This week the National Gallery opens a brilliant new show of major works by one of the most luminous and original of all European artists, Vincent Van Gogh — for whom the label “troubled genius” is a drastic understatement.
Some of the masterworks are from the last 10 weeks of his life when he had moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, after checking out of a mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He painted a picture a day for 10 weeks in a fever of activity. On the afternoon of July 27, 1890, he set out to paint tree roots.
