Behind a three-storey white house in this village north of Paris, a rickety garden table, its top painted red, is preserved from the elements in a glass cage. Battered and scarred, it is one of the world's best known pieces of furniture, immortalised in Vincent van Gogh's portrait of Dr Paul Gachet, the most expensive painting ever sold. Now Gachet's house and gardens have been opened to the public to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Van Gogh's birth, a key event in the multi-million-pound industry surrounding the penniless Dutch painter. Gachet posed for two near-identical portraits. One now belong to Paris's Musée d'Orsay and the other to a Japanese businessman who paid $82 million (£51.5m) for the version in which yellow books obscure much of the table top. A few days after the paintings were completed, Gachet was called toVan Gogh's bedside as he lay dying at the village's Auberge Ravoux from a self-inflicted bullet wound. Yet Auvers was until recent years the neglected piece in the jigsaw of Van Gogh's life. A decade ago the town on the Oise river was visited by fewer than 10,000 art lovers a year, many of them also seeking traces of Pissarro and Cézanne, also friends of Gachet. The café where Van Gogh died on 29 July, 1890, aged 37, was known for many years as the Maison de Van Gogh, but only a handful ever climbed the rickety stairs to see the cell-like room where the painter completed more than 70 pictures in the last two months of his life. This year more than 400,000 tourists will come, half of them Japanese, to see the garret and visit the ivy-covered graves of Van Gogh and his art dealer brother, Theo. Gachet's house, last owned by American art lovers who preserved much of the furniture, has been restored, and now there is access to quarries where Gachet's son hid a thousand paintings during the Second World War. Among them were portraits of Gachet's daughter Marguérite, who some speculated was the cause of Van Gogh's fatal depression. Van Gogh's correspondence with Theo dispelled that theory, but access to the house and the gardens has opened up a new channel for research into what really happened in those last 70 days. The subject is the centre of endless conversations at the Auberge Ravoux, now headquarters of the Van Gogh Institute. There has never been a satisfactory explanation of why, at the peak of his creativity, he borrowed the café owner's pistol, supposedly to shoot crows, and then turned it on himself. Gachet's son, Paul Jr, claimed Vincent suddenly became depressed when he found himself alone after Gachet went to Paris and Theo announced plans for a holiday in the Netherlands. He theorised that the mental decline could be recreated by putting the paintings into a logical order in which Auvers, brightly lit by a splendid summer, gradually descends into a sombre landscape. Frustratingly, the house contains no visual clues to the fatal crisis, as it is all but empty. But, as Van Gogh once wrote: 'Too much detail wipes out the dream
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