A row over the ownership of the tree roots that figured in the last painting by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh continues to rage in the French village of  Auvers-sur-Oise.

Last week, a French court decided the 350-year-old roots belong to the owner of the garden in which the roots are located, much to the chagrin of mayor Isabelle Mézières who has now vowed to take the case to the highest court.

Mézière said in her Facebook post that the roots are  “a common good” and” not a commercial enterprise”. The current owners, the Serlinger family, who bought the property in 2013, are currently charging €8 per visit.

They did not discover until seven years after the purchase that the roots in their garden had a connection with Van Gogh, who spent his final days in the village.

It was Wouter van Veen, director of the Institut Van Gogh, who discovered the site in a postcard of Auvers-sur-Oise from between 1900 and 1910. “On that postcard, you can see a man with a bicycle and behind him a hill with a remarkable tree structure,” Van der Veen told Nieuwsuur in 2020.

The scene reminded him of the gnarled tree motif in Van Gogh’s Boomwortels (tree roots) from 1890. The were a lot of similar features that made a lot of sense to me. The site is at 150 metres of the Ravoux Inn, where Van Gogh was staying at the time,” he said.

A few hours after Van Gogh finished the painting, he shot himself in the chest. He died two days later.

Further investigations by the Van Gogh museum and other experts have confirmed the contested roots are those Van Gogh painted.

The roots reportedly attract some 300,000 people a year, and the Serlingers also organise guided tours. Mézières has accused them of “shamelessly exploiting” what she claimed was part of the public space because it verges on a public road.

The last court decision puts the owners, who have said they are safeguarding the integrity of the site, in the right for the second time. However the mayor has said she will go to the highest authority in the land to “preserve the heritage of the Auversois”.