Van Gogh's Finale is the last volume on Van Gogh's time in France from Martin Bailey and may well be the most interesting. Which is saying a lot since I found the others very good. If you're interested, the others are The Sunflowers are Mine, Studio of the South, and Starry Night.

It has almost become cliché to pronounce how much one likes Van Gogh's work or how often we have visited the museum or walked some part of his own life's path, so many of us have that it really means very little. What it does signify, however, is how deeply and how personally his work has touched so many people. Take any ten of us who admire his work and visited sites, museum or otherwise, just to feel a bit closer, and you'll likely get ten very different ways in which his life and work touched us. And there lies a large part of his popularity.

This volume covers the last days of his life, and the final burst of creativity that produced many of his best works. In addition to the many paintings he produced as many drawings in that time as well. Yet this was how he worked once he became an artist. He seemed to know he would not live a long life so had to paint at almost every moment, or at least be thinking about his next painting.

If you are familiar with the weak, but popularized, theory that he was accidentally shot rather than committed suicide, Bailey presents the evidence that pretty much makes that argument impossible. It is hard to accidentally shoot someone if you've already left town. In addition to that simple fact there are plenty of logical reasons to not believe the other story.

I found particularly fascinating the story of how, after death, he and his work steadily gained in popularity. This section of the book may well be my favorite single section of all four of Bailey's books. Again, I found the rest to be engrossing as well but the reception, popular and critical, just happens to be what grabbed me this time through the book.

I would highly recommend this to anyone with an interest in art in general and in Van Gogh in particular. The writing is very good and the illustrations are great. A beautiful addition to any library.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

When I was twenty I purchased a packet of reproductions of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings to decorate the apartment. When I was in my forties, his Sunflower painting inspired my color choice for my Sunflower applique quilt.

I don’t recall when I first saw his work, it seems he was always present in our culture. This year, an immersive experience of his work has been touring around the country and I know quite a few who attended, even in the middle of a pandemic.

It is amazing to consider that he only sold one painting in his lifetime because what he was doing so radically new and disconcerting. Today, his paintings are everyone’s favorites, his story known, from Irving Stone’s novel Lust for Life and the movie made of it, and even from Don McLean’s song Starry, Starry Night. You even see his images in commercials on television.

Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame studies Van Gogh’s last seventy days of life in Auvers and the seventy paintings he accomplished in those days.

After his falling out with fellow artist Paul Gaugin, and his self-mutilation of his ear; after his time in the asylum and several attempts to end his life; Van Gogh traveled to Auvers to recover. Dr. Paul Gachet welcomed him into his circle as part of his supervision of Van Gogh. The artist set up in a cheap room and every morning set out to paint the village and the wheat fields. He also painted the Doctor and his family and their home. His art was a refuge and a therapy. When Van Gogh ran out of canvas, he painted on linen towels!

Gorgeous color illustrations of the paintings bring the text to life as author Martin Bailey discusses the works.

During this time, Van Gogh was visited by, and visited, his beloved brother Theo and his young wife Jo and their baby Vincent Willem. Van Gogh loved them all, so it was hard to see his brother in ill health, Jo tired after childbirth, and perhaps suffering from post-partem depression, and the baby was not thriving and their finances precarious.

The author discusses the huge, unpeopled, wheat fields, the ripe fields being harvested, as symbols of Van Gogh’s feelings of isolation, loneliness, his awareness of mortality. There is discussion over which was his last painting, but one of the last was the Wheatfield with Crows with its ominous, dark sky, the hovering crows black over a wheat field like a tumultuous sea.

If during Vincent’s visit Theo had confided his condition–that he had symptoms of dementia paralytica from terminal syphilis and was failing–could that have precipitated the artist’s action to end his life?

Bailey actually held the rusted remains of the gun found where Van Gogh shot himself and which was perhaps the weapon he used. Having missed his targeted heart, Van Gogh lingered before death, in great pain, smoking his pipe and talking with his friend Dr. Gachet, who sketched his deathbed portrait.

Bailey then turns his attention to Van Gogh’s rising fame, how after Theo’s death, Jo dedicated her life to the work of the men she loved so well, promoting the paintings and finding buyers.

In 2022, the Detroit Institute of Art will present Van Gogh in America. The DIA was the first American museum to purchase a Van Gogh, his 1887 self-portrait. The DIA also owns a painting from Van Gogh’s time in Auvers, Bank of the Oise at Auvers. There will be sixty-five paintings. I can’t wait to see it.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased. ( )