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Vincent Willem van Gogh (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 sombre 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".
The
most comprehensive primary source for the understanding of Van Gogh as
an artist is the collection of letters which were passed between him
and his younger brother, the art dealer Theo van Gogh. They lay the foundation for
most of what is known about the thoughts and beliefs of the artist. Theo continually provided his
brother with both financial and emotional support. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The
practice of reusing a name in this way was not uncommon. Vincent was a
common name in the Van Gogh family; his grandfather (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). 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). As
a
child, Vincent was serious, silent and thoughtful. He attended the
Zundert village school from 1860, where the single Catholic teacher
taught around 200 pupils. From 1861, he and his sister Anna were taught
at home by a governess, until 1 October 1864, when he went away to the
elementary boarding school of Jan Provily in Zevenbergen,
the
Netherlands, about 20 miles (32 km) away. He was
distressed to leave his family home, and recalled this even in
adulthood. On 15 September 1866, he went to the new middle school, Willem II
College in
Tilburg, the Netherlands. Constantijn C. Huysmans, a successful artist
in Paris, taught Van Gogh to draw at the school and advocated a
systematic approach to the subject. In March 1868, Van Gogh abruptly
left school and returned home. A later comment on his early years was,
"My youth was gloomy and cold and sterile ..." In July 1869, his uncle helped
him obtain a position with the art dealer Goupil & Cie in The Hague.
After his training, in June 1873, Goupil transferred him to London,
where he lodged at 87 Hackford Road,
Brixton, and worked at Messrs. Goupil
& Co., 17 Southampton Street. This
was
a happy time for him; he was successful at work and was already, at
20, earning more than his father. Theo's wife later remarked that this
was the happiest year of Van Gogh's life. He fell in love with his
landlady's daughter, Eugénie Loyer, but when he finally
confessed his feeling to her, she rejected him, saying that she was
already secretly engaged to a former lodger. He was increasingly
isolated and fervent about religion. His father and uncle sent him to
Paris to work in a dealership. However, he became resentful at how art
was treated as a commodity, a fact apparent to customers. On 1 April
1876, his employment was terminated. 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. The proprietor of the school
relocated to Isleworth,
Middlesex, and Van Gogh moved to the new location taking the train to
Richmond and the remainder of the journey by foot. However the arrangement did not
work out and Van Gogh left to become a Methodist minister's assistant, to
follow his wish to "preach the gospel everywhere." 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. His
roommate at the time, a young teacher called Görlitz, later
recalled that Van Gogh ate frugally, and preferred not to eat meat. 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. 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. Van Gogh 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. In
January 1879, he took a temporary post as a missionary in the village of Petit Wasmes in the coal-mining district of Borinage in
Belgium. Taking Christianity to what he saw as its logical conclusion,
Van Gogh opted to live like those he preached to — sharing their
hardships to the extent of sleeping on straw in a small hut at the back
of the baker's house where he was billeted. The baker's wife reported
hearing Van Gogh sobbing all night in the hut. His choice of squalid
living conditions did not endear him to the appalled church
authorities, who dismissed him for "undermining the dignity of the
priesthood." He then walked to Brussels, returned briefly to the village
of Cuesmes in the Borinage but gave in
to pressure from his parents to return home to Etten.
He stayed there until around March the following year, a
cause of increasing concern and frustration for his parents. There was
particular conflict between Vincent and his father; Theodorus made
inquiries about having his son committed to the lunatic asylum at Geel. He returned to Cuesmes where he lodged
with a miner named Charles Decrucq until October. He
became increasingly interested in ordinary people and scenes around
him. However, 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 Royal
Academy of Art.
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." 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." 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. 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). Late that November, he wrote a
strongly worded letter to his uncle Stricker, and then hurried to Amsterdam
where he again spoke with Stricker on several occasions. Kee refused to see him and her
parents wrote, "Your persistence is disgusting". 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." 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 given
Van Gogh's inability to support himself financially. 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. In
January 1882, he settled in The Hague where he called on his
cousin-in-law, the painter Anton Mauve (1838 – 1888). Mauve
encouraged him towards painting, however the two soon fell out,
possibly over the issue of drawing from plaster casts.
