# The Auvers Wheatfield *A Biography of Vincent Van Gogh* — Legendary Biographies No. 219 - **Subject:** Vincent Willem van Gogh - **Written by:** Sofía Estrada - **Shelf:** Art & Design / Visual Art - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 157 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 157 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-146-8) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Adam Frasier (ISBN 979-8-90623-243-4) - **Content notes:** mental illness; suicide Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/219-the-auvers-wheatfield.html ## About this book July 27, 1890, a wheatfield outside the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, twenty-five kilometres north of Paris. Vincent Willem van Gogh, thirty-seven, the Dutch painter who has produced approximately two thousand works in the previous ten years and sold one, shoots himself in the chest with a revolver. He walks back to the Ravoux Inn in the village. He dies in his bed in his attic room two days later, with his brother Theo beside him. His last words: "La tristesse durera toujours." The sadness will last forever. Sofía Estrada's biography opens earlier — in Zundert, the Brabant village where Vincent was born in 1853, the eldest of six children of a Dutch Reformed pastor — and follows the arc through the long Goupil & Cie art-dealer apprenticeship, the Borinage Belgian-coalfield missionary year, the 1881 turn to painting at twenty-seven, the long Hague and Drenthe and Nuenen studio years and The Potato Eaters, the 1886 move to Paris and Theo's Cormon studio, the long winter of friendship with Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, the 1888 move to Arles and the Yellow House and the Sunflowers, the December 1888 ear incident after Gauguin's arrival, the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence asylum year of 1889 and the Starry Night, the May 1890 move to Auvers-sur-Oise under Dr. Gachet, and the July 27 wheatfield. What emerges is a portrait of the Dutch painter whose ten years of production — sold once, kept by his brother's family until the wife Johanna Bonger turned the catalog into the modern record — built the visual grammar of post-impressionism. ## Contents 1. The Grave with His Name 2. Goupil 3. The Failed Preacher 4. Cuesmes 5. Kee 6. Sorrow 7. Drenthe and Nuenen 8. Antwerp and the Train to Paris 9. Cormon's Atelier 10. Arles in Snow 11. Sunflowers 12. The Yellow House 13. The Petition 14. Saint-Rémy 15. Auvers 16. The Last Letter 17. Thirty Hours 18. The Sadness Will Last Forever ## Questions **Who is The Auvers Wheatfield about?** Vincent Willem van Gogh. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Auvers Wheatfield — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,239 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 157 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: mental illness; suicide. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Sofía Estrada is a Madrid-based art critic whose biographies of women artists have been translated into eleven languages. She writes about painters, performance artists, and photographers whose work has historically been undervalued by the market and the museum. In her books, including The Body and the Brush and The Charwoman Photograph, she combines meticulous archival research with vivid narrative prose. She has also examined urban installations in The Subway Chalk Years and late-nineteenth-century landscapes in The Auvers Wheatfield. She lives in the Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid, where she contributes to local art journals and walks her two rescue greyhounds daily.