Vincent van Gogh- The Places

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Vincent van Gogh 1853-1890

The following excerpt was taken from
Van Gogh's Van Goghs :
Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
by Richard Kendall

Translated from the Dutch by Michael Hayle

NUENEN

In Nuenen, Van Gogh first began painting regularly, modeling himself chiefly on the French painter Jean-Franqois Millet (1814-1875), who was famous throughout Europe for his scenes of the harsh fife of peasants. Van Gogh set to work with an iron will, depicting the life of the villagers and humble workers. He made numerous scenes of weavers. In May Y,884 he moved into rooms he had rented from the sacristan of the local Catholic church, one of which he used as his studio.

At the end of 1884 he began painting and drawing a major series of heads and workroughened peasant hands in preparation for a large and complex figure piece that he was planning. In April 1885 this period of study came to fruition in the masterpiece of his Dutch period, The Potato Eaters.

In the summer of that year he made a large number of drawings of the peasants working in the fields. The supply of models dried up, however, when the local priest forbade his parishioners to pose for the vicar's son. He turned to painting landscapes instead, inspired in part by a visit to the recently opened Rijksmuseurn in Amsterdam.

In 1885, feeling the need for a proper artistic training, Van Gogh enrolled at the academy in Antwerp. He found the lessons rather tedious, but was greatly impressed by the city and its museums. He fell under the spell of Rubens' palette and brushwork, and also discovered Japanese prints.

PARIS

In early 1886 Van Gogh went to live with his brother in Paris. There, at last, he was confronted with the full impact of modern art and especially with the recent work of the impressionists and postimpressionists. He discovered that the dark palette he had developed back in Holland was hopelessly out-of-date. in order to brighten it up he began painting still lifes of flowers. The search for his own idiom led him to experiment with impressionist and postimpressionist techniques and to study the prints of the Japanese masters. During his time in Paris he made friends with such artists as Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Henri ToulouseLautrec, Paul Signac, and Georges Seurat. Within two years Van Gogh had come to terms with the latest developments and had forged his own, highly personal style.

ARLES

At the beginning of 1888, Van Gogh, now a mature artist, went south to Arles, in Provence, where he at last began to feel confident about his choice of career. He set out to make a personal contribution to modem art with his daring color combinations. He was swept away by the landscape around Arles. In the spring he painted numerous scenes of fruit trees in blossom, and in the surnmer the yellow wheatfields. Although he had some difficulty finding models, he did make portraits, among which were those of the Roulin family. It was typical of Van Gogh's faith in his own abilities that he decided not to try to sell any work yet but to wait until he had thirty top-class pictures with which he could announce himself to the world. He cherished the hope that a number of other artists would come and join him in Arles, where they could all live and work together. The idea seemed to get off to a promising start when Gauguin arrived in October 1888.

Toward the end of the year, however, his optimism was rudely shattered by the first signs of his illness, a type of epilepsy that took the form of delusions and psychotic attacks. It was during one of those seizures that he cut off his left earlobe. Gauguin made a hasty departure and Van Gogh's dreams of an artist's colony disappeared.

SAINT-REMY

In April 1889 he went to nearby Saint-R6my, where he entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum as a voluntary patient. Van Gogh was unable to work when suffering from bouts of his illness. If he felt well enough, though, he went out to draw and paint in the garden or surroundings of the asylum. His use of color, which had often been so intense in Arles, became more muted, and he tried to make his brushwork more graphic. In the closing months of the year he had a success when two of his paintings were shown at the fifth exhibition of the Societe des artistes independants.

Van Gogh also made a large number of "translations in color" of prints by some of his favorite artists, like Millet and Eug~ne Delacroix. He found them consoling, and they helped him keep in practice.

In January 18go the critic Albert Aurier published an enthusiastic article about Van Gogh's work.

AUVERS-SUR-OISE

The artist left Saint-Remy in May 1890 and went north again, this time to the rustic village of Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris. On his way he stopped off in Paris to call on Theo, his wife Johanna, and their infant son Vincent Willem.

Although he now had a small but growing circle of admirers, Van Gogh had lost his original passion. "I feel-a failure," he wrote to his brother. "That's it as far as I'm concerned-I feel that this is the destiny that I accept, that will never change."

He nevertheless continued working hard during his two months in Auvers, producing dozens of paintings and drawings. Life, though, had become an intolerable burden. On 27 July 1890 he shot himself in the chest. He died two days later. Theo, who had stored the bulk of Vincent's work in Paris, died six months later. His widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger (1862-1925), returned to Holland with the collection, and dedicated herself to getting her brother-in-law the recognition he deserved. In 1914, with his fame assured, she published the correspondence between the two brothers. From that moment on Van Gogh's oeuvre became inextricably interwoven with the story of his remarkable and tragic life.

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