On March 30, 1853 a boy was born to the family of a Dutch village vicar, Theodorus van Gogh (1822-1885) and his wife Anne Cornelia, nèe Carbentus (1819-1907). A year before, exactly the same day, another boy was born to the family, he died, and now the new-born received his name: Vincent Willem van Gogh.
After getting school education, van Gogh started his career as a picture salesman: in The Hague (1869) he entered the branch office of the Paris art dealer Goupil & Cie, founded originally by his uncle Vincent. As an agent of the company he worked in its branches in Brussels (1873), London (1873), Paris (1875). But his personal disappointment increased and he left Goupil.
Van Gogh tried himself as a teacher in Ramsgate near London (April-December 1876), then he worked as an apprentice lay preacher and wanted to devote his life to evangelization of the poor. In 1878 Vincent convinced his father of his religious vocation and in August began a three-month course in preaching in Evangelist school in Laeken, near Brussels. At school he was considered unsuitable for the lay-preaching profession. But he persistently followed his inclination and went to Borinage, the Belgian coal mining area close to the French border. There, living in extreme poverty, he visited sick people and read the Bible to the miners.
In 1879 Vincent got permission to work for 6 months as a lay preacher in Borinage. But his involvement in the plight of the poor irritated his superiors, and his contract was not extended under the pretext that his rhetorical talents were insufficient. He continued to work without any payment until July 1880. In Borinage Vincent experienced a period of deep personal crisis, which was to mold his later life. While in Borinage he drew much, made sketches of the miners’ environment. Meanwhile his four-years younger brother, Theo ((1857-1891), began to work at Goupil’s in Paris and started to support Vincent financially, he also encouraged Vincent in his wish to become an artist.
Having chosen art as his new profession van Gogh went to Brussels (October 1880- April 1881), where he studied anatomical and perspective drawing at the Academy of Art. In January 1882 he moved to The Hague and settled there not far from his cousin, the artist Mauve, whom he admired and who became his teacher. With Mauve van Gogh for the first time tried oils. Accordingly, his early painting of August 1882 Beach with Figures and the Sea and Sea with a Ship is strongly influenced by The Hague School to which Mauve belonged. During 1883-1885 van Gogh traveled and worked in The Hague, Nueven, where his parents' new home was, Amsterdam. His models were poor people, slums, hard working peasants; he painted landscapes and town views, all in dark, somber colors.
While staying in Etten van Gogh suffered from a passionate unreciprocated love affair. He was rejected by his widowed cousin, Kee Vos, and the family were unsympathetic to his pain. In a moment of great depression after the collapse of his amourous hopes van Gogh moved to Hague just before Christmas 1881. He began to take lessons from the painter Anton Mauve. He had been making clumsy drawings of peasants toiling in the fields near his home; these were full of feeling and strength but he was only really successful in capturing the harsh moody landscape. Throughout 1882 Mauve was very sympathetic to him but eventually the patience of the volatile van Gogh snapped when, as a discipline, he was instructed by Mauve to copy plaster casts of antique statuary in order to improve his draughtsmanship. He simply refused to do the work and when Mauve was unrelenting in his instruction, van Gogh began systematically to destroy each of the casts. After this outburst he ceased to attend Mauve's classes.
March 26, 1885 his father died. Vincent was heart-broken. In this mood he painted The The Potato-Eaters , the main work of his Dutch period. "I think that the picture of the peasants eating potatoes that I painted in Nuenen is the best of all my work." Writing to his siter two years later from Paris, van Gogh still considered The Potato Eaters his most successful paintings.
Van Gogh did countless studies for The Potato Eaters. The studies included heads, interiors, compositional sketches, and details of hands or the coffee pot. And when he was finally done with his monumental work, van Gogh signed it: "Vincent." If he was ever to make a career as an artist it would be as the painter of that picture alone.
In January 1886 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, but already in March he left it and arrived in Paris. He started studies in Cormon studio, the owner of which, the painter Fernand Cormon, was a fairly unknown artist, but a quite successful teacher. Van Gogh studied in the studio for 3 months. Here he made friends with Toulouse-Latrec and Emile Bernard. Theo introduced him to Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Signac, Seurat, and Gauguin who came to Paris from Pont-Aven. From now on the colors on Vincent’s palette became considerably brighter; under the influence of Impressionists his style also changed. View of Paris from Montmarte , Paris Seen from Vincent's Room in the Rue Lepic , Terrace of the Cafe' "La Guinguuette" and others are based on a typical Impressionist interpretation.
