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Photograph of Vincent, aged 19 |
Throughout his brief but passionate life, Vincent van Gogh drew much solace from
the beauty of nature. In his youth he roamed through the woods near his home,
fascinated by the plants and insects. As a man Vincent believed that the
countryside was a sanctuary of health, the natural rhythms of life demonstrating
the restorative power of nature. He saw in nature the model for beauty, balance,
and harmony in his art, explaining,
" I study nature, so as not to do foolish
things, to remain reasonable"
(Letter 429).
And in his natural subjects, such as
bright bouquets, blossoming trees, favorite flowers, and verdant fields, he
expressed his most personal passions. Vincent's paintings of these subjects
reflect his belief in a bond between humanity and the natural world. Through
them, he affirmed meaning in his life and they remain a testament to his
unwavering faith in nature and in the arts.
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in the village of
Groot-Zundert m the province of Brabant in the Netherlands. The eldest surviving
child of Theodorus wan Gogh and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. he was named after their
first son. who had been born on the same date one war earlier but died in
infancy. Five more children followed Vincent: Anna Cornelia, Theodorus,
Elisabetha, Willemina, know as Wil, and Cornelius Vincent.
Vincents father, Theodorus van Gogh, was descended from a well-established
bourgeois family. After studying theology, he became a Dutch Reformed pastor
and an active practitioner of Christian Humanism. His wife Anna ran the modest
household but was also an avid amateur botanist, recording her observations of
flowering plants in accomplished watercolor sketches.
In addition to home instruction, Vincent attended the village school m Zundert
for a year (1861) and was later
sent to boarding schools in Zevenbergen (1864—1866) and Tilburg
(1866—1868). A competent, but not distinguished, student, Vincent
did possess a natural talent for languages and rapidly learned both
French and English. He was an enthusiastic reader and from boyhood
he enjoyed fiction as well as works on the natural sciences.
There was little in Vincent's youth to indicate any special
inclination toward the arts. His earliest surviving drawings date to
the time before he entered his first term at boarding school, but
they appear to be copy work with little evidence of skill. The
academy at Tilburg had a progressive drawing master named C. C.
Huysman, who encouraged his students to study directly from nature
as well as to make copies of masterworks. The extent to which he
influenced Vincent cannot be judged, but even before his schooling
young Vincent had been fascinated by first-hand observation of
nature. From his early childhood, his parents had taken him on long
walks through the woods where, perhaps following his mother's
interest, he assembled collections of wild flowers, birds' nests,
and insects.
Vincent left school at the age of sixteen to work and contribute to
the family's finances. Through the influence of his Uncle Vincent,
known as "Cent," he obtained a post as a junior clerk in a branch of
art dealer and publisher Goupil et Cie in The Hague. Vincent proved
to be both adept and enthusiastic in his work, and in June 1873, the
company transferred him to their London establishment. Theo, his
younger brother, followed him into the business, taking his position
in The Hague. Always close, the brothers began a regular
correspondence. In his letters Vincent confided his most private
thoughts and he came to rely upon Theo's sympathy and support
throughout his life.
New influences shaped Vincent's interest in England. While he
admired a few English artists—including John Everett Millais and
George Boughton—he also became fascinated with popular illustrated
journals, particularly the Illustrated London News and the Graphic.
He favored social realist images, depicting the struggle of the
poor, which he clipped out and kept in a file for reference. His
heightened sensitivity toward the less privileged was accompanied by
an intensifying spirit of piety. Vincent's interest in the business
of art waned in the wake of a mounting desire to give service to
needy communities.
When Vincent failed to fulfill his initial promise in the business,
the Goupil company transferred him from city to city, ultimately
dismissing him in April 1876. A period of restlessness—fueled by his
pious aspirations—followed. He served briefly as an assistant to a
school master in England, but, seized with a passion to preach, he
returned to Holland, seeking the support of his family in his new
mission. Uncle Cent found him a position as a clerk in a bookstore
in Dordrecht, hoping that the salary would be put toward his
education. But Vincent did not stay in the job, and in May 1877 he
moved to Amsterdam to prepare for the qualifying examinations for a
university course in theology. Once there, he neglected his studies,
devoting his time instead to projects such as making a multilingual
translation of the Bible and drawing meticulous maps of the Holy
Land.
