The Last Van Gogh

by Alyson Richman

  PAPA died some twenty years after Vincent, his body withered and his mind half addled from years of the herbs that brought him little solace. Madame Chevalier had passed away five years earlier, and her absence seemed to worsen Papa’s frailty. In his final weeks, I made his favorite foods and mashed them, carefully spooning them into his mouth and wiping the yarn of saliva from his lips.

  In an eerie way, the palette that Vincent had used to paint Papa seemed to foreshadow him in his last days. The same puce color underscored his eyes, his mouth was ghostly pale, his skin lined like the bark of an old tree.

  Sometimes, when his eyes would be pooled with hallucinations, he would call out for Madame Chevalier. He would take my hand and stroke it between his papery palms and call me his little Chouchette. And although I yearned for him to say my name, or at least tell me that he held me in some affection, the words never came. I allowed myself to be called his little Chouchette, never once correcting him, letting him believe his beloved companion was there beside him. Her name, however, was not the last thing he uttered before he took his final breath. No, that was something that even took Paul by surprise. With a raspy breath and eyes wide open, he lifted his head from the mound of pillows and stretched out his arms. He called out her name, clearly so that there was no mistaking it, the name that it seemed was closest in all our hearts: “Louise-Josephine.”

  MY life changed little after Papa’s death. I continued to have a solitary life, where most of my days were filled with morning walks to the village and afternoons spent tending to the flowers in my garden. But when Papa died, Paul became, by default, the master of the house. He took to his role with great zeal. He rummaged through Papa’s closets and began wearing his cherished smocks, his silk foulards, his nautical caps. Two years later he married our distant cousin Emilienne, someone I only remembered meeting a handful of times. She was too old to have children when they wed, and she was neither a great conversationalist nor a beauty. But their union kept the villagers gossiping just a little less about the queer activities of our household.

  My brother continued our father’s obsession, dedicating himself to chronicling Vincent’s last seventy days in our Auvers. He sat at his desk, his hair raked between his fingers, and tried to recall every detail of the relationship between Vincent and our father. He cataloged the paintings Vincent did in our home as well as those he remembered seeing stacked in Vincent’s room at the Ravoux Inn. Like Papa, Paul shunned all visitors to our home except for Louise-Josephine and her daughter, the occasional elderly artist friends of Father’s, or the rare scholar who wrote requesting to see one of the paintings in our collection.

  A FEW years before Papa died, they dug up Vincent’s body to move him to the new cemetery in town. And when they finally unearthed his coffin, the roots of the thuja tree that had shaded his grave for so long had penetrated the wooden boards and entwined themselves with his bones. The grave diggers gossiped that the roots clung to his skeleton like ferocious brown claws. I winced when I heard they needed pruning shears to cut Vincent free.

  When Paul first informed me that Papa had planted a tree on Vincent’s grave, he had not mentioned it was a thuja. That tree was a well-known source of thujone, the toxin found in absinthe. And although Papa did not plant a wormwood tree, the tree that absinthe is most often derived from, it was still an ironic choice, particularly as Vincent admitted that he had been addicted to the “green-eyed devil” prior to his stay in Auvers.

  Whether it was a hidden message by Papa or a mere coincidence, I will never know. What I am sure of is that even in death the plant’s lengthy dark ropes held Vincent in a tight embrace, their serpentine legs attracted to the absinthe that remained in his bones.

  Even when Vincent’s coffin was disinterred and reburied next to his brother Theo’s, Papa still could not let him alone. He took a few seeds from the tree that had threaded through Vincent’s bones and placed them in an envelope that he labeled “Vincent’s Tree.” A few weeks later, he planted those seeds in the front garden and over the years the tree grew strong and high. It stands there to this day, flowering yellow-green blossoms that paper the ground.

  I do not like this tree very much. The image of the original roots choking Vincent’s skeleton is hard to shake from my mind. To me it’s another example of something taken from Vincent. How, even in death, so many people wanted to claim him as their own. Even I, with my thoughts of our stolen moments in the cave, hoard my memories of him. Fingerprints of genius touched my skin, eyes that were aflame and full of vision chose me as a final muse. Of this I am greedy and refuse to share.

  PERHAPS we all are predisposed to dislike the act of sharing. As Paul’s obsession with Vincent strengthened, he became more intolerant of the fact that Vincent had chosen me to be his final muse.Vincent had painted Papa, me, Adeline Ravoux, and other faces in Auvers, but never Paul. This fact weighed on him like a thicket of scars that blistered more with each passing year.

  So tonight when my brother tells me that, of all the Van Gogh paintings we own, he has decided to sell only one—the one of me—I cannot say I’m surprised.

  “It’s the least technically interesting,” he tells me over dinner.

  His wife, Emilienne, is silent, looking down at the plate of stewed lamb that I prepared for them.

  “We need the money and, as the head of this household, I have decided that because that painting is the weakest in the collection, it should be the first one sold.”

  I look up from the table, raising my head to stare at him. It is mine, it is not yours to sell, I think to myself. I know that Emilienne is trembling in her seat. I feel her eyes traveling over me like two marbles sliding across an abacus.