Together with Gauguin and Bernard, Van Gogh spent many days in Asnières, a popular spa town on the Siene, not far from Paris. There he painted the views of Asnières and the well-known The Seine with the Pont de la Grande Jatte in summer 1887. In Paris he frequently visited the Café de Tambourin on the Boulevard de Clichy and had a love affair with its owner Agostina Segatori, a former model of Corot and Degas. She sat for van Gogh and he painted her many times, e.g. Agostina Segatori in the Café du Tambourin. In the café, together with Bernard, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, he exhibited his works; they also decorated the walls with Japanese colored woodcuts. They called themselves “Peintres du Petit Boulevard” (painters of small boulevard) in contrast to the “Peintres du Grand Boulevard” (Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Seurat), who exhibited in Theo van Gogh’s gallery. That year Vincent painted several pictures using the techniques of Pointillism, e.g. Vase with Daisies and Anemones . During his two years in Paris van Gogh painted more than 200 pictures.
Letters to Émile Bernard:
... Why do you say Degas is impotently flabby? Degas lives like a small lawyer and does not like women, for he knows that if he loved them and fucked them often, he, intellectually diseased, would become insipid as a painter.
Degas's painting is virile and impersonal for the very reason that he has resigned himself to be nothing personally but a small lawyer with a horror of going on a spree. He looks on while human animals, stronger than himself, get excited and fuck, and he paints them well, exactly because he doesn't have the pretension to get excited himself.
Rubens! Ah, that one! he was a handsome man and a good fucker, Courbet too. Their health permitted them to drink, eat, fuck. . . . As for you, my poor dear comrade Bernard, I already told you in the spring: eat a lot, do your militaryexcercises well, don't fuck too much; when you do this your painting will be all the more spermatic.
. . . P.S. Cézanne is a respectable married man just like the old Dutchmen; if there is plenty of male potency in his work it is because he does not let it evaporate in merrymaking.
Those tattooed races, Negroes, Indians, all of them, all, all are disappearing or degenerating. And the horrible white man with his bottle of alcohol, his money and his syphilis. -- when shall we see the end of him?
I saw a brothel here last sunday -- not counting the other days -- a large room, the walls covered with blued whitewash -- like a village school.
On 29 June 1888, after lengty efforts at persuasion, he was delighted to hear that Gauguin was prepared to share the Yellow House with him. Gauguin's arrival was delayed until 23 October.
Gauguin stayed at the Yellow House for two whole months and until December the relationship of the painters seemed amicable enough. However, heated arguments began to take place and on 14 December Gauguin wrote to Vincent's brother Theo that he would have to return to Paris because of "temperamental incompatibility with Vincent." He withdrew the threat four days later, dissmissing the episode as a "bad dream," but there were soon more violent arguments. Finally, according to Gauguin, Vincent approached him with an open razor in his hand but was repelled by a steady stare. That evening, after Gauguin had retreated to a hotel, Vincent cut off the lower part of his left ear with the same razor and delivered it at 11:30 pm to a prostitute named Rachel in a nearby brothel with the words, "Keep this object carefully." He then went home to bed.
On February 1890, Theo informs him that Anne Boch, sister of Eugène Boch, has bought The Red Vineyard in Brussels, for 400 Francs. This is probably the only painting Vincent ever sold.
In 1888 he left Paris and went to Arles. At first Vincent rented a room in a restaurant. The small attic was completely unsuitable for a studio and he mainly worked out of doors. He did not know anybody who could sit as his model, and so the landscapes of area around Arles with its trees, hills, bridges, huts became his main theme. “An endlessly flat landscape – seen from a bird’s eye view from the top of the hill – vineyards, harvested corn fields. All this is multiplies to infinity and spreads like the surface of the sea to the horizon, which is bordered by the hills of Grau,” wrote Vincent van Gogh about his surroundings. He painted many pictures with blooming flowers and trees, which reminded of Japanese landscapes. On receiving the news of Mauvre’s death he dedicated a picture to his memory Peach Tree in Bloom . Soon he moved to the “yellow house”. Gradually he made friends with people, who agreed to sit for him: Zouaves Milliet, a soldier, Joseph Roulin, the country postman, Madame Ginoux an owner of a station restaurant in Arles, and others.
