This summer, Rose and I spent a wonderful week in Avignon; the whole journey was on foot or by public transport. On one of the days there we took the bus to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence to visit the asylum, Saint-Paul de Mausole, to which Van Gogh was committed for a year from May 1889. While there he completed some of his most famous works.
The walk from Saint-Rémy to the asylum is punctuated with boards with copies of paintings done during Van Gogh’s stay, together with extracts from letters written by him to friends and family. In one of the letters, to his brother, Theo, he refers to his painting ‘The Reaper’: “I then saw in this reaper … the image of death in the sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped. … But in this death there is nothing sad, it takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold.”
From what we saw, Van Gogh seems to have thought about death a lot during his time at the asylum, but not with fear.
Van Gogh’s mental illness could have caused him to shoot himself in the chest shortly after leaving the asylum [and in a wheat field!], but his lack of fear of death made me think again about why I do not fear death – not because of mental illness but with the assurance of what Jesus has prepared for me [John 14:1-2]. Van Gogh’s father was a pastor, and Van Gogh had also hoped to be a pastor, so he might have had the same assurance.