By July 1878, Vincent had abandoned his university plans. He began
training for an evangelical ministry, but after the three-month
probationary period he was denied an official post. Relying on his
family's support, he moved to a community in the Borinage, a poor
Belgian mining district beset with labor disputes, where he became a
lay preacher. Vincent's now fanatical devotion led him to live a
life of self-imposed sacrifice. Equating abstention with piety, he
lived in a shack, ate only enough to stay alive, and dressed in
rags, having given away most of his possessions to the local poor.
In July 1879 his superiors in the church intervened, and Vincent
was prohibited from preaching. By the end of the year, the deeply
religious tone of his letters to Theo had changed, revealing a
different sense of mission: Vincent declared his desire to become an
artist.
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A Pair of Shoes
Late 1886
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
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The subject of this painting—a pair of battered work boots—reflects Vincent's
interest in ordinary, well-worn objects so routinely used that they are scarcely
noticed. He uses a dark palette, featuring earth tones of somber brown and
ocher, heavily shadowed in black, to express the spirit of the life of the rural
poor. The thickening impasto (the piling up of paint for texture) and subtle
golden highlights forecast the stylistic changes associated with his work in
Paris.
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A new vocation
Vincent embraced his new vocation with the intensity of his recent
religious calling. In letters to Theo and to his former employer
Tersteeg, he asked for art materials, prints to copy, and Charles
Bargue's drawing manual, Exercises au fusain. Theo, now promoted to
the Paris office of Goupil et Cie, began to send his brother a
monthly allowance; his generous support would continue throughout
Vincent's life. Vincent's early subjects revealed his enduring
sympathy with the downtrodden; beginning with drawings of the miners
of the Borinage, he defined himself as an artist of working people
and ordinary things.
Now a different kind of restlessness set in. Torn between a desire to
work on his own and the recognition that formal study would improve
his technique, Vincent moved back and forth from the city to the
countryside. In October 1880, he enrolled in the academy in Brussels
for classes in anatomical drawing and perspective. By April 1881,
he tired of the regimen and left for an extended stay at his
parents' home in Etten, where he drew landscapes, as well as
figures. Over the summer, on Tersteeg's advice, he cultivated a
relationship with Anton Mauve, his cousin by marriage and a member
of The Hague School. In December, Vincent moved to The Hague, where
Mauve gave him informal instruction in color theory.
During this period, Vincent suffered a physical decline. His poor
nutrition caused stomach disorders and dental problems, and a
stubborn case of gonorrhea required a three-week hospitalization.
Relations with his parents became strained. They believed that their
eldest son was chasing a capricious dream, and his behavior—refusing
to join the family at Christmas, openly living with a prostitute and
her children, and declaring his intention to marry her—struck them
as deliberately defiant. Angry with his decisions, his parents also
feared for his health and stability.
In the autumn of 1883, Vincent left The Hague, feeling that Mauve
had no more to teach him and that family life and a career in the
arts were irreconcilable. He traveled to Drenthe in northern
Holland, again seeking inspiration among the rural workers. By
December, plagued by intense loneliness, he joined his parents in
Nuenen, where the previous year his father had been assigned to a
parish post. Although emotionally estranged from his family, Vincent
attended to his mother when she was bedridden with a broken leg in
January 1884, and he was grief-stricken at the death of his father
in March of the following year.
Vincent worked ceaselessly in Nuenen, drawing figures and portraits
of the local farm workers. His first distinctive style emerged in
The Potato haters (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), painted
in the
spring of 1885. The somber palette, dominated by tones of brown, and
the roughly drawn faces of the rugged peasants, expressed Vincent's
desire to paint the spirit of the earth. But by autumn, he sought a
change in his environment, moving briefly to Amsterdam, and then
settling in Antwerp at the end of November. He enrolled in classes
at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts early in the new year, but repeatedly
expressed a need for a change of scenery in his letters to Theo. He
proposed to visit Theo in June, after spending the spring in Nuenen.
But, early in March, Theo received a note scrawled in black crayon
from a railroad porter, imploring,
"Do not be cross with me for
having come all at once like this; I have thought about it so much,
and 1 believe that in this way we shall save time. Shall be at the Louvre
from midday on or sooner if you like" (Letter 459).
Vincent
had come to live with his brother in Paris.
