Archive for 2019-07-14

In the heat of the summer in 1890, Vincent van Gogh stumbled into his boarding house in rural Auvers-sur-Oise, outside of suburban Paris. He was bleeding, clutching his torso. He made it upstairs to his spartan room, took to his bed, and died two days later.

Only 37 years old, he had shot himself in the chest, ultimately succumbing not to the initial wound, but to the resulting infection from the lodged bullet. His suicide was a surprise to some, having spent the previous months madly spitting out canvas after canvas of the bucolic countryside. He was buried, the day after he died, in the village public cemetery.

Van Gogh’s grave is as modest as his reputation was at the time, befitting an artist who had sold only one painting during his too-brief life. But his influence as a transformative modernist was more widely known and admired in Impressionist circles in Paris, and his burial was attended not only by his devoted brother Theo and villagers who had grown fond of him, but by a small cohort of the Parisian art community as well—including painters Lucien Pissarro, Charles Laval and Émile Bernard, and the well-known art dealer Julien Tanguy.

Six months later, Theo—who is thought to have been suffering from syphilis—died at the age of 33. He was buried in Utrecht, about 50 miles from where the brothers were born in Zundert, Netherlands. His body stayed in Utrecht until 1914, when the family had it exhumed and transported to join his brother, and they were reunited.

Many of van Gogh’s paintings from his time in Auvers are as bold and dramatic as any of his greatest works. Wheat and corn fields, farm cottages, expressive blue skies—all of the scenes that surround the quiet country cemetery where he’s laid to rest with his dear brother Theo, Vincent’s champion in life and art, by his side.

Know Before You Go

Auvers-sur-Oise is about 20 miles north of Paris. The cemetery is just north of the town center, a 10 minute walk from Gare d'Auvers, the inn / boarding house where Van Gogh spent the last few months of his life.

The cemetery is open to the public, and can be visited every day during daylight hours.

ALMOST HIDDEN AWAY INSIDE A glass cabinet in one of the more obscure hallways of the Musée de l’Armée in Paris is a small taxidermy horse, a crack running down its shoulder like a fault line. These are the remains of Vizir, Napoleon Bonaparte’s grey Arabian stallion that accompanied the deposed emperor to Elba.

Vizir was hardly Napoleon’s only horse. According to the Musée de l’Armée, over the 14 years of Napoleon’s reign he used 130 horses (here’s a rambling list of them). And the stallion wasn’t Napoleon’s most famous horse either, that would go to Marengo, a charger who served and was captured at Waterloo, his skeleton still a British trophy at the Imperial War Museum in London.

But Vizir was the last horse to keep Napoleon company out in exile, and now serves as the only taxidermy reminder of all his fellow steeds employed by Napoleon in his rise and fall from power.

Painting of Le Vizir by Pierre Martinet (via Musées de France)

Napoleon preferred small, spry horses, rather than the thoroughbreds favored by his officers, although not because of his stature (his low height is mostly a myth anyway). Rather, he just wasn’t a terribly great horseman. Not having grown up wealthy in Corsica, he didn’t start riding until his military career. Yet later he would pose on horseback in his most famous portraits, such as the famous 1803 painting of “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” by Jacques-Louis David (believed to depict Marengo) where man and horse rear up on a stormy, mountainous landscape, his red cape flowing like the horse’s mane. The paintings suggest a fierce pride in both his power and that of the animals he rode.

As for Vizir, he was a friendship gift from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. As far as it’s known, Vizir is the only one of Napoleon’s horses to end up in taxidermy, and he spent some time in a museum in Manchester before arriving at the Louvre in 1868, being forgotten in the attic for a time, and then transported to the Musée de l’Armée after the War of 1870.

This was, of course, a few decades after Vizir’s death, so how were they sure it was him? A brand on the horse’s haunches bears an “N” topped with a crown.

Archive photograph of “le Vizir” with Napoleon’s dog.

The Musée de l’Armée offers a careful bit of doubt in their take on the story — stating “si c’est bien lui,” “if it’s indeed him” — but from most accounts the monogrammed horse was long ago the last equine companion of Napoleon. He’s shrunk down a bit from botched restorations, and the taxidermy dog who accompanied Napoleon on Saint Helena and once stood alongside Vizir in the museum now seems to have been removed from display.

Yet even in his shoddy state, his fur worn down in places to the tanned skin, his glass case unglamorously positioned by a museum restroom, Vizir is just a few minutes walk from the grand tomb of Napoleon himself at les Invalides. Even in death, Vizir remains the closest final animal companion of the once-emperor.

Vizir in the hallway of the Musée de l’Armée

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