The Auvers Wheatfield

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.