Page 492 - The Secret Museum

in a vase; the other 12 stems in a vase. The drawings match up with two paintings that

belong to the Van Gogh Museum; they have the same number of flowers in the vases.
Perhaps he was sketching and remembering happier times.

Other sketches that you’d recognize as paintings include some sketches from
Daubigny’s garden and sketches of irises, olive pickers and two figures in a ravine in
Saint-Rémy. He called his Irises ‘the lightning conductor for my illness’; by painting
them, he thought he could ground his mind and make himself feel better. Now, the
painting belongs to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and is one of the most
expensive paintings ever bought – for a secret sum.

Van Gogh shot himself believing that he was a failure, and a lot of his family

thought the same thing. When Theo died half a year after his brother, the family
washed its hands of the paintings, and it fell to Theo’s wife and son to take care of
the estate.

In her lifetime, Theo’s wife saw her brother-in-law’s work go from being
worthless to being among the most prized paintings in the world. The city of
Amsterdam built the museum where his sketchbooks live so as to exhibit and
conserve his work. I wonder, if he had known what would become of his paintings,
would he have shot himself? And, if he had not, what other paintings might he have

produced?
After I had looked at the priceless sketchbooks, the curators who showed them to

me let me peek into other back rooms. We went into a photography studio, where The
Harvest, absent from its usual spot on the museum wall, was being photographed. It
was at the centre of a wheel lit with nine bright spotlights. What would Vincent have
made of the care and precision with which it was being recorded, or indeed of the
queues outside to see his work?

Afterwards, we visited the painting storage rooms. I saw Vincent van Gogh
himself. His cool green eyes stared out from a painting: Self-Portrait with Felt Hat.
It’s a small image of the red-bearded artist wearing a brown hat, a white shirt and a

blue-brown jacket. His eyes are alarming, his face is serious, and seeing him
reminded me of what Madame Calment had said about the man she once served in a
shop in Arles.

This painting of van Gogh’s face was in storage because it was about to be
reframed and sent to Japan for an exhibition. I liked the idea of van Gogh going to
Japan. He loved their art, and would have loved to know that they, in turn, liked his.