Court battle over who owns famous van Gogh roots is tearing French village apart
A tangled clump of tree roots that inspired Vincent van Gogh's final painting are at the centre of a heated legal battle between French villagers and their mayor.
Five years ago, art experts concluded that a system of exposed, gnarly roots along the side of a road in Auvers-sur-Oise on the outskirts of Paris, were those depicted in Tree Roots, the artist's last work.
It is believed that he painted the piece just hours before he died in 1890, after shooting himself in the chest with a revolver.
News of the location shook the art world. The small village, located about an hour north of Paris where van Gogh spent the last two months of his life, attracted international media in the summer of 2020 and a steady stream of eager pilgrims.
But the discovery has since become the subject of a pitched war between the town over whether the roots belong to the municipality or property owners Jean-François Serlinger and his wife Hélène, who is also an artist who moved to the village to live where van Gogh had worked.
Last month, French courts sided with the Serlingers and ruled that the roots painted by van Gogh are on their property, marking the second legal victory for the couple.
'The embankment containing the tree roots painted by Vincent van Gogh does not constitute an accessory to the public highway,' the Versailles Administrative Court of Appeal wrote in their decision.
But for Isabelle Mézières, the mayor of Auvers-sur-Oise, the fight is far from over.
'The roots belong to the people of Auvers!' she wrote this month, adding that she plans to file another appeal.
'There's no way we're going to surrender the public interest of the people of Auvers in the face of private interests. The question of ownership has not been settled.'
The couple moved to the village in the mid-1990s and purchased an extra parcel of land in 2013, not knowing that they had also bought an important part of art history.
Since the discovery, the Serlingers have launched guided tours called 'The Mystery of van Gogh's Roots' in collaboration with the van Gogh Europe Foundation.
Auvers will not 'abandon its roots'
Tickets are €8 (£7), and visitors are led on a 30-minute tour that traces the artist's life and work throughout the town, including the tree roots on their property.
The tours offer an 'immersive experience' of the area that is 'deeply linked' to the artist's final painting and last stretch of his life, according to the site.
Despite the municipality losing their case twice in a row, the town has vowed to try a third time.
'We are considering a possible appeal,' Michel Gentilhomme, the town's lawyer, told Le Parisien.
'There is a desire for private individuals to appropriate this property, in the interest of the municipality's residents. This issue must be resolved so that the municipality is not criticised for having abandoned its roots.'
For their part, the Serlingers said they wanted to 'turn the page' and put the legal battle behind them, while pursuing other ways to develop the site.
'There's no doubt about it, we own the land right down to the street,' the couple told Le Parisien. 'We've won a second time. We're within our rights.'
The initial connection between the local roots and the painting was made in 2020, when Wouter van der Veen, a local van Gogh expert, stumbled on an old black and white postcard in his collection that showed a man walking his bike along the village's Rue Daubigny.
The familiar ancient roots growing out of the road caught his eye and, in a eureka moment, he made the connection between the photo and the painting.
The new tourist season officially started on Saturday, which came with an air of tension in the village amid the ongoing row.
'It created a deep sense of insecurity around a site that calls for calm and serenity,' Mr. Serlinger told The New York Times. 'We have a feeling of insecurity with a mayor who is still in a war.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Sharing a bed with Edmund White
Photo by Peter Kevin Solness / Fairfax Media via Getty Images For a time, Edmund White and I slept in a bed reputed to have belonged to Walt Whitman. We were both living in New York and teaching at Princeton. When we had to stay the night, we were hosted by a friend who lived on the edge of the campus. In his guest room was a dark wood bed purchased in the 1950s from an antique dealer who produced the story of its connection to the 19th-century American poet. Whatever the truth, on our separate nights, Edmund and I both slept in 'Whitman's bed', smoothing the unchanged sheets in the mornings to maintain the fiction that it had not been slept in by anyone else. Eventually, Edmund wrote a poem about it, describing himself, an aged gay novelist, chastely reading Chekhov's stories, and a British PhD student who was the object of his erotic fantasy, both sharing the great gay poet's bed. 'My first poem since 1985', he told me untruthfully in an email. Edmund, who died this week at the age of 85, was perhaps America's greatest living gay writer. The author of more than 30 books, including novels, memoirs, and biographies of Proust, Genet, and Rimbaud, he occupied a unique position in American literature. I first met Edmund in Princeton, where he was a professor of creative writing until 2018, at a weekly dinner that he hosted with the owner of 'Whitman's bed' – the philosopher George Pitcher. The evening before Edmund taught his class, he and his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, would travel down to Princeton, stay with George, and take a group of PhD students out to dinner at a local restaurant. The dinners were a finely honed ritual: George, then in his early nineties, would use a flashlight on his key ring to inspect the menu. Someone would order a bottle of white wine. And the PhD students would attempt to keep up with Edmund and Michael's wit. Edmund was a conversationalist of the kind I associate with 18th-century philosophers: intellectually curious but also a master of levity, ranging from minor French literature to celebrity gossip. He once recalled a dinner with Michel Foucault to which he had also invited Susan Sontag. When she went to the bathroom, Foucault hissed at Edmund: 'Why did you invite her? She only ever talks about work!' Edmund's life informed his literature in a special way. In The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (2025), his last published work, he writes: 'I'm at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them – for me it would be thousands of sex partners.' This is another connection with his 19th-century predecessor, as his Princeton colleague Jeff Nunokawa points out: 'Ed believes with a Whitmanesque unabashedness that sex is an instrument of knowledge.' His promiscuity gives his work an epic quality. His oeuvreis, in one sense, a story of America in the second half of the 20th century: its husbands and hustlers observed in their most intimate moments. In The Loves of My Life, he writes: 'I remember a big Southerner who fucked me as I wiggled my butt to show passion, though he kept saying in his baritone drawl, 'Just lay still, little honey.' More wiggling and he'd say, 'C'mon, baby, just lay still for me.' I thought his bad grammar proved he was a lifelong top. