“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.” Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh would have been surprised to know what happened to his painting, Landscape with House and Ploughman, which he painted during the autumn of his stay in Saint-Rémy?
How did his painting come to be in Russia’s Hermitage Museum?
Here is what is known: Vincent van Gogh created the painting in 1889, but it seems to have disappeared until the the decade of the 1920’s. Otto Krebs, a German industrialist, who lived 1873 – 1941, had it in his collection.
In all of the upheaval of the next decade, the painting was lost until 1995, when it suddenly appeared in an exhibition of 74 artworks looted by the Soviet Union at at the end of WWII.
The world changed dramatically over the course of a century, but Vincent van Gogh’s painting remaines ever fresh, ever vibrant. Today, it continues to be displayed in the Hermitage Museum.
“I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.” Vincent Willem van Gogh
On 8 May 1889, after months of hospital treatment in Arles, Vincent allowed himself to be committed to the Saint-Paul de Mausole psychiatric institution in Saint-Rémy de Provence. He was treated by Dr Théophile Peyron. In between attacks, Vincent made numerous paintings and drawings, first in the asylum and its gardens and later beyond, among the olive gardens and cypresses, in the Alpilles mountains and in the village. Saint-Rémy served as the setting for many of his most famous works. After a little more than a year, on 16 May 1890, he left for Auvers-sur-Oise, wishing to return to the north and tired of being in the asylum. Dr Peyron had also pronounced him cured.