The Hunt for Clarity About van Gogh’s Last Days Leads to Maine

Experts are examining a watercolor found in an antiques shop that may be a rare work by Edmund Walpole Brooke, who painted with van Gogh during his final months.

The 19th-century painter Edmund Walpole Brooke occupies a tiny, but durable place in art history. Not because of his own work, but because he offers a tantalizing look into the tragic last days of Vincent van Gogh. That the two shared something close to friendship during the weeks before van Gogh committed suicide in July 1890 was a noteworthy feat given van Gogh’s embrace of isolation during his stay in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village on the northwestern outskirts of Paris. But Brooke had grown up in Japan, a place that fascinated and inspired the Dutch painter. And so off they would go into the plein air on painting excursions, their relationship chronicled in a few letters that have made Brooke an intriguing figure to a van Gogh scholar who is still struggling to understand what led him to put a bullet in his chest.