Mauve appears to have suddenly gone cold towards Van Gogh and did not
return a number of his letters. Van
Gogh
supposed that Mauve had learned of his new domestic arrangement with an
alcoholic prostitute, Clasina Maria "Sien" Hoornik
(1850 – unknown) and her
young daughter. He had met Sien towards the end
of January, when
she had a five year old daughter and was pregnant. She had already
borne two children who had died, although Van Gogh was unaware of this. On 2 July, Sien gave birth to a
baby boy, Willem. When
Van Gogh's father discovered the details of their relationship, he put
considerable pressure on his son to abandon Sien and her children. Vincent was at first defiant in
the face of opposition. Van Gogh's uncle Cornelis, an art dealer,
commissioned 20 ink drawings of the city, the artist completed by the
end of May. That June, he
spent three weeks in a hospital suffering gonorrhea. That summer he began to paint in oil. 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. 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. 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." Willem believed himself to be Van Gogh's
son, however the timing of his birth makes this unlikely. 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. In Nuenen,
he devoted himself to drawing and would pay boys to bring him birds'
nests for subject matter, and
made many sketches of weavers in their cottages. 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. On 26 March 1885, his father
died of a heart attack and the artist grieved deeply at the loss. For
the first time, there was interest from Paris in his work. That spring,
he completed what is generally considered his first major work, The Potato
Eaters (Dutch: De Aardappeleters). That
August, his work was exhibited for the first time, in the windows of a
paint dealer, Leurs, in The Hague. He was accused of forcing himself on
one of his young peasant sitters who became pregnant that September. As a result, the Catholic village priest
forbade parishioners from modeling for him. During 1885, he painted
several groups of still-life paintings. 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. 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.
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). 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. 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. While in Antwerp Van Gogh began to drink absinthe heavily. He was treated by Dr Cavenaile, whose
practice was near the docklands, possibly for syphilis; the treatment of alum irrigations and sitz
baths was jotted down by Van Gogh in one of his
notebooks. 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. Van Gogh
traveled to Paris in March 1886 to study at Fernand Cormon's
studio, where he shared Theo's Rue Laval apartment on Montmartre.
In
June, they took a larger flat further uphill, at 54 Rue Lepic. Since
there was no longer need to communicate by letters, less is known about
Van Gogh's time in Paris than of earlier or later periods of his life. He painted several Paris street
scenes in Montmartre and elsewhere such as Bridges
across the Seine at Asnieres (1887). 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)91887), Van Gogh traced the figure from a
reproduction on the cover of the magazine Paris Illustre and then graphically enlarged it in his
painting. 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. For
months, Van Gogh worked at Cormon's studio where he frequented the
circle of the British-Australian artist John Peter
Russell, and he met
fellow students like Émile
Bernard, Louis Anquetin,
and Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec,
who created a portrait of Van Gogh with pastel. The group used to meet
at the paint store run by Julien "Père" Tanguy, which was at
that time the only place to view works by Paul
Cézanne.
He would have had easy access to Impressionist works in Paris at the
time. In 1886, two large vanguard exhibitions were staged. In these
shows Neo-Impressionism made its first appearance —
works of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac were the talk of the town.
Though Theo, too, kept a stock of Impressionist paintings in his gallery on
Boulevard Montmarte — by artists including Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro
— Vincent seemingly had problems acknowledging developments in how
artists view and paint their subject matter.
Conflicts
arose, and at the end of 1886 Theo found shared life with Vincent
"almost unbearable". By the spring of 1887 they had made peace. He
then
moved to Asnières where he became acquainted with Signac.
With his friend Emile Bernard, who lived with his parents in
Asnières, 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. The theory behind this style
stresses the value of complementary
colors —
including blue and orange — which form vibrant contrasts and enhance
each other when juxtaposed. In November 1887, Theo and Vincent met
and befriended Paul
Gauguin who had just arrived in Paris. Towards
the end of the year, Van Gogh 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. Van Gogh
moved to Arles hoping for refuge; at the time he was ill from drink and
suffering from smoker's cough. 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. 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". 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". She also recalled selling him colored
pencils.
Yet,
he was taken by the local landscape and light. His works from the
period are richly draped in yellow, ultramarine and mauve. His
portrayals of the Arles landscape are informed by his Dutch upbringing;
the patchwork of fields and avenues appear flat and lack perspective,
but excel in their intensity of colour. The
vibrant light in Arles excited him, and his newfound appreciation is
seen in the range and scope of his work. He painted local landscapes
using a gridded "perspective frame" that March. Three of these
paintings were shown at the annual exhibition of the Société
des Artistes Indépendants. In April, he was visited by
the American artist Dodge MacKnight,
who was living nearby at Fontvieille. On 1 May, he signed a lease for
15 francs month in the eastern wing of the Yellow House at
No. 2 Place Lamartine. The rooms were unfurnished and uninhabited for
some time. He had been staying at the Hôtel Restaurant Carrel,
but the rate charged by the hotel was 5 francs a week, which he found
excessive. He disputed the price, took the case to a local arbitrator
and was awarded a twelve franc reduction on his total bill. He
moved from the Hôtel Carrel to the Café de la Gare on 7
May, where
he became friends with the proprietors, Joseph and Marie Ginoux.
