In order to understand how and why Van Gogh’s paintings from Saint-Rémy are so wrought with the idea of death, it is necessary first to understand the circumstances of his life both during and surrounding his time at Saint-Rémy. He made the decision to have himself committed in April of 1889, but it is impossible to state definitively what the reasoning behind this decision was. He was not clear on the subject even to Theo, to whom he wrote the following words in April 1889: “At the end of the month I should like to go to the hospital in St. Rémy, or another institution of this kind, of which M. Salles has told me. Forgive me if I don’t go into details and argue the pros and cons of such a step. Talking about it would be mental torture� (Letter 585). The “mental torture� of talking about his condition and decisions is solid enough ground for a strong speculation that he was no longer feeling emotionally secure enough to go on handling his illness on his own: he was willing to turn control of his life over to an asylum in order to avoid this torture, and hopefully to eradicate it altogether. But what does this mean in the context of Van Gogh’s life? In the same letter, he expressed to Theo a “wish to be temporarily shut up, as much for my own peace of mind as for that of others� (Letter 585, qtd Cooper 79). This is more telling in several ways. Firstly, the “peace of mind� of “others� almost certainly refers to the townspeople of Arles, who had a marked distaste for Van Gogh that had been exacerbated by the events of late 1888 and early 1889 (Conrad 67). But the reference to Vincent’s “own peace of mind� implies that he did not feel comfortable in the outside world, and felt that he could find solace and refuge in an asylum. Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov supports this idea in her book Van Gogh in Provence and Auvers, in which she writes, “a feeling of tranquility settled over Van Gogh when he realized he had found a refuge� (Welsh-Ovcharov 186). The asylum offered to Van Gogh the sanctuary he sought from the mental anguishes he had suffered while in Arles.
Despite having found the refuge he sought, however, Vincent continued to be plagued with morbid thoughts. He wrote to Theo much later in his stay, on 12 January 1890: “Don’t forget that a broken pitcher is a broken pitcher, and therefore in no way do I have any pretensions� (Letter 623). So while he had found a refuge at Saint-Rémy, Vincent believed that he would never become fully and permanently well again: a “broken pitcher,� once broken, remains so, and will never again hold water. It is important to understand this seeming paradox, for it forms the crux of Van Gogh’s experience at Saint-Rémy. He may have felt safe within the asylum, but he continued to be plagued by his disease. The relative security of the hospital, then, was contrasted with the fears he began to associate with the outside world. His thoughts of death did not fit into the comfort of the asylum, and so they were projected upon the outside landscape, which Van Gogh for this reason came to associate with death.