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This is the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France, near Arles, where Vincent van Gogh lived for a year and eight days—from May 1889 to May 1890—under medical treatment. The exact nature of his illness remains uncertain even today. The most famous symptom, of course, was his impulsive act of cutting off his own earlobe and giving it to a prostitute in Arles. Yet Van Gogh’s letters from the asylum reveal an astonishing empathy and self-awareness. “Though you continually hear terrible cries and howls like beasts in a menagerie,” he wrote, “people get to know each other very well and help each other when their attacks come on. When I’m working in the garden, they all come to look, and they have more discretion and good manners to leave me alone than the good people of Arles.” He wrote too, “There are people who love nature, even though they are cracked or ill—those are the painters. Though some patients here are very seriously ill, the fear and horror of madness that I used to have is already much lessened.”

In Saint-Rémy, every object he saw seemed charged with energy. His vision fused the physical and the spiritual until everything appeared made from the same living substance—the same plasma of existence. It was within this heightened state that Van Gogh created some of his most transcendent paintings, transforming inner turmoil into radiant, pulsing life on canvas.