All program, they repeated that van Gogh was rejected by women and after his first rejection, he never fell in love again and then, as in a cheap love story, they suddenly tell to you that he fell in love with another woman and then he rejected another woman who fell in love with him and, because of his rejection, she committed suicide .
Second common lie about him seems that he never studied art but, according to history, he was born to a very artistic family and studied art all his life in different academies in England, Belgium, France and Holland.
All his life he did what he wanted to do, his brother paid all his expenses, Van Gogh never learn to compromise with anything .
Van Gogh had everything for success: he was born in the right family; he worked very hard; he studied art and developed in art all his life, I would say he was married to art; and he had the right artist friends as well.
When coming to the value of his paintings, I do not understand the art critics who say that people pay for his art millions because they love his expression of emotions, but – for sure art critics are the first who should to know – the public are afraid of real emotions in art, they like to buy what looks ordinary and safe. People buy van Gogh because of his name, I do not believe there are many collectors who own his paintings that really appreciate his art or understand it.
All the history of van Gogh looks for me as made up; when pieces of his life that look commercial are highlighted and other pieces of his life are suppressed. For example, it sounds as though this Provence village send van Gogh really mad and, if you know his personality a little bit, you can see what can happen when all the village rejected him when he was full of hope but had no ability to compromise; the first sign of a cry for help that I see, was when he started to ask his brother all the time send to him yellow colour. It was not the sun of Provence that made him paint yellow, it is a sign of madness and rejection that made him paint yellow.
Art critics are impressed with the movement in his paintings and emotions, but, again, why just not say it was because he worked extremely hard and fast that he managed to keep emotion in his painting. No one, even a very mad person, can keep emotions constantly, it is not human nature.
About the influence on van Gogh by Japanese art. It is true, but when art critics talk about Japanese style, maybe they should learn what Japanese style is, not just have an ignorant European common opinion. Because, if an artist see what different styles of painting can bring to his work, why cannot art critics. At this moment, what I cannot understand is: are art critics there to sell art for more money and make artist famous (but I believe, for this type of work, you usually choose a manager), or are they there actually to try and help people to understand art better?
I cannot work today in the morning; too tired. Maybe I will get a little sleep and try do some sketches this afternoon.
Vincent van Gogh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Van Gogh” redirects here. For other uses, see Van Gogh (disambiguation).
| Vincent van Gogh | |
|---|---|
 Self-portrait (1887), Art Institute of Chicago | |
| Birth name | Vincent Willem van Gogh |
| Born | 30 March 1853 Zundert, Netherlands |
| Died | 29 July 1890 (aged 37) Auvers-sur-Oise, France |
| Nationality | Dutch |
| Field | Painter |
| Movement | Post-Impressionism |
| Works | The Potato Eaters, Sunflowers, The Starry Night, Irises, Portrait of Dr. Gachet |
| Influenced by | Anton Mauve, Jean-François Millet, Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli, Impressionism |
listen (help·info), or English: ˌvæn ˈɡɒx,[note 1] 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life, and died largely unknown, at the age of 37, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.Little appreciated during his lifetime, his fame grew in the years after his death. Today, he is widely regarded as one of history’s greatest painters and an important contributor to the foundations of modern art. Van Gogh did not begin painting until his late twenties, and most of his best-known works were produced during his final two years. He produced more than 2,000 artworks, consisting of around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. Although he was little known during his lifetime, his work was a strong influence on the modernist art that followed. Today many of his pieces—including his numerous self portraits, landscapes, portraits and sunflowers—are among the world’s most recognizable and expensive works of art.
Van Gogh spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers and traveled between The Hague, London and Paris, after which he taught in England. An early vocational aspiration was to become a pastor and preach the gospel, and from 1879 he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium. During this time he began to sketch people from the local community, and in 1885 painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette at the time consisted mainly of somber earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later work. In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. Later he moved to the south of France and was taken by the strong sunlight he found there. His work grew brighter in color and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style which became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.
