Vincent rented a modest attic room at the Auberge Ravoux for three and a half francs a night. He used the ‘Painter’s Room’ downstairs to paint and to store his canvases.

Two months later, his body would be laid out in the same room. The suicide weapon was almost certainly a pistol taken from the landlord, Arthur Ravoux.

‘When I was sitting with him and told him we would try to cure him and that we kept hoping he would be spared this sort of despair, he said: “Sadness will last forever.” I understood what he meant. Shortly afterwards, he gasped for breath and a moment later closed his eyes.’

Theo van Gogh to his sister Lies, 5 August 1890

Vincent’s body lay on his deathbed for more than a day until a coffin could be brought. Dr Paul Gachet drew this portrait of him there.

The artist’s face has been shaved, and his mutilated ear is visible. A faint geometric pattern can be made out in the drawing, as the paper was laid on a wicker chair while the charcoal was fixed.

The day he arrived in Auvers, Vincent went straight to Dr Gachet with Theo’s letter of introduction in his pocket.

The alternative physician and amateur artist (who signed his works ‘Paul van Ryssel’), did not offer him medical treatment, but talked to the artist at length and encouraged him to paint. Gachet taught Vincent how to make etchings in his studio, which is where this portrait was also made.

Fourteen years after Vincent’s death, Dr Gachet’s son painted this view of the location in Auvers where the painter shot himself.

What was almost certainly the suicide weapon was found almost seventy years later by a farmer while ploughing the fields behind the haystacks in the painting.

The calibre of the rusty pistol corresponds with the gunshot wound. The bullet itself remained in Vincent’s body. There were powder burns around the edge of the wound, suggesting that the painter was shot from very close range.

The tension caused by Gauguin’s threatened departure boiled over on 23 December 1888.

During a heated argument, Vincent became agitated and cut off his ear, which he then presented to a prostitute friend of his. The episode resulted in his hospitalisation in Arles.

Vincent was discharged from the hospital in January 1889, but he remained mentally fragile. He suffered a relapse in February, when he became convinced he had been poisoned. He was readmitted for ten days, before being allowed to return to the Yellow House.

However, the objections of local residents and fear of fresh relapses led him to commit himself voluntarily to the psychiatric clinic in Saint-Rémy.

Vincent was buried on 30 July. To make things as easy as possible for his artist friends, Theo included the train times from Paris on the funeral card.

Vincent’s paint supplier, Père Tanguy, came to the service, as did a number of artists, including Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, Auguste Lauzet and Camille Pissarro’s son.

According to Dries Bonger, what Vincent painted on the day he shot himself was a forest scene, ‘full of sun and life’: Tree Roots. The canvas is not entirely finished, and might have been intended as a kind of farewell note.

Some of the elms are on the brink of falling from the limestone wall. Their roots have loosened already; their death is inevitable. Was Vincent sketching his own situation?

The second unfinished painting found after Vincent’s death was this landscape with farms. Dries later submitted it as Village: Final Sketch for an exhibition in Paris.

It is Vincent’s second to last painting, which he probably made the day before his suicide attempt.