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The Potato Eaters
1885
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Vegetable Gardens and the Moulin de Blute-Fin on Montmartre
February-March 1887
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
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Following the path pioneered by the Barbizon School and the Impressionists,
Vincent believed m the integrity of plein-air painting. By working on the spot,
he gained a sensitivity to the visual effects of light and color, seen in the
nuances of tone in the sky and the flickering white touches on the fields in
this painting. In the later years of the nineteenth century, the outskirts of
the district of Montmartre were undeveloped and featured communal allotments,
outage gardens, and windmills. Emile Bernard attributed Vincent's urge to paint
"the humble shanties of Montmartre where the lower middle classes come to
cultivate their tiny pieces of sand in the early morning sun," to his reading
of Emile Zola's naturalist novels, but whenever Vincent lived in the city he
longed for the countryside.
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An artistic community
Sharing his brother's apartment in Montmartre, Vincent was able
to take part in the most advanced artistic community in Europe. Theo,
now working for Boussod and Valadon (who had taken over the
administration of Goupil et Cie), managed a gallery in Montmartre,
featuring contemporary work. Through his brother, Vincent met many of
the artists involved in the original Impressionist exhibition,
including Monet, Degas, and Pissarro. That spring he attended the
last Impressionist exhibition, where he saw Georges Seurat's
experiment in optical divisionism, Sunday Afternoon in the Isle
of the Grand Jatte. It excited him to share his ideas with the more
daring painters of the day, including Paul Signac, Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Gauguin.
Vincent drew energy and inspiration from these new surroundings. He became a devoted
plein-air painter, setting up his easel in
the roads of Montmartre and in the suburb of Asnieres with fellow
painters Paul Signac and Emile Bernard. The claustrophobic quality
of his dark Nuenen style disappeared. Most of all, he explored the
use of color. Through the summer and well into the autumn he painted
more than thirty bouquets, using his study of flowers to master the
range of natural hues.
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The Courtesan (after Kesai Eisen)
September-October 1887
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam |
Like many of his contemporaries, Vincent was intrigued with Japanese
prints. He began to collect them in Antwerp, writing to Theo that
his studio room above a paint shop
"is not too bad. especially as 1
have pinned up a number of Japanese prints on the walls which amuse
me very much"
(Letter 437).
In Paris, during the summer of 1887,
Vincent made three closely observed copies of individual prints— Hiroshitre's
The Plum Tree Teahouse at Kameido and Sudden Shower on
the Great Bridge, and Kesai Eisen's The Courtesan —to gain
first-hand knowledge of the aesthetic and to translate its qualities
into his own technique. He came to associate everything pure,
strong, and natural in art with ]apanese prints; for Vincent, Japan
was less a geographic location than an artistic ideal.
Vincent's years in Paris transformed his art and confirmed his own
identity as an artist. But the stimulation of urban life and the
sophisticated community drained him. He felt awkward in social
situations, and he found few chances to display his paintings. Once
again, Vincent neglected his health, and the brutal early winter of
1887 convinced him that he needed a change. He chose to go to Aries,
believing that the southern climate would improve his well-being and
that the countryside would restore his equilibrium. On February 21,
the day after he arrived in Aries, Vincent wrote to his brother that
he had made the right decision:
"It seems to me almost impossible to
work in Paris unless one has some place of retreat where one can
recuperate and get one's tranquility and poise back. Without that,
one would get hopelessly stultified"
(Letter 463).
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During the summer of 1887, Vincent made three copies in oil after Japanese
prints. One was from the cover of a journal in Vincent's possession, featuring a
reproduction of Kesai Eisen's The Courtesan (1820s). For this work, he traced
the figure, and overlaid the tracing with squares to transfer the image to his canvas. The result is a free interpretation rather than a strict translation.
Although the pattern on the kimono follows the original, Vincent brightened the
colors and loosened the rigid formality. He set his figure against a thickly
impastoed background of gold, framed in a yellow border. The images behind
her—blooming lily pads, feeding cranes, swaying bamboo, and a pair of frogs—were
in part borrowed from other sources, including Toyokuni ill's print Geishas
in a
Landscape and Yoshimaru's volume A New Book of Incests, but their combination in
this decorative scheme was Vincent's own invention.