The extent to which his mental illness affected his painting has been a subject of speculation since his death. Despite a widespread tendency to romanticise his ill health, modern critics see an artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence brought about by his bouts of sickness. According to art critic Robert Hughes, Van Gogh’s late works show an artist at the height of his ability, completely in control and “longing for concision and grace”.[1]
Contents |
Letters
Their lifelong friendship, and most of what is known of Van Gogh’s thoughts and theories of art, is recorded in the hundreds of letters they exchanged from August 1872 until 1890. Most were written by Vincent to Theo beginning in the summer of 1872. More than 600 letters from Vincent to Theo and 40 from Theo to Vincent survive today and although many are undated, art historians have been able to largely arrange the correspondences chronologically. Problems remain—mainly from dating those from the Arles period. Yet during that period alone, it is known that Van Gogh wrote 200 letters to friends in Dutch, French and English.[8] The period when Vincent lived in Paris is the most difficult for art historians to examine because he and Theo shared accommodation and thus had no need to correspond, leaving little or no historical record of the time.[9]
In addition to letters to and from Theo, other surviving documents include those to Van Rappard, Émile Bernard, Van Gogh’s sister Wil and her friend Line Kruysse.[10] The letters were first annotated in 1913 by Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. In her preface, she stated that she published with ‘trepidation’ because she did not want the drama in the artist’s life to overshadow his work. Van Gogh himself was an avid reader of other artists’ biographies and expected their lives to be in keeping with the character of their art.[5]
Biography
Early life
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, a village close to Breda in the province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands.[11] He was the son of Anna Cornelia Carbentus and Theodorus van Gogh, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. Vincent was given the same name as his grandfather—and a first brother stillborn exactly one year before.[12] The practice of reusing a name in this way was not uncommon. Vincent was a common name in the Van Gogh family; his grandfather, Vincent, (1789–1874) had received his degree of theology at the University of Leiden in 1811. Grandfather Vincent had six sons, three of whom became art dealers, including another Vincent who was referred to in Van Gogh’s letters as “Uncle Cent.” Grandfather Vincent had perhaps been named in turn after his own father’s uncle, the successful sculptor Vincent van Gogh (1729–1802).[13] Art and religion were the two occupations to which the Van Gogh family gravitated. His brother Theodorus (Theo) was born on 1 May 1857. He had another brother, Cor, and three sisters: Elisabeth, Anna and Willemina (Wil).[14]
Van Gogh returned to England for unpaid work. He took a position as a supply teacher in a small boarding school overlooking the harbor in Ramsgate, where he made sketches of the view. When the proprietor of the school relocated to Isleworth, Middlesex, Van Gogh moved to the new location taking the train to Richmond and the remainder of the journey by foot.[19] However the arrangement did not work out and he left to became a Methodist minister’s assistant, to follow his wish to “preach the gospel everywhere.”[20] At Christmas, he returned home and worked in a bookshop in Dordrecht for six months. However, he was not happy in this new position and spent most of his time in the back of the shop either doodling or translating passages from the Bible into English, French and German.[21] His roommate at the time, a young teacher called Görlitz, later recalled that Van Gogh ate frugally, and preferred not to eat meat.[22][23]
Van Gogh’s religious emotion grew until he felt he had found his true vocation. In an effort to support his effort to become a pastor, in May 1877, his family sent him to Amsterdam to study theology. He stayed with his uncle Jan van Gogh, a naval Vice Admiral.[24] Vincent prepared for the entrance exam with his uncle Johannes Stricker; a respected theologian who published the first “Life of Jesus” available in the Netherlands. He failed, and left his uncle Jan’s house in July 1878. He then undertook, but failed, a three-month course at the Vlaamsche Opleidingsschool Protestant missionary school in Laeken, near Brussels.
He returned to Cuesmes where he lodged with a miner named Charles Decrucq until October.[29] He became increasingly interested in the people and scenes around him. He recorded his time there in his drawings, and that year followed the suggestion of Theo and took up art in earnest. He traveled to Brussels that autumn; intending to follow Theo’s recommendation to study with the prominent Dutch artist Willem Roelofs, who persuaded Van Gogh, in spite of his aversion to formal schools of art, to attend the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He registered on November 15, 1880. While in attendance, he not only studied anatomy but also the standard rules of modeling and perspective, of which he said, “…you have to know just to be able to draw the least thing.”[30] Van Gogh wished to become an artist while in God’s service as he stated, “…to try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another in a picture.”
