Vincent van Gogh called homes ‘human nests’, and in Auvers-sur-Oise it was a nest he was after, to regain his poise through work and rest. Loving Vincent, a Polish–English co-production, spends most of its time in Auvers, where Vincent died an arduous death in 1890, but begins in Arles, where Vincent made friends such as postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd), whose son, Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), is our film’s protagonist. Under a luminous Southern sun, mania had seized Vincent’s brain: even the joyous Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun seems feverish with heatstroke. In Saint-Rémy, recuperation led to calmer colours promising convalescence, like the paradisal chartreuse and epinard tones of Green Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889). But in Auvers, where he made seventy-seven paintings from mid-May to July 1890, there were among the thatched cottages and cypress obelisks wheat fields under troubled skies: not whorling curlicues, but ill-boding horizontal planes of deep cobalt.