Vincent Van Gogh
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born March 30, 1853, Zundert, Netherlands
died July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, France
in full Vincent Willem van Gogh Dutch painter, generally considered
the greatest after Rembrandt, and one of the greatest of the
Post-Impressionists. The striking colour, emphatic brushwork, and
contoured forms of his work powerfully influenced the current of
Expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh's art became astoundingly
popular after his death, especially in the late 20th century, when
his work sold for record-breaking sums at auctions around the world
and was featured in blockbuster touring exhibitions. In part because
of his extensive, published letters, van Gogh has also been
mythologized in the popular imagination as the quintessential
tortured artist.
Early life
Van Gogh, the eldest of six children of a Protestant pastor, was
born and reared in a small village in the Brabant region of the
southern Netherlands. He was a quiet, self-contained youth, spending
his free time wandering the countryside to observe nature. At 16 he
was apprenticed to The Hague branch of the art dealers Goupil and
Co., of which his uncle was a partner.
Van Gogh worked for Goupil in London from 1873 to May 1875 and in
Paris from that date until April 1876. Daily contact with works of
art aroused his artistic sensibility, and he soon formed a taste for
Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and other Dutch masters, although his
preference was for two contemporary French painters, Jean-François
Millet and Camille Corot, whose influence was to last throughout his
life. Van Gogh disliked art dealing. Moreover, his approach to life
darkened when his love was rejected by a London girl in 1874. His
burning desire for human affection thwarted, he became increasingly
solitary. He worked as a language teacher and lay preacher in
England and, in 1877, worked for a bookseller in Dordrecht, The
Netherlands. Impelled by a longing to serve humanity, he envisaged
entering the ministry and took up theology; however, he abandoned
this project in 1878 for short-term training as an evangelist in
Brussels. A conflict with authority ensued when he disputed the
orthodox doctrinal approach. Failing to get an appointment after
three months, he left to do missionary work among the impoverished
population of the Borinage, a coal-mining region in southwestern
Belgium. There, in the winter of 1879–80, he experienced the first
great spiritual crisis of his life. Living among the poor, he gave
away all his worldly goods in an impassioned moment; he was
thereupondismissed by church authorities for a too-literal
interpretation of Christian teaching.
Penniless and feeling that his faith was destroyed, he sank into
despair and withdrew from everyone. “They think I'm a madman,” he
told an acquaintance, “because I wanted to be a true Christian. They
turned me out like a dog, saying that I was causing a scandal.” It
was then that van Gogh began to draw seriously, thereby discovering
in 1880 his true vocationas an artist. Van Gogh decided that his
mission from then on would be to bring consolation to humanity
through art. “I want to give the wretched a brotherly message,” he
explained to his brother Theo. “When I sign [my paintings]
‘Vincent,' it is as one of them.” This realization of his creative
powers restored his self-confidence.
The productive decade
His artistic career was extremely short, lasting only the 10 years
from 1880 to 1890. During the first four years of this period, while
acquiring technical proficiency, he confined himself almost entirely
to drawings and watercolours. First, he went to study drawing at the
Brussels Academy; in 1881 he moved to his father's parsonage at
Etten, The Netherlands, and began to work from nature.
Van Gogh worked hard and methodically but soon perceived the
difficulty of self-training and the need to seek the guidance of
more experienced artists. Late in 1881 he settled at The Hague to
work with a Dutch landscape painter, Anton Mauve. He visited museums
and met with other painters. Van Gogh thus extended his technical
knowledge and experimented with oil paint in the summer of 1882. In
1883 the urge to be “alone with nature” and with peasants took him
to Drenthe, an isolated part of the northern Netherlands frequented
by Mauve and other Dutch artists, where he spent three months before
returning home, which was then at Nuenen, another village in the
Brabant. He remained at Nuenen during most of 1884 and 1885, and
during these years his art grew bolder and more assured. He painted
three types of subjects—still life, landscape, and figure—all
interrelated by their reference to the daily life of peasants, to
the hardships they endured, and to the countryside they cultivated.
Émile Zola's Germinal (1885), a novel about the coal-mining regionof
France, greatly impressed van Gogh, and sociological criticism is
implicit in many of his pictures from this period—e.g., Weavers and
The Potato Eaters. Eventually, however, he felt too isolated in
Nuenen.
His understanding of the possibilities of painting was evolving
rapidly; from studying Hals he learned to portray the freshness of a
visual impression, while the works of Paolo Veronese and Eugène
Delacroix taught him that colourcan express something by itself.
