Baumwurzeln

This is very likely the last thing Van Gogh painted. On the morning of July 27, 1890, in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris, he worked on a tangle of tree roots and stumps on a hillside just up the road from his inn. That same evening he returned with a gunshot wound to his chest, and he died two days later. For a long time people assumed his final work was a wheatfield with crows. Then a researcher matched an old postcard to the exact bank on the Rue Daubigny, and the gnarled roots in the postcard photograph are the same ones in the picture, still there in the village. It is one of the double-width canvases he used for his last landscapes, the roots pressed flat and close, almost abstract.