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Cover of Paris Illustre: Le Japon
May 1886
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
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The move to Aries
From the beginning, Vincent associated Aries with his personal
vision of Japan. Although the harsh weather was a surprise—he had
been seeking the sun and warmth of the south—he compared the snowy
terrain to a winter scene in a Japanese print. As the seasons
changed, Vincent allowed nature to suggest his subjects. In early
spring he painted the blossoming trees, and with the onset of
summer, he found inspiration in the fields of blooming flowers.
Color became his foremost consideration; he observed the bold
contrasts in nature and matched the blues and yellows of his palette
to the bright fields of irises under the strengthening sun. In
Aries, Vincent led a simple life of focused work, modeled on his
notion of the life of Japanese craftsmen.
But Vincent longed for companionship, fellow artists to work with
him in his "Studio of the South." He extended invitations to Emile
Bernard and Paul Gauguin, and in anticipation, prepared one of the
rooms he rented in the "'Yellow House," a small building on the
Place Lamartine in Arles. Through the late summer and early fall, he
painted many sunflowers to decorate the white walls of the room; for
Vincent, the large, bright blossom became a symbol of his dream of
an artist's colony.
Sensitive to his brother's loneliness, Theo persuaded Gauguin to make
the journey south to Aries. He arrived on October 23, and, at first,
he appeared to provide ideal company for Vincent. They worked
together, shared their expenses, and Gauguin saw to it that Vincent
ate more regularly, cooking him nourishing meals. But their close
companionship began to stifle Gauguin and made Vincent feel anxious,
and their lively debates about art soon heated into arguments. On
December 23. according to Gauguin's account, Vincent confronted him
with a razor. Gauguin claimed to have stared him down, and Vincent
retreated to the Yellow House where he was found the next morning,
bleeding profusely from a self-inflicted wound to his left ear. What
drove him to this desperate state remains unclear, but his
heightened emotions, exacerbated by his irregular eating habits and
abuse of alcohol, may have triggered the first of the psycho-motor
seizures that would continue to plague him for the rest of his days.
Vincent was taken to the hospital, where he was treated for blood
loss and potential infection. Within a few weeks he was released to
convalesce alone—Gauguin had left Aries. Vincent attempted to
dismiss his fear in his letters to Theo, describing his recent
crisis as "an attack of artistic temperament "but further
hospitalizations for his chronic insomnia and intermittent
hallucinations followed.
When his neighbors petitioned the mayor of Aries to have him
forcibly readmitted to hospital because of his erratic behavior,
Vincent relinquished his vision of the Studio of the South. As Theo
had recently married he could not consider intruding on him, but he
longed for help and companionship. In May, he admitted himself to
Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a psychiatric hospital in nearby
Saint-Remy-de-Provence. At first, he was confined to the hospital
gardens, but as his condition stabilized, he was allowed off the
grounds to paint in the company of an attendant. The cypress groves
and olive trees, as well as the surrounding fields, restored his
sense of connection with nature through his art.
In this sympathetic environment, Vincent managed to regain some sense
of strength and purpose. His condition was diagnosed as a form of
epilepsy, and even under these controlled circumstances, he suffered
from sporadic, but profound, seizures. As a result, Vincent was
periodically debilitated, unable to work in the aftermath of an
attack. In the intervals between these unpredictable incidents, he
was calm and lucid, well aware of the scope of his condition. He
wrote to Theo:
"As far as I can judge I am not really mad. You will
see that the canvases I've done in the meantime are untroubled and
no worse than the others"
(Letter 580).
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Self-Portrait, Summer
Summer 1887
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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Vincent began his relentless and highly charged
self-investigation through portraiture during his stay in Paris.
Many explanations for his fascination with making self-portraits
can be cited, one being that without ready funds to hire models,
an artist like Vincent could always depict his own visage. But
the intensity of his expression and the fixed gaze that demands
the attention of the viewer suggest that Vincent used these
portraits to explore his deepest emotions. This rich and brooding
image was painted during his second summer in Pans. It
demonstrates his new command of tone and brush stroke, pointing
to the daring contrasts of color and the heavily applied paint
that would characterize his mature style.
