Van Gogh
left school
without finishing, quit an apprenticeship and was a
disaster as an itinerant preacher. He then became a painter and — as it
seemed to most of those who knew him — was as unsuccessful at this as he
had been at everything else, depending on his brother Theo who was an art
dealer for money and becoming an out-of-control alcoholic, who spent his
evenings in whorehouses. One episode of apparent madness led to his
commitment. When he was discharged he shot himself: he died at the age of
thirty-seven, a passionate and dreamy man.
Other painters admired him.
Claude Monet
thought Van Gogh's pictures were the best at the March 1890 "Salon des
Independants", and
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
challenged an acquaintance to a duel for mocking
Van Gogh's
work. Yet
Van Gogh
was never able to make a living as a painter. The only picture he is known
to have sold during his lifetime was Red Vineyard
at Aries.
One episode has come to symbolise
Van Gogh's
life lived between hallucination and creative frenzy. In 1888 he moved
from Paris to Aries in Provence, attracted by the southern light and the
intense colours. There he shared a little yellow house with
Paul
Gauguin,
who was already a successful painter. But
Gauguin
soon found that he liked neither Aries nor
Van Gogh.
On December 23 they quarrelled worse than ever:
Gauguin
felt threatened and left to spend the night at an inn. When he returned
the following morning, there was a throng of spectators in front of the
house, which was spattered with blood.
Gauguin
was arrested. It turned out that
Van Gogh
had returned at night alone and had cut off his own ear lobe with a razor.
Then he had gone to a brothel, where he had presented the ear lobe,
wrapped in newspaper, to a prostitute named Rachel: "Truly I say unto you,
you will think of me."
Emile Bernard,
a staunch supporter of
Van Gogh,
admitted publicly that his friend was mad.
Van Gogh
was sent to an asylum, where he painted Self-Portrait with Bandaged
Ear which reveals the state he was in. He, who had always said he
wanted to bring the sun to suffering people by painting in brilliant
colours, appears as a shadow of what he had once been. When
Van Gogh
was young,
Camille Pissarro
had said: "This man will either go mad or he'll leave all the rest of us
far behind." Rather than "either-or", he should have said "bothand".
