Abrar Hussain: Details of the most harrowing period of Vincent van Gogh’s life, including his mental collapses when he tried to poison himself with his own paint, have been revealed in a new book.
Author and journalist Martin Bailey, an expert of Van Gogh’s life, traced the admissions register and other records from Saint-Paul de Mausole, a small asylum on the outskirts of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France, for the period when Van Gogh was admitted as a private patient, a stay paid for by his brother Theo.
Although it was a period of anguish, it was also a time of extraordinary creativity for the famous painter, in which he produced some of his most dazzling and beloved works, now in museum collections across the world – all based on brief outings, the views through the barred window of his asylum room and many days spent painting in the asylum gardens.
The register shows Vincent van Gogh, 36, from Arles but born in the Netherlands, was admitted on 8 May 1889. Through the register, Bailey traced the 18 male patients including an elderly priest, Jean Revello, and Henri Enrico, who was described as constantly smashing up furniture and crockery. Bailey was able to match many of the names with death certificates and other evidence, and details of medical conditions and minimal treatment in a later book by the asylum director.
Revello, admitted two years before Van Gogh, aged 20, would spend the next half century in the asylum and die there in 1932. Van Gogh described fellow patients, whom he called “my companions in misfortune”, slumped into silent resignation, with no treatment and nothing to fill their days except the next stodgy meal, eaten with a spoon because of the risk from knives and forks. Some, however, were very troubled. In one letter, he described the long nights: “One continually hears shouts and terrible howls as of animals in a menagerie.”
Following the collapse of a proposed artistic partnership with Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh mutilated himself, cutting off his ear and presenting it, wrapped in paper, to a young woman in a local brothel. This prompted the artist’s brother and friends to judge him to be unfit to live alone.
-Source: The Guardian