Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

Yeah, so I read this morning that it was painted in 1889.

It's one of a series of several hundred paintings that Van Gogh made at the Saint-Paul-de-Mozolle Asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, and that he did it in the last year before his death in 1890.

I found that very striking, just placing it in that setting or imagining him as the artist creating it at that time in his life and in that place.

It is so sad in a way, that creation of beauty, I suppose, and awe in an asylum, and also knowing that he died only a year later.

Yeah.

And they often do that, by the way, when they're at their residences in Tuscany or in Saint-Rémy in the south of France.

The VCs are quite vocal when they're on vacation in the south of France.

Oh,

Oh, no, no, it's fine.

Saint-Rémy.

You been? Of

course.

I love a big moment.

And that was, God, now I feel seen because that's kind of why I proposed.

I was in Saint-Rémy.

She had a couple work calls, so I went out for a stroll.

Mm.

Because Vincent van Gogh painted this image in the summer of eighteen eighty-nine when he was in a psychiatric clinic, not in Arles, which is where we left him at the end of last episode, but nearby, just outside a village called Saint-Rémy.

And he was there for about a year, and one of the fascinating things is that it was this feverish period, wasn't it-

Mm.

And like a kind of celebrity who gets caught for sexual harassment and then quickly checks themselves into the priory to avoid- [laughs] ... any scrutiny, it seems that Vincent very quickly decided, perhaps for his own safety- Yes ... or perhaps to reassure Theo and the community in Arles, that he would commit himself to a psychiatric hospital.

And that is what he does.

On the eighth of May, eighteen eighty-nine, he goes to this small, I think it's a church-affiliated psychiatric hospital, an asylum as it would be called back then, in a place called Saint-Rémy, which is, I think about fifteen miles a-or so away from Arles.

It, it must be something like that.