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The Bedroom
October 1888
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
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Vincent painted this portrait of his bedroom in the Yellow House at Aries while
preparing for Gauguin's visit. With its acute perspective and flattened
dimensions, The Bedroom has a jarring expressive force, but Vincent told Theo it
was meant to convey a sense of rest. In a letter written to his brother about
the painting, he describes the furniture of the room as rendered with "sturdy
lines" to suggest the peace of "undisturbed rest."
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Returning north
In October 1889, Camille Pissarro recommended to Theo that Vincent
move to Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris, where he could live
under the care of Dr. Paul Cachet, a physician and amateur artist.
Plans were delayed by a severe attack in December, and it was not
until May 1890 that Vincent made the train journey to Auvers. He
found his new circumstances comfortable and took an immediate liking
to Paul Gachet, whom he described in a letter to his sister
Willemina as being "a perfect friend" and almost "'like another
brother." Vincent sensed a deep empathy in Gachet: "So alike are we
physically, mentally too. He is very nervous and most odd himself."
Vincent embraced his work with new conviction and a sense of
tranquility, finding subjects that ranged from the garden at the
house of Barbizon painter Charles Daubigny to the vast wheatfields
that lay on the outskirts of Auvers.
But, on July 25,Theo received a letter from Vincent that he
described in a note to his wife as "quite incomprehensible." Theo
sadly wondered, "When will there come a happy time for him?" Two
days later, Vincent shot himself in the stomach, while out in the
wheatfields that had become the focus of his art.
He died on July
29.
The funeral was held in Auvers, with Theo and a few friends in
attendance. In a letter to Albert Aurier, the first critic to
recognize the power of Vincent's painting, Emile Bernard described
Vincent's coffin, covered with a simple white drape and "masses of
flowers, the sunflowers that he so loved, yellow dahlias, yellow
flowers everywhere. It was his favorite color, if you remember,
symbol of the light that he dreamed of finding in the heart of his
artworks."
The story of Vincent van Gogh's turbulent life has been told
repeatedly in the century since his death. He, too, left many
accounts of his experience: his self-portraits provide an intimate
and unflinching view of his troubled inner existence, while his
long, heartfelt correspondence with his brother lends insight to the
issues on his mind. But another vision of Vincent can be observed in
the paintings of fields and flowers that occupied him during the
last, and most productive, years of his life. As he painted the
bouquets and the flowering trees, the iris and the sunflower, and
the vast fields, Vincent celebrated the deep connection of his art
with nature. Within that bond, he found a brief and tranquil refuge,
and at least for a time, a reason to work and live, feeling joy in
his own existence.
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Courtyard in the Hospital at Arles
April 1889
Oscar Reinhart Collection.Winterthur
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While in hospital in Aries, Vincent made several drawings and
paintings of the hospital garden. Here, he selected a high point
of view, suggesting perhaps that he had set his easel on the
balcony above the courtyard. The flowerbeds, radiating in
wedge-shaped plots around the fountain in a traditional formal
pattern, mark a contrast to the freer compositions he painted
off the grounds.
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Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
January 1889
Courtauld
Institute, London |
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After the incident of his mutilation of his own ear, Vincent
painted two self-portraits while he still wore heavy bandages.
In this painting, he appears as a convalescent, wrapped in a
thick wool coat, with his fur-trimmed hat pulled down over the
dressings. Behind him is a Japanese print, Toyokuni ill's Geishas
in a Landscape, which had been in his collection at least since
he lived in Paris. The print recalls the hopes he brought to
Aries, but his weary posture and sorrowful gaze express the grim
recognition that his life had irrevocably changed.
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The Starry Night
June 1889
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
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Painted in June, just a month after Vincent voluntarily admitted
himself to the asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, The Starry Night
appears to reflect the turbulent turn of events that led to his
self-imposed confinement. But from his first days m Provence,
Vincent had expressed a wish to paint a "starry night with
cypresses." His room m Samt-Paul-de-Mausole looked out on
the eastern sky, presenting a vista to inspire him.
Dominated in the foreground by a dark, twisting stand of
trees, the panoramic terrain of The Starry Night seems to roll back into the distance
under a chaotic sky. The stars, with their swirling auras of
thick impasto, vibrate against the bright blue heavens. The
orange-yellow of the crescent moon heightens the tonal contrast,
recalling Vincent's sense of freedom in the "arbitrary use of
color to express [himself] more forcefully."
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Church
at Auvers
1890
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