In October, after Vincent’s repeated requests, Gauguin came to stay with him in Arles. Van Gogh was overjoyed. He gladly let Gauguin take the lead-role in art, placing himself in the role of a student. They worked out a lot of motifs together, compared the results and argued over artistic concepts. But their partnership could not last long, they were too different personalities, and besides, van Gogh was seriously ill. Guaguin decided to leave, but “ever since I wanted to leave Arles, he has been behaving so strangely that I hardly dare to breathe. ‘You want to leave’, he said to me and as soon as I answered in the affirmative he tore a piece, containing the following sentence, from the newspaper: ‘The murderer, has fled’,” Gauguin was later to recall in a letter. Van Gogh really appeared to be going mad. Gauguin waited with leave: “In spite of a few differences I can't be angry with a good chap who is ill and suffering and calling for me.” On the 23rd of December Gauguin went for a walk in the evening and heard steps behind, he turned and saw van Gogh, his face distorted, a razor blade in his hand. Gauguin spoke softly to Vincent, the latter turned and went away. When later Gauguin returned home, the whole of Arles was already there. Plagued with hallucination, Van Gogh cut off the lower part of his left his ear; after he managed to stop bleeding he wrapped the ear in a handkerchief, ran to the town brothel and gave the awful package to a prostitute. Then he returned home and slept. In this state police found him and took to town hospital. Gauguin immediately left. In order to quiet his bad conscience he later wrote in his autobiography that van Gogh had threatened him.
Theo immediately came to Arles. Epilepsy, dipsomania and schizophrenia were the presumed causes of Vincent’s illness. He stayed in hospital for two weeks. Back in his studio he painted the result of the catastrophe: his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear . Sleeplessness and hallucinations went on. The scared citizens of Arles initiated a petition asking to take Vincent back into hospital. Looked after by a priest and a doctor, he lived in the Arles hospital both as patient and prisoner until the beginning of May 1889. In May, although he felt better, he went on his own desire into the mental hospital Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. “I am ready to play the role of a madman, although I have not at all the strength for such a role”. Theo paid for two rooms for Vincent, one as a studio with a view of the garden. He was allowed to paint outdoors under the supervision of the ward attendant Poulet. In the hospital he painted mainly landscapes. On January 31, 1890 Theo’s son was born and baptized Vincent Willem after his uncle and godfather. Van Gogh dedicated The Branches of an Almond Tree in Blossom to his nephew.
In May 1890 Vincent visited Theo and his family in Paris and then settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris. The town was chosen because Dr. Gachet, himself a hobby painter and friend of the Impressionists, was living there, he agreed to take care of Vincent. In Auvers van Gogh painted more than 80 pictures. During these last weeks of his life it was only due to his work that he could forget about his illness, and he painted as if possessed. Among the works of the period are religious works after Delacroix, Pieta' and Good Samaritan , the masterpiece The Church in Auvers , multiple landscapes and portraits.
On the evening of the 27th July 1890 van Gogh went at dusk into the fields and shot himself in the chest with a revolver. With all his strength he managed to drag himself back to the inn; here he died two days later in the arms of his brother, who had hurried to his side. Besides Theo and Dr. Gachet some friends from Paris, amongst them Bernard and “Père” Tanguy, took part in the funeral.
Thus ended the singular life of an artist who defies comparison with any other. “I can’t change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.” -- Vincent van Gogh
Notes
Julien Tanguy, a paint dealer, known to everybody as “Père” Tanguy, was a socialist by his political views. He participated in Paris Commune and because of this had to go into exile. The artists looked upon him as the hero and grand seigneur of their own utopian ideals. They bought all of their material cheaply from Tanguy, often on credit. He even had a small gallery in a side room. “Père” Tanguy can therefore be looked upon as a key figure in the Modernist Movement, since it was in his small gallery that artists such as van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin and Paul Cézanne, who were later considered as the precursors of the 20th century, exhibited their works. By the end of his stay in Paris, Vincent had painted 3 portraits of “Père” Tanguy.
