creation was impossible to locate.
Tuesday, took place in Auvers-sur-Oise, in the presence of Emilie Gordenker, Director General of the Van Gogh Museum, the inauguration of the exact site of the realization of the masterpiece, which will be protected by a temporary wooden structure, and could become a place of pilgrimage, 150 meters from the inn where the painter resided, suffering from fits of madness.
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“This painting, painted shortly before he shot himself in the stomach on July 27, 1890, was indecipherable, because the place of the realization was impossible to locate“. “What is extraordinary is that the main stump that we find on the painting is still visible today in the thicket.“130 years later, wonders Wouter van der Veen.
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