This led to his enthusiasm for Peter Paul Rubens and inspired his
sudden departure for Antwerp, Belgium, where the greatest number of
Rubens's works could be seen. The revelation of Rubens's mode of
direct notation and of his ability to express a mood by a
combination of colours proved decisive in the development of van
Gogh's style. Simultaneously, van Gogh discovered Japanese prints
and Impressionist painting. All these sourcesinfluenced him more
than the academic principles taught at the Antwerp Academy, where he
was enrolled. His refusal to follow the academy's dictates led to
disputes, and after threemonths he left precipitately in 1886 to
join Theo in Paris. There, still concerned with improving his
drawing, van Goghmet Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and
others who were to play historic roles in modern art. They opened
his eyes to the latest developments in French painting. At the same
time, Theo introduced him to Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, and
other artists of the Impressionist group.
By this time van Gogh was ready for such lessons, and the changes
that his painting underwent in Paris between the spring of 1886 and
February 1888 led to the creation of his personal idiom and style of
brushwork. His palette at last became colourful, his vision less
traditional, and his tonalities lighter, as may be seen in his first
paintings of Montmartre. By the summer of 1887 he was painting in
pure colours and using broken brushwork that is at times
pointillistic. Finally, by the beginning of 1888, van Gogh's
Post-Impressionist style had crystallized, resulting in such
masterpieces as Portrait of Père Tanguy and Self-Portrait in Front
of an Easel , as well as in some landscapes of the Parisian suburbs.
After two years van Gogh was tired of city life, physically
exhausted, and longing “to look at nature under a brighter sky.” His
passion was now for “a full effect of colour.” He leftParis in
February 1888 for Arles, in southeastern France.
The pictures he created over the following 12 months—depicting
blossoming fruit trees, views of the town and surroundings,
self-portraits, portraits of Roulin the postman and other friends,
interiors and exteriors of the house, sunflowers, and
landscapes—marked his first great period. In these works he strove
to respect the external, visual aspect of a figure or landscape but
found himself unable to suppress his own feelings about the subject,
which found expression in emphatic contours and heightened effectsof
colour. Once hesitant to diverge from the traditional techniques of
painting he worked so hard to master, he now gave free rein to his
individuality and began squeezing his tubes of oil paint directly on
the canvas. Van Gogh's style was spontaneous and instinctive, for he
workedwith great speed and intensity, determined to capture an
effect or a mood while it possessed him. “When anyone says that such
and such [painting] is done too quickly,” he told hisbrother, “you
can reply that they have looked at it too fast.”
Van Gogh knew that his approach to painting was individualistic, but
he also knew that some tasks are beyond the power of isolated
individuals to accomplish. In Paris he had hoped to form a separate
Impressionist group with Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others whom
he believed had similar aims. He rented and decorated a house in
Arles withthe intention of persuading them to join him and found a
working community called“The Studio of the South.” Gauguin arrivedin
October 1888, and for two months van Gogh and Gauguin worked
together; but, while each influenced the other to some extent, their
relations rapidly deteriorated because they hadopposing ideas and
were temperamentally incompatible.
Disaster struck on Christmas Eve 1888. Physically and emotionally
exhausted, van Gogh snapped under the strain.He argued with Gauguin,
reportedly chased him with a razor, and then cut off the lower half
of his own left ear. A sensational news story reported that a
deranged van Gogh then visited a brothel near his home and delivered
the bloody body part to a woman named Rachel, saying, “Guard this
object carefully.” Whatever transpired, Gauguin left after the
incident, and van Gogh was hospitalized.
Van Gogh returned home a fortnight later and resumed painting,
producing a mirror-image Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear,
several still lifes, and La Berceuse (“MmeRoulin Rocking a Cradle”).
Several weeks later, he again showed symptoms of mental disturbance
severe enough to cause him to be sent back to the hospital. At the
end of April 1889, fearful of losing his renewed capacity for work,
which he regarded as a guarantee of his sanity, he asked to be
temporarily shut up in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in order
to be under medical supervision.
Van Gogh stayed there for 12 months, haunted by recurrent attacks,
alternating between moods of calm and despair, andworking
intermittently: Garden of the Asylum, Cypresses, Olive Trees, Les
Alpilles, portraits of doctors, and interpretations of paintings by
Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Millet date from this period. The keynote
of this phase (1889–90) is fear of losing touch with reality, as
well as a certain sadness. Confined for long periods to his cell or
the asylum garden, having no choice of subjects, and realizing that
his inspiration depended on direct observation, van Gogh fought
against having to work from memory. At Saint-Rémy he muted the
vivid, sun-drenched colours of the previous summer and tried to make
his painting more calm. As he repressed his excitement, however, he
involved himself more imaginatively in the drama of the elements,
developing a style based on dynamic forms and a vigorous use of line
(he often equated line with colour). The best of hisSaint-Rémy
pictures are thus bolder and more visionary thanthose of Arles.