Zonave Milliet, an infantry soldier from Algeria, was the first Vincent’s model in Arles. Milliet was on vacation in Arles. He took painting lessons from van Gogh and accompanied him on walks. Later he characterized van Gogh in his remark: “This young man who shows both talent and good taste in his drawings becomes abnormal as soon as he touches a brush’.
All-Night Café “In my painting of the All-Night Café I've tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, become crazy and criminal. Through the contrast of delicate pink, blood red and dark red, of mild Louis XV and Veronese green against the yellow-green and stark blue-green tones – all this in an atmosphere like the devil’s inferno and pale sulphurous yellow… I’ve tried to convey the sinister power of such a place.” Vincent van Gogh. See the same café by Gauguin.
Yellow House “My house here is painted butter yellow on the outside and has solid green window shutters; it is located directly in a square with green park full of plane-trees, oleanders and acacias. And inside all the walls are painted white and the floor is tiled in red. Yet the most striking thing is the glaring blue sky. Inside the house I can really live and breathe and think and paint.’ Vincent van Gogh. He lived in the house from May 1888 till April 1889.
Dr. Gachet was an admirer of Impressionists and a hobby painter himself. On Theo’s request he agreed to look after the sick Vincent in Auvers-sur-Oise. The doctor and the patient became friends. Gachet liked his portrait by van Gogh so much that he asked the artist to paint a second version of the portrait. Art was a strong bond in their friendship and van Gogh was overjoyed to be able to paint someone who really understood his work. After a long period of loneliness he finally found a person with whom he could discuss his paintings.
Van Gogh is today one of the most popular of the Post-Impressionist painters, although he was not widely appreciated during his lifetime. His works are characterised by expressive and emotive use of brilliant colour and energetic application of impastoed paint.
Van Gogh was born in Holland, the son of a pastor. He became an apprentice at an art dealership, but was fired in 1876. Over the next decade he was employed in various ways, including as a preacher.
By 1883 he had started painting. In 1885-6 he attended the academy in Antwerp. On his return to Paris in 1886 he met artists such as Degas, Gauguin and Seurat.
. . . As far as I know there isn't a single academy where one learns to draw and paint a digger, a sower, a woman putting the kettle over the fire or a seamstress. But in every city of some importance there is an academy with a choice of models for historical, Arabic, Louis XV, in short, all really nonexistent figures.
. . . I ask you, do you know a single digger, a single sower in the old Dutch school??? Did they ever try to paint a "labourer?" Did Velasquez try it in his water carrier or types from the people? No.
The figures in the pictures of the old masters do not work. I am drudging just now on the figure of a woman whom I saw digging for carrots in the snow last winter.
In 1888 Van Gogh settled in Arles in Provence, where he was visited by Gauguin and painted his now famous series of 'Sunflowers'. In the following year a nervous breakdown brought him to a sanatorium at St Remy; it was during this period that he painted ' A Wheatfield witih Cypresses ' .
In 1890, suffering from a new bout of depression, he shot himself in the chest and died two days later.
Title:A Wheatfield, with Cypresses Creation Date: January 1889 Genre: Abstract - Impressionism Media: Canvas Not for sale Brief Description: This was painted in September 1889, when Van Gogh was in the St-Rémy mental asylum, near Arles, where he was a patient from May 1889 until May 1890.
Title:Auction of Crosses Near the Old Tower, Nuenen Creation Date: May 1885 Genre: Abstract - Impressionism Media: Paper Medium: Watercolor Not for sale Brief Description: Watercolor
Title:Beach with Figures and Sea with a Ship Creation Date: August 1882 Genre: Abstract - Impressionism Media: Paper Medium: Oil Not for sale Brief Description: Oil on paper on cardboard.
Title:Blossoming Almond Tree, Saint-Remy Creation Date: February 1890 Genre: Impressionist Media: Canvas Medium: Oil Not for sale Brief Description: Oil
Title:Carpenter's Workshop, Seen from tohe Artist's Studio Creation Date: May 1882 Genre: Abstract - Impressionism Media: Canvas Medium: Ink Not for sale Brief Description: Pencil, pen, brush, heightened with white.
