"Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul."..... Vincent Van Gogh

The Ravoux Inn

Auvers-sur-Oise

Arnold Smith 2003
Oil on canvas 20 x 16 in.


For the last 69 days of his life, from May 20 to July 27, 1890, Vincent lived in the small attic room of the Ravoux Inn at Auvers-sur-Oise. On the ground floor is a room called the "painter's room". In this room, Vincent worked on many of the 77 paintings completed in his last days. He probably had to do a lot of the work indoors from sketches because of the terrible rainy weather that kept up for days on end.

(Detail) Adeline Ravoux standing in the doorway and her father, Arthur Gustave Ravoux seated on the left.

The Graves of Vincent and Theo, Auvers-sur-Oise Arnold Smith 2000 Oil on canvas 12 x 16 in. (Dedicated to Robert Harrison) On March 30, 2003, the town of Auvers-sur-Oise was celebrating the150th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh's birthday. That evening, when the tourists, (who had mostly come to see the famous house of "Dr." Gachet and the Ravoux Inn ) had all gone home and the sightseeing and partying were over, One man was still there. Standing silent in the local cemetary, under a troubled sky, with the wind blowing across fields of wheat as vast as the sea, Van Gogh scholar Robert Harrison of Montreal had come a long way to simply make sure that Vincent was not alone while the Sun set on his birthday.