Etten, Drenthe and The Hague
In April 1881, Van Gogh moved to the Etten countryside with his parents where he continued drawing, often using neighbors as subjects. Through the summer he spent much time walking and talking with his recently widowed cousin, Kee Vos-Stricker. She was the daughter of his mother’s older sister and Johannes Stricker, who had shown warmth towards the artist.[31] Kee was seven years older than Van Gogh and had an eight-year-old son. He proposed marriage, but she refused with the words, “No, never, never” (niet, nooit, nimmer).[32] Late that November, he wrote a strongly worded letter to his uncle Stricker,[33] and then hurried to Amsterdam where he again spoke with Stricker on several occasions.[34] Kee refused to see him and her parents wrote, “Your persistence is disgusting”.[35] In desperation, he held his left hand in the flame of a lamp, with the words “Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame.”[35] He did not clearly recall what next happened, but later assumed that his uncle blew out the flame. Kee’s father made it clear that there was no question of marriage[36] given Van Gogh’s inability to support himself financially.[37] Van Gogh’s perceived hypocrisy of his uncle and former tutor affected him deeply. That Christmas he quarreled violently with his father, to the point of refusing a gift of money, and left for The Hague.[38]
Van Gogh’s art dealer uncle, Cornelis, commissioned 20 ink drawings of the city, the artist completed by the end of May.[50] That June, he spent three weeks in a hospital suffering gonorrhea.[51] That summer he began to paint in oil.[52] In autumn 1883, after a year together, he left Sien and the two children. Van Gogh had thought of moving the family from the city, but in the end made the break.[53] It is possible that lack of money had pushed Sien back to prostitution—the home had become a less happy one, and likely Van Gogh felt family life was irreconcilable with his artistic development. When he left, Sien gave her daughter to her mother and baby Willem to her brother. She then moved to Delft, and later to Antwerp.[54] Willem remembered being taken to visit his mother in Rotterdam at around the age of 12, where his uncle tried to persuade Sien to marry in order to legitimize the child. Willem remembered his mother saying, “But I know who the father is. He was an artist I lived with nearly 20 years ago in The Hague. His name was Van Gogh.” She then turned to Willem and said “You are called after him.”[55] Willem believed himself to be Van Gogh’s son, however the timing of his birth makes this unlikely.[56] In 1904, Sien drowned at her own hand in the river Scheldt. Van Gogh moved to the Dutch province of Drenthe, in the northern Netherlands. That December, driven by loneliness, he went to stay with his parents who were by then living in Nuenen, North Brabant.[57]
Emerging artist
Nuenen and Antwerp (1883–1886)
In Nuenen, he devoted himself to drawing and would pay boys to bring him birds’ nests for subject matter,[58] and made many sketches of weavers in their cottages.[59] In autumn 1884, Margot Begemann, a neighbor’s daughter ten years older than him, often accompanied the artist on his painting forays. She fell in love, and he reciprocated—though less enthusiastically. They decided to marry, but the idea was opposed by both families. As a result, Margot took an overdose of strychnine. She was saved when Van Gogh rushed her to a nearby hospital.[47] On 26 March 1885, his father died of a heart attack and the artist grieved deeply at the loss.[60]
From this period, Still-Life with Straw Hat and Pipe and Still-life with Earthen Pot and Clogs are regarded by critics and writers for their technical mastery. Both are characterized by smooth, meticulous brushwork and fine shading of colors.[62] During his two-year stay in Nuenen, he completed numerous drawings and watercolors and nearly 200 oil paintings. However, his palette consisted mainly of sombre earth tones, particularly dark brown, and he showed no sign of developing the vivid coloration that distinguishes his later, best known work. When he complained that Theo was not making enough effort to sell his paintings in Paris, Theo replied that they were too dark and not in line with the current style of bright Impressionist paintings.[63]
In November 1885, he moved to Antwerp and rented a small room above a paint dealer’s shop in the Rue des Images (Lange Beeldekensstraat).[64] He had little money and ate poorly, preferring to spend what money his brother Theo sent on painting materials and models. Bread, coffee and tobacco were his staple intake. In February 1886, he wrote to Theo saying that he could only remember eating six hot meals since May of the previous year. His teeth became loose and caused him much pain.[65] While in Antwerp he applied himself to the study of color theory and spent time looking at work in museums, particularly the work of Peter Paul Rubens, gaining encouragement to broaden his palette to carmine, cobalt and emerald green. He bought a number of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts in the docklands, and incorporated their style into the background of a number of his paintings.[66] While in Antwerp Van Gogh began to drink absinthe heavily.[67] He was treated by Dr Cavenaile, whose practice was near the docklands,[68] possibly for syphilis;[69] the treatment of alum irrigations and sitz baths was jotted down by Van Gogh in one of his notebooks.[70] Despite his rejection of academic teaching, he took the higher-level admission exams at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and in January 1886, matriculated in painting and drawing. For most of February, he was ill and run down by overwork, a poor diet and excessive smoking.[71][72]