  I do not speak. I just raise my eyebrows and stare at him with icy pupils. He knows the painting he has chosen to sell has hung for over four decades in the same spot in my bedroom. That it is the image I have seen every night before I went to sleep and the first one that I awakened to each morning.

  “You’re a sixty-five-year-old woman,” he mutters underneath his breath. “It’s unhealthy to dwell on a forty-five-year-old painting of one’s younger self.”

  I can see his body twitching uncomfortably underneath his jacket. His silk scarf billows underneath his chin, the bristles of his goatee snagging the cloth as he lowers his head.

  I try to stifle my body from trembling.

  “If you must, Paul,…then you must,” I say knowing I will not win this battle with him.

  And so after the plates have been cleared from our dinner, he removes the painting from my bedroom wall. Outside, the November wind howls and I am forced to look away so he does not see my tears.

  MY garden has been put to rest, the beet fields are soaked in rainwater, and Vincent’s painting of me at my piano is on its way to hang on a strange new wall. But even with my bedroom wall now bare, I still remember how Vincent pressed that first poppy into my hand; how I sat for him; and how he smudged yellow paint across my cheek before our first kiss. And in those lost moments of my memory, I am as Vincent imagined me: white flesh bursting crimson through taffeta, marble skin trembling under the spell of warm fingers.

  Tonight Paul believes he is selling the last portrait Vincent painted of me. But he is wrong and there is a certain satisfaction in that. He does not realize that on Sunday afternoons when I bid him and his wife farewell, I make two special trips after church.

  First I visit Vincent’s grave. I do not place sunflowers on his tombstone like Papa once did, and now Paul does. Instead, I place a single red poppy, so tiny and delicate. Folded neatly, like a tiny red fan.

  And then, I wander past the Château Léry, ending up at the limestone cave where my painting still remains. The cool air has preserved it well. It is my little secret; not even Louise-Josephine knows that it is there.

  The paint is still luminous, and the colors still glow in the soft gray light. It sits there on the shelf where he placed it years before. It remains there quietly triumphant. As
Vincent promised. There, for only me to see.

  Author’s Note

  In 1999 I attended an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that displayed the paintings in the private collection of Dr. Gachet, the doctor who was responsible for Van Gogh’s care during the final months before his suicide. The exhibition was unusual, in that it not only displayed the doctor’s extensive collection of Cézannes, Pissarros, and Van Goghs that were painted while these artists were either visiting or being treated by the doctor during their stay in Auvers-sur-Oise, but also the copies of the same paintings he and his son, Paul, had executed once Vincent and some of the other artists had left their village.

  Photos of the interior of their house supplemented the exhibition and, through these images, it was clear how seriously Dr. Gachet attached himself to his artist patients—particularly Vincent van Gogh. There, in the black-and-white images, one could see the shrinelike atmosphere the Gachets maintained after Vincent’s death. His paintings hung on every wall, and the articles he had used for still lifes were at arm’s reach. The text describing the family pointed out that the Gachets maintained a guarded and intensely private existence. Gachet’s son never held a job, and he and his sister lived with their father until his death. Upon Dr. Gachet’s passing, his son made it his life’s work to become an expert on Vincent and, with Van Gogh buried in the Auvers cemetery, the keeper of his grave.

  After conducting some preliminary research, I discovered there was an even more intriguing character in this cast of eccentrics. In the exhibition catalog, Susan Alyson Stein speaks of how Gachet’s only daughter “Marguerite, who never married, was the silent and respectful witness to this parsimonious life consumed by study, in a house frozen in the past.”1

  Who was this silent woman who never left the confines of her family home yet was the model for two of Vincent’s paintings while he stayed in Auvers? Mademoiselle Gachet in the Garden and Mademoiselle Gachet at the Piano are two excellent examples of how Vincent used both symbolism and a multicolored palette to illuminate a painfully shy model who was kept under close watch by her overbearing father. By placing Marguerite in both her garden and at her piano—her two favorite spots and the places where she sublimates her passions—Vincent is able to show a side of her that the average person would have missed. And that was always one of Vincent’s objectives: to use both paint and his artistic eye to celebrate a subject’s hidden beauty.

  The most astonishing item was a footnote in the catalog that suggests that the 1934 auction of Mademoiselle Gachet at the Piano, a gift from Van Gogh that Marguerite hung in her bedroom for over forty years, was done on the orders of her brother Paul, who had always been jealous that he had never been painted by Van Gogh.2 Another supposition went so far as to suggest that he had been jealous of a rumored affair between the two, so he exacted revenge by forcing her to sell the painting.

  The question of what motivated the sale of this painting became the genesis for the novel. Had there been an affair between Vincent and Marguerite during his final weeks? Certainly the girl was of marriageable age, having turned twenty-one shortly after Vincent’s arrival. Her limited contact with the outside world would have made her particularly susceptible to the charms of an artist, particularly one as well-traveled as Vincent. Not knowing the answer, I began to dig deeper into the lives of the Gachet family, particularly this quiet young woman whom no one seemed to know anything about. What I did not expect to find was that there were actually two women in the Gachet household who were kept under lock and key: Marguerite and Louise-Josephine Chevalier, who many believe was Dr. Gachet’s illegitimate child with Marguerite and Paul’s governess, Louise-Anne-Virginie Chevalier.

