Forever Auvers – Frank McNally on the village where Vincent van Gogh spent his last days

Among the last things Vincent van Gogh ever painted was the Catholic church in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris to which he moved in late May 1890.

His version – made in the first or second week of June, during a frenzy of activity that produced 80 pictures in 70 days – is more colourful and less solid-looking than the real thing.

Like Monet with Rouen Cathedral, Van Gogh was more interested in the way light fell on the walls and windows than the building itself.

This may explain why he painted the church from the back, a view you wouldn’t usually expect to see in a gallery.

The painter seemed in good form on arrival at Auvers, where many other artists worked. As recorded in a letter to his brother Theo, he found the village “seriously beautiful”, with “a lot of wellbeing in the air”.

But one Sunday evening in July, he went out into the surrounding countryside, placed his easel against a haystack, and shot himself in the chest with a revolver.

Then he limped back to the auberge where he had rented a room, and spent the next two days dying painfully (while also smoking a pipe until the last).

The heartbroken Theo, who had rushed to his bedside and been with him at the end, assumed the funeral would be in the same church his brother had recently painted, and said so in printed death announcements.

But the priest decreed otherwise. As a suicide – and a protestant suicide at that – Van Gogh was denied a Catholic funeral service, or any of the accessories that would have gone with it, including the local hearse.

After a wake in the auberge – decorated for the occasion with sunflowers, dahlias, and his last paintings – it was left to a more charitable cleric from a neighbouring village to supply the transport to carry Van Gogh’s body to the hilltop cemetery.

A sign on the walls there now recalls that the fields around it that day were “drenched in dazzling sunlight”. But this being Van Gogh’s ideal working condition, it only added to the grief of his distraught friends, including the painter Emile Bernard.

In a letter to another artist afterwards, also now reproduced at the cemetery gate, Bernard described the location and burial:

“It is on the little hill above the fields that were ripe for harvest under the wide blue sky that he would still have loved ... perhaps.

“Then he was lowered into the grave ... Anyone would have started crying at that moment ... the day was too much made for him not to imagine that he was still alive and enjoying it ...”

[ Vincent van Gogh’s final days: The extraordinary paintings from the artist’s last burst of creative geniusOpens in new window ]

The name of the priest who denied Van Gogh a funeral service is today forgotten, at least in this world. But his church – the back of it anyway – has become world-famous, thanks to that painting.

Art pilgrims from all over the world now pass its familiar shape on the way to the hilltop cemetery, as I did last weekend. It was late autumn rather than summer in this case, but just as in July 1890, the hill was drenched in sunlight.

So were the sunflowers that now decorate the graves of both Van Gogh brothers. Although four years younger, at 33, Theo was also dead within six months, killed by a disease linked to syphilis (fear of which may also have explained some of the mental torments to which his older brother had been prone).

Theo was at first buried in Utrecht. But his remains were exhumed in 1914 and moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, at the request of his widow Jo. Her wish was for the brothers to “lie together eternally” in keeping with the closeness Theo had always felt to his sibling.

The infamous ear episode apart, one of the other things that most people now know about Van Gogh the painter is that, in life, he only ever sold one picture. And he did indeed survive on the edge of poverty, depending on Theo – an art dealer by trade – for money and materials.

But the lack of commercial success tends to overshadow how well he had succeeded on his own terms – and in the eyes of his close contemporaries – before that final, catastrophic breakdown.

The tourist information signs now strewn around Auvers-sur-Oise speak of an artist who, by the time he arrived there, was no longer haunted by doubts about his own talent, and increasingly admired by fellow painters.

His heroic younger brother, meanwhile, was a constant source of support – practical and emotional – although himself in poor health. For him, Vincent’s genius had never been in question.

In a letter to their sister, a week after the funeral, Theo wrote prophetically: “People must know that he was a great artist, which often goes hand in hand with being a great man. In time, he will be recognised, and there will be many who regret that he left us so soon.”

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