Auvers the rainbow

Our Sunday jaunt was to Auvers-sur-Oise, a 45 minute motorway mix-up away.
The atmosphere is as far removed from Paris as a village in the Midi and it was here that Vincent van Gogh spent the last 2 months of his life, dying from self-inflicted bullet wounds after 2 days of agony, in the arms of his kind, loving brother Theo, who died six months later from a broken heart.
They are buried side by side in the village graveyard, overlooking Vincent's beloved cornfields; their simple headstones linked by a single covering of ivy.

Vincent arrived in Auvers on May 20th 1890 after spending a year voluntarily in hospital in Saint Rémy. He stopped off to see Theo in Paris , couldn't stand the noise and dog muck (I made that bit up but who knows..?) and took the train to Auvers to stay in an attic room above Ravoux's café-restaurant. By the next day he had painted his first canvas of cottages in Auvers, which now hangs in the Hermitage Museum.

He continued to paint in a frenzy, finishing at least 26 works, hoping that one day he would have his own exhibition in a café.