  I came upon this information almost by accident. Upon my first visit to Auvers-sur-Oise, I befriended the director of the tourist office who told me that there were two women in their nineties who were alive when Marguerite still lived in the village. She arranged for me to meet them. One was the baker’s daughter, Madame Cretelle, who had vivid memories of selling bread and other provisions to the quiet Marguerite. The other was Madame Millon, who was a schoolgirl in Marguerite’s later years and had memories of seeing her walking through town.

  While both of them proved invaluable in telling me details that could never be found in any art catalog or history book, such as the way Marguerite dressed in muted colors when she went to church, or the shy way in which she acknowledged people in the street, they also provided me with village gossip that had never been relayed in any of the English texts I had for my research. The most shocking of these revelations was the existence of Louise-Josephine, who supposedly lived in the Gachet household from the age of fourteen to twenty-three, and who no one even knew existed until the family’s house was put up for sale.

  Madame Millon wrote a book in French in which she was able to find a birth certificate of this child, whose father goes unnamed on the certificate. But there are other clues about her paternity. For example, Gachet signed something that acknowledges that she was not born under adulterous circumstances so that she will be able to marry at a later date. Her name, Louise-Josephine, is also similar to Louis-Joseph, which was Dr. Gachet’s father’s name. Also, her conception coincides with the time just before Dr. Gachet became betrothed to his wife, the mother of Marguerite and Paul, who died of tuberculosis when Marguerite was a young girl. Madame Millon, in her book Vincent Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, speculates that the doctor met Madame Chevalier before his marriage and continued their relationship (and financial support of Louise-Josephine) until his wife’s death. At that point, he invited Madame Chevalier to come and be his children’s governess. Eventually, Louise-Josephine joined them.

  Fiercely guarding his privacy, Dr. Gachet refused to let the young Chevalier be seen in the village. There is no mention in Van Gogh’s letters of him meeting the governess or her child, and one can assume that Gachet, fearing the spread of village gossip, intentionally kept them away from the artist.

  Seizing upon this information, I began to create a framework for The Last Van Gogh that would give a voice to these two female characters relegated to all but footnotes in history, especially Marguerite. Using the idea that Marguerite was not only a muse to Vincent in his last days, but also a voyeur to her father’s questionable medical tactics in Vincent’s treatment and a victim of her brother’s rage, I tried to create a narrative in which her experience is released from her only tangible legacy: the two completed portraits Van Gogh painted of Marguerite and the one he mentions to his sister Wilhemina in which she was seated at a small organ as a modern Saint Cecilia,3 but which scholars believe was never completed.

  The clues hidden in Van Gogh’s paintings (such as the foxgloves in the portrait of Dr. Gachet, which is a form of digitalis that can cause side effects such as anxiety and heart palpitations and could have been used improperly in Van Gogh’s own medical treatment, and the mentioning of a painting never completed) are just some of the mystery surrounding Vincent’s final days in Auvers. In the seventy days he stayed in the village, he completed over seventy paintings. The Last Van Gogh sets out to examine the inspiration for his final one.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the superb scholarship of Anne Distel and Susan Alyson Stein, whose catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition: “Cézanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet,” served as an inspiration for this novel. I am also indebted to the scholarship of Ronald Pickvance and The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, published by the New York Graphic Society.

  In Auvers-sur-Oise, both Monsieur and Madame Cretelle peppered my research with wonderful anecdotes of the Gachet family, particularly their memories of Paul and Marguerite Gachet. Madame Millon’s research on Vincent van Gogh and her fastidious details about village life in Auvers during the late nineteeth century proved invaluable as well. A special thanks should be given to Catherine Galliot at the Auvers-sur-Oise tourism agency, who introduced me to thes
e wonderful people and also arranged for me to privately view the Gachet house, which was not made available to the public until recently.

  Rosalyn Shaoul, I thank you for your tireless efforts on my behalf. You read my many drafts and translated all my French documents and were a wonderful springboard for developing so many of the intricacies of the novel. I truly cannot thank you enough and this book deserves to be dedicated to you. Meredith Hassett, Nikki Koklanaris, Jardine Libaire, Sara Shaoul, and Heather Rowland, I thank each of you for your careful readings of the book. To my husband, I thank you for your support, your patience, and your willingness to push me further with each novel I write.

  A final thanks to my agent, Sally Wofford-Girand, for your belief in this book, and to my late editor, Leona Nevler, who loved it enough to give it a home.

  1The Gachet Donation in Context: The Known and Little-Known Collections of Dr. Gachet

  , Susan Alyson Stein. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1999, p.168

  2Id

  . At no.30. The Gachet Donation in Context. Susan Alyson Stein. 1999

  3The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

  , selected and edited by Ronald de Leeuw, Penguin Books 1996, p. 498.