Card announcing Vincent van Gogh’s death
Theo was at Vincent’s deathbed, a broken man. He arranged for his brother’s body to be put in a coffin, surrounded by his paintings. On some of them the paint was still wet. Yellow flowers – dahlias and sunflowers – adorned Vincent’s coffin.
A dozen friends and acquaintances from Paris attended the funeral on the following day, Wednesday 30 July, at the small cemetery in the field outside Auvers. The funeral cortège made its way from the Ravoux’s café to the churchyard, led by a grief-stricken Theo. He was followed by friends of the brothers from Paris, the Ravoux family, and neighbours and other villagers who had known the painter in Auvers.
In the months following Vincent’s death, both Theo and his mother received numerous letters from artists, expressing their shock and deepest sympathy.
Theo wrote to his mother two days after the funeral: ‘If he could have seen how people behaved toward me when he had left us and the sympathy of so many for himself, he would at this moment not have wanted to die.’
After Vincent’s death, Theo had a mission: to cultivate understanding and appreciation for his brother’s work. Six weeks after Vincent’s death, Theo organized a memorial exhibition of his brother’s work at his own apartment in Paris. Theo’s many exertions and setbacks meant his own health was now steadily deteriorating too. Shortly after the exhibition, he resigned from Boussod with immediate effect, and promptly suffered a severe nervous breakdown. In October 1890 Theo became mentally deranged, probably as a result of advanced untreated syphilis. He was hospitalized and later transferred to a clinic in Utrecht, where he died in January 1891, six months after Vincent.
Card announcing Vincent van Gogh’s death
Paul van Ryssel (Paul-Ferdinand Gachet), Vincent van Gogh on his deathbed, 1890
Following Theo’s death, his widow Jo moved to the Dutch town of Bussum with her son Vincent Willem, taking Vincent and Theo’s art collection with her. Jo sought to raise public awareness of Vincent’s paintings in various ways, including exhibition loans to museums all over the world and sales to art dealers and collectors. More and more buyers emerged for Van Gogh’s work. In 1914, Jo published Vincent’s letters to Theo. That same year she had her husband’s remains reinterred in Auvers, in a grave next to his brother’s.
Invitation for the funeral of Vincent van Gogh
The graves of Vincent and Theo van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise