Van Gogh in Saint Rèmy

Freaking Out(doors):
Van Gogh's Fear of Death As Associated with the Outdoors at Saint-Rèmy

Audrey Burgess, Princeton Class of 2008

“I do not hide from you the fact that I would rather have died than cause or suffer so much unhappiness.” (Vincent Van Gogh, qtd Vedovello 155)

Vincent Van Gogh wrote these words to his brother Theo, just before he was admitted to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Remy in May 1889. In this letter, he refers to the incident of December 1888 in which he allegedly attempted to attack his roommate and fellow artist Paul Gauguin, and then proceeded to cut off the lobe of his ear, which resulted in a hospitalization that lasted until January of 1889. After this first hospitalization, he returned to the house where he had been living with Gauguin, but continued to experience hallucinations, and was hospitalized twice before May (Vedovello 155). More than a year passed between the time he wrote these words to his brother and the time that he finally left the asylum at Saint-Rmy for Paris and then Auvers, where he would remain for two months until his suicide in July 1890 (Brooks). In the interim, Van Gogh lived and worked at the asylum, creating a vast collection of drawings, sketches, studies, and some of his most famous paintings. The reference to death in the passage above would prove to be a striking foreshadow of Van Gogh’s time at Saint-Rmy: the specter of death haunted him throughout this period, as manifested in many of the pieces he created. Because they did not fit with the sanctuary of the asylum, Van Gogh correlated these overbearing thoughts of death with the outdoors, with the natural world that he found outside the asylum, and he makes this correlation visible by distorting his images of the outdoors specifically for this purpose.