[edit] Paris (1886–1888)
Courtesan (after Eisen) (1887), Van Gogh Museum
The Blooming Plumtree (after Hiroshige) (1887), Van Gogh Museum
Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887), Musée Rodin
During his stay in Paris, he collected Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. His interest in such works date to his 1885 stay in Antwerp when he used them to decorate the walls of his studio. He collected hundreds of prints, and they can be seen in the backgrounds of several of his paintings. In his 1887 Portrait of Père Tanguy several are shown hanging on the wall behind the main figure. In The Courtesan or Oiran (after Kesai Eisen) (1887), Van Gogh traced the figure from a reproduction on the cover of the magazine Paris Illustre and then graphically enlarged it in his painting.[74] Plum Tree in Blossom (After Hiroshige) 1888 is another strong example of Van Gogh’s admiration of the Japanese prints that he collected. His version is slightly bolder than the original.[75]
Van Gogh, greatly admired the work of Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli after seeing it in Paris when he arrived there in 1886. Van Gogh immediately adopted a brighter palette and a bolder attack [76][77] In 1890, Van Gogh and his brother Theo were instrumental in publishing the first book about Monticelli.[78]
He moved to Asnières where he became acquainted with Signac. With Émile Bernard he adopted elements of pointillism, whereby many small dots are applied to the canvas to give an optical blend of hues when seen from a distance.[81] The style stresses the value of complementary colors—including blue and orange—to form vibrant contrasts and enhance each other when juxtaposed.[82]
In November 1887, Theo and Vincent met and befriended Paul Gauguin who had just arrived in Paris.[83] Towards the end of the year, Vincent arranged an exhibition of paintings by himself, Bernard, Anquetin, and probably Toulouse-Lautrec in the Restaurant du Chalet on Montmartre. There Bernard and Anquetin sold their first paintings, and Van Gogh exchanged work with Gauguin who soon departed to Pont-Aven. Discussions on art, artists and their social situations that started during this exhibition continued and expanded to include visitors to the show like Pissarro and his son Lucien, Signac and Seurat. Finally in February 1888, feeling worn out from life in Paris, he left, having painted over 200 paintings during his two years in the city. Only hours before his departure, accompanied by Theo, he paid his first and only visit to Seurat in his atelier (studio).[84]
Artistic breakthrough and final years
Arles
Van Gogh moved to Arles hoping for refuge; at the time he was ill from drink and suffering from smoker’s cough.[8] He arrived on 21 February 1888, and took a room at the Hôtel-Restaurant Carrel, which, idealistically, he had expected to look like one of Hokusai (1760–1849) or Utamaro‘s (1753–1806) prints.[8][85] He had moved to the town with thoughts of founding a utopian art colony, and the Danish artist Christian Mourier-Petersen became his companion for two months. However, Arles appeared exotic and filthy to Van Gogh. In a letter he described it as a foreign country; “The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes going to their First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinocerous, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world”.[86]100 years after his stay there, he was remembered by 113-year-old Jeanne Calment—who as a 13 year old was serving in her uncle’s fabric shop where Van Gogh wanted to buy some canvas—as “dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable” and “very ugly, ungracious, impolite, sick”.[87][88] She also recalled selling him colored pencils.[89]
The Night Café (1888), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Paul Gauguin’s Armchair (1888), Van Gogh Museum
He visited Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer that June where he gave drawing lessons to a Zouave second lieutenant, Paul-Eugène Milliet. MacKnight introduced Van Gogh to Eugène Boch, a Belgian painter who stayed at times in Fontvieille, and the two exchanged visits in July.[96]
Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (August 1888), Neue Pinakothek, Munich
The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night (September 1888), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Holland
Van Gogh’s Chair (1888), National Gallery, London