Van Gogh himself brought this period to an end. Oppressed by
homesickness—he painted souvenirs of Holland—and loneliness, he
longed to see Theo and the north once more and arrived in Paris in
May 1890. Four days later he went to stay with a homeopathic
doctor-artist, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a friend of Pissarro and Paul
Cézanne, at Auvers-sur-Oise. Back in a village community such as he
hadnot known since Nuenen, four years earlier, van Gogh worked at
first enthusiastically; his choice of subjects such as fields of
corn, the river valley, peasants' cottages, the church, and the town
hall reflects his spiritual relief. A modification of his style
followed: the natural forms in his paintings became less contorted,
and in the northern light headopted cooler, fresh tonalities. His
brushwork became broader and more expressive and his vision of
nature more lyrical. Everything in these pictures seems to be
moving, living. This phase was short, however, and ended in quarrels
with Gachet and feelings of guilt at his financial dependence on
Theo (now married and with a son) and his inability to succeed.
In despair of ever being able to overcome his loneliness or be
cured, van Gogh shot himself. He did not die immediately. When found
wounded in his bed, he allegedly said, “I shot myself.…I only hope I
haven't botched it.” That evening, when interrogated by the police,
van Gogh refusedto answer questions, saying, “What I have done is
nobody else's business. I am free to do what I like with my own
body.”
Van Gogh died two days later. Theo, his own health broken, died six
months later (January 25, 1891). In 1914 Theo's remains were moved
to his brother's grave site, in a little cemetery in Auvers, where
today the two brothers lie side by side, with identical tombstones.
Assessment
Largely on the basis of the works of the last three years of
hislife, van Gogh is generally considered one of the greatest Dutch
painters of all time. His work exerted a powerful influence on the
development of much modern painting, in particular on the works of
the Fauve painters, Chaim Soutine,and the German Expressionists. Yet
of the more than 800 oil paintings and 700 drawings that constitute
his life's work, he sold only one in his lifetime. Always
desperately poor, he was sustained by his faith in the urgency of
what he had to communicate and by the generosity of Theo, who
believed inhim implicitly. The letters that he wrote to Theo from
1872 onward, and to other friends, give such a vivid account of his
aims and beliefs, his hopes and disappointments, and his fluctuating
physical and mental state that they form a unique and touching
biographical record that is also a great human document.
The name of van Gogh was virtually unknown when he killed himself:
only one article about him had appeared during his lifetime. He had
exhibited a few canvases at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris
between 1888 and 1890 and in Brussels in 1890; both salons showed
small commemorative groups of his work in 1891. One-man shows of his
work did not occur until 1892.
Van Gogh's fame dates from the early years of the 20th century, and
since then his reputation has never ceased to grow. A large part of
this reputation is based on the image of van Gogh as a struggling
genius, working unappreciated in isolation. The dramatic elements of
his life—poverty, self-mutilation, mental breakdown, and
suicide—feed the drama of this mythology. The notion that his
unorthodox talent was unrecognized and rejected by society heightens
the legend, as it is just that sort of isolation and struggle
thathas come to define the modern concept of the artist. This
mythical van Gogh has become almost inseparable from hisart,
inspiring artists to dramatize his saga in poems, novels, films,
operas, dance ensembles, orchestral compositions, and a popular
song. Wide and diverse audiences have come to appreciate his art,
and the record-breaking attendance at exhibitions of his works—as
well as the popularity of commercial items featuring imagery from
his oeuvre—revealthat, within the span of a century, van Gogh has
become perhaps the most recognized painter of all time. The
unprecedented prices his works have attained through auction and the
attention paid to forgery scandals have only increased van Gogh's
stature in the public imagination.
Because the most sensational events of van Gogh's life—the conflicts
with Gauguin, the mutilation of his left ear,and the suicide—are
thinly documented and layered with apocrypha and anecdote, there is
a trend in van Gogh studies to penetrate the layers of myth by
reconstructing theknown facts of the artist's life. This scholarly
analysis has taken many forms. Medical and psychological experts
have examined contemporary descriptions of his symptoms and their
prescribed treatments in an attempt to diagnose van Gogh's condition
(theories suggest epilepsy, schizophrenia, or both). Other scholars
have studied evidence of his interaction with colleagues,
neighbours, and relatives and have meticulously examined the sites
where van Gogh worked and the locales where he lived. In light of
van Gogh's continually increasing popularity, scholars have even
deconstructed the mythologizing process itself. These investigations
shed greater light on the artist and his art and also offer further
proof that, more than a century after his death, van Gogh's
extraordinary appeal continues to endure and expand.
