Vincent Vangogh identified as a cruxified Jesus with surrogate mother Vergin zmary lamenting under the dead body of Jesus Christ in order to gave his surrogate mother Rachel a segment of his dead body he repeated the scene on calvary. For van Gogh, the story ends conclusively: the Yellow House empty, the dream of community gone, the asylum’s doors the only ones open to him. He left the hospital in January and returned to the town, but his behavior was so strange that the people of Arles put together a petition to have him committed to an asylum or sent back to his family—breaking for good the vestiges of his dream of an organic rural community. Arles was as tight and closed and suspicious as any other small town. In his letters, the old fantasy, the fishermen and the monks, disappears, and the one time that he mentions it there is a new and sadly chastened tone. To Theo he wrote: Poor egotist that I’ve always been and still am now, I can’t shake off this idea, which, however, I’ve already explained to you two or three times, that it’s thus for the best that I go into an asylum right now. It will perhaps turn out all right in the end. . . . However, the fact that the idea of an association of painters, of housing them together, some of them, although we haven’t succeeded, although it’s a deplorable and painful failure—this idea remains true and reasonable—like so many others. BUT NO BEGINNING AGAIN. Yet the Christmas crisis proved instructive, too. “Among artists, we no longer know what to say to each other, we don’t know if we ought to laugh or cry about it, and doing, my word, neither one thing nor the other, we are happiest when we find ourselves in possession of a little paint and canvas, the thing we also lack sometimes,” he wrote to his sister