After repeated requests, Gauguin finally arrived in Arles on 23 October. During November, the two painted together. Gauguin painted Van Gogh’s portrait The Painter of Sunflowers: Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, and uncharacteristically, Van Gogh painted some pictures from memory—deferring to Gauguin’s ideas in this—as well as his The Red Vineyard. Their first joint outdoor painting exercise was conducted at the picturesque Alyscamps.[103]
On 23 December 1888, frustrated and ill, Van Gogh confronted Gauguin with a razor blade. In panic, Van Gogh left their quarters and fled to a local brothel. While there, he cut off the lower part of his left ear lobe. He wrapped the severed tissue in newspaper and handed it to a prostitute named Rachel, asking her to “keep this object carefully.”[105] Gauguin left Arles and never saw Van Gogh again.[a 3] Days later, Van Gogh was hospitalized and left in a critical state for several days. Immediately, Theo—notified by Gauguin—visited, as did both Madame Ginoux and Roulin. In January 1889, he returned to the Yellow House, but spent the following month between hospital and home suffering from hallucinations and delusions that he was being poisoned. In March, the police closed his house after a petition by 30 townspeople, who called him “fou roux” (the redheaded madman). Paul Signac visited him in hospital and Van Gogh was allowed home in his company. In April, he moved into rooms owned by Dr. Rey, after floods damaged paintings in his own home.[106][107] Around this time, he wrote, “Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant.” Two months later he had left Arles and entered an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.[108]
Saint-Rémy (May 1889 – May 1890)
The Starry Night (June 1889), The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Sower (1888), Kröller-Müller Museum
During his stay, the clinic and its garden became the main subjects of his paintings. He made several studies of the hospital interiors, such as Vestibule of the Asylum and Saint-Remy (September 1889). Some of the work from this time is characterized by swirls—including one of his best-known paintings The Starry Night.[110] He was allowed short supervised walks, which gave rise to images of cypresses and olive trees, like Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background 1889, Cypresses 1889, Cornfield with Cypresses (1889), Country road in Provence by Night (1890). Limited access to the world outside the clinic resulted in a shortage of subject matter. He was left to work on interpretations of other artist’s paintings, such as Millet’s The Sower and Noon – Rest from Work (after Millet), as well as variations on his own earlier work. Van Gogh was an admirer of the Realism of Jules Breton, Gustave Courbet and Millet [111] and compared his copies to a musician’s interpreting Beethoven.[112][113] Many of his most compelling works date from this period; his The Round of the Prisoners, (1890) was painted after an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), the face of the prisoner in the center of the painting and looking toward the viewer is Van Gogh.[114]
L’Arlésienne: (Madame Ginoux) (1890), Kröller-Müller Museum
Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), was sold for US$ 82.5 million in 1990.[115] Private collection
The Round of the Prisoners (1890).
Auvers-sur-Oise (May–July 1890)
See also: Double-squares and Squares
The Church at Auvers (1890), Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Wheat Field with Crows (July 1890)[123] is an example of the unusual double square canvas which he developed in the last weeks of his life. In its turbulent intensity, it is among his most haunting and elemental works.[124] It is often mistakenly believed to be his last work, but Van Gogh scholar Jan Hulsker lists seven paintings which postdate it.[125]
Barbizon painter Charles Daubigny moved to Auvers in 1861, and this in turn drew other artists there, including Camille Corot, Honoré Daumier, and in 1890, Vincent van Gogh. In July 1890, Van Gogh completed two paintings of Daubigny’s Garden, and one of these is most likely to be his final work.[120] There are also paintings which show evidence of being unfinished, including Thatched Cottages by a Hill.[124]
Death
Self-portrait (1889), private collection. Mirror-image self portrait with bandaged ear
Still Life with Absinthe (1887), Van Gogh Museum
A moving account of his death and funeral was given by Emile Bernard in a letter to Albert Aurier.[127] Anton Hirschig, a fellow lodger at the inn, has left a much bleaker account of his death.[128]
While most of Vincent’s late paintings are somber, they are essentially optimistic and reflect a desire to return to lucid mental health. However, the paintings completed in the days before his suicide are severely dark. His At Eternity’s Gate, a portrayal of an old man holding his head in his hands, is particularly bleak. The work serves as a compelling and poignant expression of the artist’s state of mind in his final days.[131] Yet, there has been much debate over the years as to the source of Van Gogh’s illness and its effect on his work. Over 150 psychiatrists have attempted to label its root, and some 30 different diagnoses have been suggested.[132] Diagnoses that have been put forward include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, temporal lobe epilepsy and acute intermittent porphyria. Any of these could have been the culprit and been aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia and consumption of alcohol, especially absinthe.[133][134]
