The French hill-side scene in Tree Roots, Van Gogh’s last painting has been found with the help of a postcard.
The scene in Tree Roots, a painting of trunks and roots growing on a hillside near the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, was first spotted on a card dating from 1900 to 1910 by Wouter van der Veen, the scientific director of the Institut Van Gogh. A comparative study of the painting, the postcard, and the current condition of the hillside, researchers at the Van Gogh Museum and Bert Maes, a dendrologist specialising in historical vegetation, concluded that it was “highly possible” that the place where the painter made his final brushstrokes had been discovered.
The main trunk in the painting has survived the 130 years since the Dutch master’s death. Andries Bonger, a close relative of the family had described in a letter how the “morning before his death” the painter had “painted a sous-bois [forest scene], full of sun and life”. The site is being protected with a wooden barricade. It was formally acknowledged at a ceremony attended by Emilie Gordenker, the general director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and Willem van Gogh, the great-grandson of Theo.
Van der Veen said: “The sunlight painted by Van Gogh indicates that the last brush strokes were painted towards the end of the afternoon, which provides more information about the course of this dramatic day ending in his suicide.”
Read further at The Guardian.
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