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe There is also an unignorable darkness in Edmund's account of desire. As a child, he was sent to a Freudian therapist who pronounced his sexuality pathological. His most well-known book A Boy's Own Story (1982) features a boy who seduces his teacher, only to betray him. To readers who complained that this was unbelievable, Edmund wrote: 'how could the product of an oppressive culture not be deformed?' In time, he outgrew the belief that his desires were curable. He witnessed the Stonewall riots, in the summer of 1969, after a police raid on a popular gay bar. Recalling the laughter, Edmund called it 'the first funny revolution', but emphasised its importance: 'Stonewall inaugurated an epoch when partners of the same sex could claim, maybe for the first time in history, their common humanity.' Like Whitman and the American Civil War, this revolution required its writers, and Edmund would be one of them. After becoming HIV positive in 1984, Edmund was found to be a 'long-term non-progressor', a condition affecting 1 in 500 people infected with HIV. It meant that he would not die from AIDS. Instead, he watched his friends and acquaintances die, and his own writing became a record of the disease and the political intolerance that met it. In Artforum in 1987, he wrote: 'I feel repatriated to my lonely adolescence, the time when I was alone with my writing and I felt weird about being a queer.' Unlike so many gay writers of his generation, Edmund lived long enough to see himself be celebrated as a legend. He spent his summers in Europe and winters in Florida. He was made the director of creative writing at Princeton, until, according to his friend and colleague Joyce Carol Oates, he realised that he would not be able to spend the first week of every January in Key West. At this point, he 'graciously resigned'. Success, inevitably, brought criticism. A review of The Loves of My Life by James Cahill in The Spectator called it 'lurid.' Edmund had cleverly anticipated this, noting in the book's introduction that 'sex writing can seem foolish, especially to the English.' It is his openness to and about sex that will grant Edmund's work its enduring significance, and which makes it feel vital for an era threatened both by a new puritanism and an even more repressive 'anti-wokeness'. His funny, detailed, historiographical writing makes sex appear motivated more by curiosity than appetite. 'I always feel as if I don't really know people unless I've gone to bed with him,' he claimed. I loved visiting Edmund and Michael's apartment in the West Village, the walls stacked to the roof with books. The dinner conversations were full of warmth and wit and smut. I simply expected to see him again. His long life and many books are something to be grateful for and amazed by. My friend Amelia Worsley, who visited him at home a few days before his sudden death, writes: 'I was amazed when Stan, one of Edmund's first loves, stopped by the apartment. We talked about the glamour of New York in the 1960s and the AIDS crisis that followed. 'It's a wonder that I am still alive,' Stan said to Edmund, 'And a wonder you are too.'' [See also: Alan Hollinghurst's English underground] Related
Time Out
9 hours ago
- Time Out
Legendary celeb hotspot Drai's is finally coming to New York City
Usually it's the other way around: New York restaurants getting cloned in Las Vegas. But now, Vegas is sending one of its own to the Big Apple: Drai's Supper Club, an offshoot of the celeb-loved brand with a three-decade legacy, is making its East Coast debut in Manhattan's Meatpacking District on Wednesday, June 11. And if you're thinking this is just a flashy outpost, you'll stand corrected: It's a full-on reinvention. Founded in L.A. in 1993 by nightlife impresario Victor Drai and frequented by everyone from Julia Roberts to The Weeknd, Drai's built its rep as a see-and-be-seen spot for high-end dining and entertainment. Now, Victor's 31-year-old son, Dustin Drai, president of Drai's Management Group, is bringing the brand full circle with a glamorous New York City location that honors its glitzy West Coast roots while going all in on food, flair and jazz. 'Bringing Drai's to New York City with this supper club concept is incredibly meaningful for me,' Drai told Time Out. 'It's an homage to where our brand began, a return to the sophisticated dining experience that laid our foundation. We're trying to get back to what we were, but with a more modern feel for today.' Set at 244 W. 14th Street, in the former home of iconic club Nell's, the space has undergone a full gut renovation: walls have been opened, ceilings have been raised and the kitchen was rebuilt from scratch. Upstairs, guests will find an elegant dining room with floral-accented chairs, live jazz five nights a week and a menu of French-American classics from Executive Chef Yoo Hyun Suk. Downstairs is a moody lounge with clubby vibes and an evolving cocktail program, with a menu of vintage martinis and espresso flights. 'Food is the biggest component,' Drai said. 'In somewhere like New York, how do you stand out? We wanted the venue to speak for itself with amazing food that's colorful and simple.' Expect elevated takes on Caesar salad, foie gras and a burrata-tomato tart, but Drai is particularly proud of the steak: 'We have the best steak au poivre in the city. It's a big statement, but I stand by that.' Don't let the black-and-gold facade fool you—this isn't a Vegas-style nightclub transplant. It's a primetime date night destination, with blues and jazz floating through the room, big portions, a retro-luxe atmosphere and a vibe that encourages conversation, not bottle service. Or as Drai puts it: 'Come for dinner, then go downstairs to the lounge—one stop.'