Although the Yellow House had to be furnished before he could fully
move in, Van Gogh was able to utilise it as a studio. Hoping to have a gallery to
display his work, his major project at this time was a series of
paintings which included: Van
Gogh's Chair (1888), Bedroom in
Arles (1888), The Night
Café (1888), The Café
Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night (September
1888), Starry Night
Over the Rhone (1888), Still Life:
Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (1888), all intended to
form the décoration for the Yellow House. Van Gogh wrote about The Night Café:
"I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where
one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime." 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. Gauguin
agreed to join him in Arles, giving Van Gogh much hope for friendship
and his collective of artists. Waiting, in August, he painted
sunflowers. Boch visited again and Van Gogh painted his portrait as
well as the study The
Poet Against a Starry Sky. Boch's
sister Anna (1848 – 1936), also an artist,
purchased The Red Vineyard in 1890. Upon advice from his friend,
the station's postal supervisor Joseph Roulin,
whose portrait he painted, he bought two beds on 8 September, and he finally spent the first
night in the still sparsely furnished Yellow House on 17 September. When Gauguin consented to work
and live in Arles side-by-side with Van Gogh, he started to work on the The
Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most
ambitious effort he ever undertook. Van Gogh did two chair
paintings: Van
Gogh's Chair and Gauguin's Chair. 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. The two
artists visited Montpellier that December and viewed
works in the Alfred Bruyas
collection by Courbet and Delacroix in the Musée
Fabre. However,
their relationship was deteriorating. They quarreled fiercely about
art; Van Gogh felt an increasing fear that Gauguin was going to desert
him as a situation he described as one of "excessive tension" reached
crisis point. 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." Gauguin left Arles and never saw Van Gogh
again. 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. 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. On
8 May 1889, accompanied by a carer, the Reverend Salles, he committed
himself to the hospital at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. A former monastery in
Saint-Rémy less than 20 miles (32 km) from Arles, the
monastery is located in an area of cornfields, vineyards and olive
trees at the time run by a former naval doctor, Dr.
Théophile Peyron. Theo arranged for two small rooms —
adjoining cells with barred windows. The second was to be used as a
studio. 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. 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 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 and compared his copies to a musician's
interpreting Beethoven. 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. That
September, he produced a further two versions of Bedroom in Arles,
and in February 1890 painted four portraits of L'Arlésienne
(Madame Ginoux), based on a charcoal sketch Gauguin
had produced when Madame Ginoux sat for both artists at the beginning
of November 1888. His work
was praised by Albert Aurier in the Mercure de
France in
January 1890, when he was described as "a genius". In February invited by Les XX,
a society of avant-garde painters in Brussels, he participated in their
annual exhibition.
At
the opening dinner, Les XX member Henry de Groux insulted Van Gogh's
works. Toulouse-Lautrec demanded satisfaction, and Signac declared he
would continue to fight for Van Gogh's honor if Lautrec should be
surrendered. Later, when Van Gogh's exhibit was on display with the
Artistes Indépendants in Paris, Monet said that his work was the
best in the show. In
February 1890, following the birth of his nephew Vincent Willem, he
wrote in a letter to his mother, that with the new addition to the
family, he "started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in
their bedroom, big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky." In
May 1890, Van Gogh left the clinic to move himself nearer the physician Dr. Paul Gachet (1828 – 1909), in Auvers-sur-Oise outside Paris, where he
would also be closer to Theo. Dr. Gachet was recommended to Van Gogh by Camille Pissarro (1830 – 1903);
Gachet had previously treated several artists and was an amateur artist
himself. Van Gogh's first impression was that Gachet was "...sicker
than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much." In June 1890, he painted Portrait of Dr.
Gachet and
completed two portraits of Gachet in oils, as well as a third — his
only etching. In all three the emphasis is on Gachet's melancholic
disposition. In
his last weeks at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh's thoughts had been
returning to his "memories of the North", and several of the
approximately 70 oils he painted during his 70 days in Auvers-sur-Oise,
such as The Church at
Auvers, are reminiscent of northern scenes.
Wheat Field
with Crows (July 1890) 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. It is often mistakenly stated to be his
last work, but Van Gogh scholar Jan
Hulsker lists seven paintings which postdate it. 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. There are also paintings which show
evidence of being unfinished, such as Thatched
Cottages by a Hill. Recently
acquitted
from the hospital, Van Gogh suffered a severe setback in
December 1889. Although he had been troubled by mental illness
throughout his life, the episodes became more pronounced during his
last few years. In some of these periods he was either unwilling or
unable to paint, a factor which added to the mounting frustrations of
an artist at the peak of his ability. His depression gradually
deepened. On 27 July 1890, aged 37, he walked into a field and shot
himself in the chest with a revolver. He survived the impact, but not
realizing that his injuries were to be fatal, he walked back to the Ravoux Inn.
He died there two days later. Theo rushed to be at his side. Theo
reported his brother's last words as "La tristesse durera toujours" (the
sadness will last forever). Theo's
health deteriorated in the months after the death of his brother. He
contracted
syphilis — though
this was not admitted by the family for many years. He was admitted to
the hospital, and weak and unable to come to terms with Vincent's
absence, he died six months later, on 25 January, at Utrecht. In 1914, Theo's body was
exhumed and re-buried with his brother at Auvers-sur-Oise. 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. 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. 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 a fondness for alcohol, especially absinthe. |