Vincent's last painting

The town of Auvers-sur-Oise, now a suburb of Paris, on the evening of 27 July 1890. The stumbling Vincent van Gogh returns from the field where he usually goes to paint. But this time something's wrong. He staggers and clutches his stomach, mortally wounded. He returns to his room at Mr Ravoux's inn, where he dies two days later in front of his brother Theo.

In Vincent's words „ I got hurt in the fields… “ everyone understands that he attempted suicide, and so it has been recorded for posterity. But was it really? Marianne Jaeglé and offers a surprisingly different perspective: What if the famous painter didn't try to kill himself? What if he got shot?

Based on studies by acclaimed historians Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the biographical novel Vincent's Last Picture reconstructs the last two years of van Gogh's life and, like the 2017 film With Love Vincent, challenges conventional theories about his tragic end.

Marianne Jaeglé does not give a dry account of events in her book, but rather conveys to the reader both the external circumstances of Vincent's life and an intimate insight into his soul. The reader finds himself in Vincent's shoes, feels his wrongs and misunderstandings, experiencing his ecstasy, whether from the colours of heaven, field, of flowers or the southern sun, or the authentic minutiae of everyday life. The author manages to describe the key works of van Gogh as if inadvertently, in just a few words she manages to materialize the famous paintings, including their subject matter.

In the same simple way, it captures Vincent's complicated relationship with Paul Gauguin, who stays with him for a few weeks in his yellow house in Arles, but eventually leaves in a hurry and disappoints all Vincent's hopes for a collegial partnership and the establishment of a painting school.

The new view of the universally known story thus brings a breakthrough in the perception of the personality of the famous painter. It demolishes the idea of the madman with a cut ear and presents Vincent van Gogh as a sensitive, shy, anti-social man, an exceptional genius, an artist misunderstood by his time and alone in the midst of a society full of prejudice.