Scottish Sun
10 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Illegal immigrants back smuggling themselves into Britain in lorries – as number caught surges by a quarter
ILLEGAL immigrants who smuggled themselves into Britain in the back of a truck were arrested yesterday — the latest seized amid a shock rise in people hiding in lorries. In the past year, the number of illegal stowaways caught in HGVs at Channel ports has leapt by nearly a quarter. 6 The migrants jumped from the back of a lorry and made a run for it at a Sainsbury's distribution centre in Charlton, South East London Credit: Supplied 6 Police were called at 8am and arrested nine men in relation to immigration offences Credit: Supplied 6 A picture of migrants hiding on a lorry in 2018 - before most switched to small-boat crossings Credit: Jamie Lorriman - The Sun Until 2018 this was the main method employed by migrants desperate to reach the UK. Since then, small boat crossings have boomed. Yesterday, 13 migrants jumped from the back of a lorry and made a run for it at a Sainsbury's distribution centre in Charlton, South East London. Police were called at 8am and arrested nine men in relation to immigration offences. They were taken into custody for questioning. Four others underwent an age assessment which later proved they were over 18. The Met Police said inquiries are ongoing. It is understood the migrants had sneaked into the back of an HGV travelling from Spain. Exclusive photos obtained by The Sun show the group outside the distribution centre after trying to flee. A trucker who saw the drama said: 'A few of us were standing around the yard when a driver from an outside company delivering goods from Spain came in. 'He parked, opened the back door of his lorry up, and out came around a dozen immigrants. 'They started running around the yard trying to get out, but they didn't get very far. Starmer 'loses control' as over 1,000 migrants cross Channel in biggest daily total of 2025 – as French cops watch on 'Someone from the office noticed and the managers came out and were trying to contain them all. 'I don't think the lorry driver had a clue they were in his vehicle. 'It took everyone by surprise.' 6 A spokesman for Wincanton, which operates the distribution centre, said: 'We are co-operating with the police and cannot comment further due to the ongoing investigation.' There has been a sharp rise in attempted illegal lorry crossings in the past year. Figures show 5,874 migrants were detected at ports on the continent, including Calais, Dunkirk and the Channel Tunnel in Coquelles. That is a 22 per cent rise compared with the 4,794 caught in 2023. While migrants crossing the Channel are easily recorded, lorry stowaways may reach the UK undetected. But the method is fraught with danger. In 2019, the bodies of 39 Vietnamese migrants were discovered in a trailer in Grays, Essex. They had suffocated during the journey from Belgium. And last year, ferry staff discovered seven Vietnamese migrants crammed inside a tiny compartment in a van at Newhaven, East Sussex. More than 44,000 people are known to have arrived in the UK illegally last year — by small boat, in the back of lorries, using fake documents and hiding in car boots. Small boat arrivals made up 86 per cent in the year to March, totalling 38,023. Another 2,585 were found within 72 hours of sneaking into Britain via other methods. Home Office data shows most were from Sudan, followed by Iran and Iraq. Some 3,240 were stopped by Border Force at British airports trying to use fake passports and documents. But the number caught at our ports has fallen by 74 per cent since 2018 as small boat crossings have risen. In the year to March, only 277 migrants were detected. Since 2018, more than two thirds of irregular arrivals have been men above the age of 18. Meanwhile, frontline officers warn criminals will exploit budget cuts to Border Force. The department is among those expected to bear the brunt of savings in the Government's spending review next month. One insider told The Times that a reduction in frontline staff would be a 'threat to national security'. 6 The migrants wander around a Sainsbury's distribution centre in Charlton, South East London, after jumping from the back of a lorry Credit: Supplied 6 Despite most illegal migrants entering via the Channel, the number of stowaways found in lorries has surged by almost a quarter since 2023 (stock picture) Credit: Getty