Work
The Old Mill (1888), Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888), Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background (1889), Museum of Modern Art, New York
Early in 1883, he began to work on multi-figure compositions, which he based on his drawings. He had some of them photographed, but when his brother remarked that they lacked liveliness and freshness, he destroyed them and turned to oil painting. By Autumn 1882, his brother had enabled him financially to turn out his first paintings, but all the money Theo could supply was soon spent. Then, in spring 1883, Van Gogh turned to renowned Hague School artists like Weissenbruch and Blommers, and received technical support from them, as well as from painters like De Bock and Van der Weele, both Hague School artists of the second generation.[138] When he moved to Nuenen after the intermezzo in Drenthe he began a number of large-sized paintings but destroyed most of them. The Potato Eaters and its companion pieces—The Old Tower on the Nuenen cemetery and The Cottage—are the only ones to have survived. Following a visit to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh was aware that many of his faults were due to lack of technical experience.[138] So he traveled to Antwerp and later to Paris to learn and develop his skill.[139]
The art historian Albert Boime was the first to show that Van Gogh—even in seemingly fantastical compositions like Starry Night—based his work in reality.[141] The White House at Night, shows a house at twilight with a prominent star surrounded by a yellow halo in the sky. Astronomers at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos calculated that the star is Venus, which was bright in the evening sky in June 1890 when Van Gogh is believed to have painted the picture.[142]
The paintings from the Saint-Rémy period are often characterized by swirls and spirals. The patterns of luminosity in these images have been shown to conform to Kolmogorov’s statistical model of turbulence.[143]
Self Portraits
See also: Self-portraits by Vincent van Gogh
Self-portrait dedicated to Paul Gauguin, September 1888 (F 476), Oil on canvas, 62 × 52 cm., Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA
September 1889, (F 627), Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm., Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Self-portrait without beard, end September 1889, (F 525), Oil on canvas, 40 × 31 cm., Private collection.
Self-portrait (1889), National Gallery of Art. All Self-Portraits executed in Saint-Rémy show the artist’s head from the left, i.e. the side with his ear not mutilated.
Cypresses
One of the most popular and widely known series of Van Gogh’s paintings are his Cypresses. During the Summer of 1889, at sister Wil‘s request, he made several smaller versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses.[149] The works are characterised by swirls and densely painted impasto—and produced one of his best-known paintings – The Starry Night. Other works from the series have similar stylistic elements including Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background (1889) Cypresses (1889), Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889), (Van Gogh made several versions of this painting that year), Road with Cypress and Star (1890) and Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888). These have become synonymous with Van Gogh’s work through their stylistic uniqueness. According to art historian Ronald Pickvance,
Road with Cypress and Star (May 1890), Kröller-Müller Museum
Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889), National Gallery, London
Cypresses (1889), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Road with Cypress and Star (1890), is compositionally as unreal and artificial as the Starry Night. Pickvance goes on to say the painting Road with Cypress and Star represents an exalted experience of reality, a conflation of North and South, what both Van Gogh and Gauguin referred to as an “abstraction”. Referring to Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background, on or around 18 June 1889, in a letter to Theo, he wrote, “At last I have a landscape with olives and also a new study of a Starry Night.”[150]Hoping to also have a gallery for his work, his major project at this time was a series of paintings including Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (1888), and Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888) that all intended to form the décoration of the Yellow House.[151][152]
Flowering Orchards
See also: Flowering Orchards
Cherry Tree (1888), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Van Gogh was taken by the landscape and vegetation of the South of France, and often visited the farm gardens near Arles. Because of the vivid light supplied by the Mediterranean climate his palette significantly brightened.[154] From his arrival, he was interested in capturing the effect of the Seasons on the surrounding landscape and plant life.
