Yesterday took me to Auvers-sur-Oise, a village outside of Paris. It’s where Charles-Francois Daubigny is from, who encouraged a number of Realist and Impressionist painters in his time. His house and studio were frequented by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and others. His house is a lovely museum now, and his studio is still owned by his descendants, who use it still for art installations and to showcase local art.

For a lot of art-lovers, the village has an even greater meaning – it’s the village where Van Gogh spent the last 70 days of his life, during which time he completed 80 paintings. The room where he died has been preserved in the same state it was after his family had collected his belongings and I will go there one day, I think.

The village is lovely and well worth a wander. The lovely folks in the Tourist Information office have put together two walking tours in and around the village, which are well worth a couple of hours wandering. Along the route are placards with paintings by Pissarro, Daubigny and Van Gogh, who spent a lot of time out in the village and the countryside, captivated by the houses, wheat fields and big blue skies in this part of France.

The cemetery up the hill from the church was new at the time of Van Gogh’s death. It is a genuinely pretty cemetery, still in use by local families, with flowers everywhere and surrounded by the wheat fields that Van Gogh loved to paint. There is a lovely interpretive panel outside of the cemetery, reproducing in full a letter sent by Emile Bernard to a mutual friend in Paris after Van Gogh’s death, describing the day of the funeral and the tributes paid by Van Gogh’s closest friends and ever-loyal brother, Theo. Theo is buried next to Vincent, arranged by Theo’s wife, Jo. Although it meant that Theo was buried a long way away from Jo and the Van Gogh family, the brothers were so close in life that Jo felt that they should rest side by side.

It’s odd in some ways to spend time retracing the steps of someone who died. I know that yesterday, I was walking along streets where Van Gogh and others had walked and stood in spots where they painted. There is always an interest in making connections, though. We are inspired by art and artists and want to see some of it for ourselves. We also want to pay tribute to the way they have moved us and made us feel, and that’s what yesterday was about for me. Like music, there are some paintings that feel like part of your soul, and some of Van Gogh’s works are that to me, including ones from his time in Auvers-sur-Oise.

Later on during this trip, I will be in the Netherlands and hope to see some of the places where Van Gogh spent his first 5 years as an artist. He was a naturally good painter and was originally inspired by the Realists and Romantic paintings of the 18th and 19th Century. In some of his early works, the level of detail and accuracy show how talented he was an Realist-style artist, something that I’ve seen some people in art museums be genuinely surprised by – his early work is worlds apart from his more famous Impressionist and post-Impressionist art, when he had freed himself to paint how he felt, as well as what he saw.

And now, a trip to the Pompidou Centre. A bientot!