Academy Travel Lecture Program

In the last two years of his life, Vincent van Gogh produced an extraordinary body of work that continues to move audiences more than a century later. 

Driven by an almost desperate intensity, he painted sunflowers blazing with colour, bedrooms humming with quiet anxiety, and wheatfields churning beneath turbulent skies — works that seem to pulse with an inner life entirely their own. Yet behind the canvases lay an equally remarkable story: of letters exchanged with his brother Theo, of time spent in an asylum at Saint-Rémy, and of a restless search for light and meaning that never quite found resolution.

From Arles to Auvers-sur-Oise, these final years were astonishingly productive — and astonishingly painful. That Van Gogh could transform such personal turmoil into works of such luminous beauty remains one of art history's most enduring mysteries.

In this lecture, Anne Harbers traces that journey through the paintings and letters of Van Gogh's final period, asking how these brief, brilliant years came to forever change the course of modern art.