Flowers
See also: Sunflowers (series of paintings)
Van Gogh painted several versions of landscapes with flowers, as seen in View of Arles with Irises, and paintings of flowers, such as Irises, Sunflowers,[155] lilacs, roses, oleanders and other flowers. Some of the paintings of flowers reflect his interests in the language of color and also in Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.[156]
View of Arles with Irises (1888), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Irises (1889), Getty Center, Los Angeles
In an August 1888 letter to Theo, he wrote,
- “I am hard at it, painting with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won’t surprise you when you know that what I’m at is the painting of some sunflowers. If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels. So the whole thing will be a symphony in blue and yellow. I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so quickly. I am now on the fourth picture of sunflowers. This fourth one is a bunch of 14 flowers … it gives a singular effect.”[157]
Wheat fields
See also: The Wheat Field
Van Gogh made several painting excursions during visits to the landscape around Arles. He made a number of paintings featuring harvests, wheat fields and other rural landmarks of the area, including The Old Mill (1888); a good example of a picturesque structure bordering the wheat fields beyond.[160] It was one of seven canvases sent to Pont-Aven on 4 October 1888 as exchange of work with Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, and others.[160][161] At various times in his life, Van Gogh painted the view from his window—at The Hague, Antwerp, Paris. These works culminated in The Wheat Field series, which depicted the view he could see from his adjoining cells in the asylum at Saint-Rémy.[162]Writing in July 1890, Van Gogh said that he had become absorbed “in the immense plain against the hills, boundless as the sea, delicate yellow”.[163] He had become captivated by the fields in May when the wheat was young and green. The weather worsened in July, and he wrote to Theo of “vast fields of wheat under troubled skies”, adding that he did not “need to go out of my way to try and express sadness and extreme loneliness”.[164] By August, he had painted the crops both young and mature and during both dark and bright weather. A depiction of the golden wheat in bright sunlight was to be his final painting, along with his usual easel and paints he had carried a pistol with him that day.[163]
Working procedures
A self-taught artist with little training, Van Gogh was anything but academic in his painting and drawing techniques. Recent research has shown that works commonly known as “oil paintings” or “drawings” would better be described as “mixed-media”. The Langlois Bridge at Arles shows highly elaborate under-drawing in pen and ink,[165] while several works from Saint-Rémy and Auvers, hitherto considered to be drawings or watercolors, such as Vestibule of the Asylum, Saint-Remy (September 1889), turned out to be painted in diluted oil and with a brush.[166]Radiographical examination has shown that Van Gogh re-used older canvases more extensively than previously assumed—whether he really overpainted more than a third of his output, as presumed recently, must be verified by further investigations.[167] In 2008, a team from Delft University of Technology and the University of Antwerp used advanced X-ray techniques to create a clear image of a woman’s face previously painted, underneath the work Patch of Grass.[168][169]
Legacy
Posthumous fame
Main article: Posthumous fame of Vincent van Gogh
Influence
In his final letter to Theo, Vincent admitted that as he did not have any children, he viewed his paintings as his progeny. Reflecting on this, the historian Simon Schama concluded that he “did have a child of course, Expressionism, and many, many heirs.” Schama mentioned a wide number of artists who have adapted elements of Van Gogh’s style, including Willem de Kooning, Howard Hodgkin and Jackson Pollock.[175] The French Fauves, including Henri Matisse, extended both his use of color and freedom in applying it,[176] as did German Expressionists in the Die Brücke group, as well as early modernism.[177] Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s is seen as in part inspired from Van Gogh’s broad, gestural brush strokes. In the words of art critic Sue Hubbard: At the beginning of the twentieth century Van Gogh gave the Expressionists a new painterly language which enabled them to go beyond surface appearance and penetrate deeper essential truths. It is no coincidence that at this very moment Freud was also mining the depths of that essentially modern domain – the subconscious. This beautiful and intelligent exhibition places Van Gogh where he firmly belongs; as the trailblazer of modern art.[178]In 1957, Francis Bacon (1909–1992) based a series of paintings on reproductions of Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, the original of which was destroyed during World War II. Bacon was inspired by not only an image he described as “haunting”, but also Van Gogh himself, whom Bacon regarded as an alienated outsider, a position which resonated with Bacon. The Irish artist further identified with Van Gogh’s theories of art and quoted lines written in a letter to Theo, “[R]eal painters do not paint things as they are…They paint them as they themselves feel them to be”.[179] An exhibition devoted to Vincent van Gogh’s letters took place in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from October 2009 to January 2010[180] and then moved to the Royal Academy in London from late January to April.
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