Art e Dossier

During his continuous travels through Holland Vincent had the first hand opportunity to observe peasant life, marked by poverty and hard work. Far from any naturalistic gratification or elegiac tones that were common in portrayals of country life, Van Gogh concentrated on facial expressions that were marked by resignation to a cruel fate and on the sad, impoverished settings played out in dark tones as in this painting where the only light comes from the weak lantern on the humble table.

In a letter to his sister Vincent expressed his feelings about portraits as a genre, “What thrills me the most in my craft is the portrait, the modern portrait. I seek it through color, and certainly, I am not the only one to seek it this way […]I would like to paint portraits which will seem like to apparitions to people a century from now. Therefore, I am no longer seeking anything through a photographic resemblance, but through our expression of feelings, using technique and the modern tastes in color as the means for expressing and intensifying the character […]”. Here, through the use of color and finely drawn lines, the delicate Agostina Segatori also evokes the style of the Japanese woodcuts that fascinated Van Gogh. When he was in Antwerp between 1885 and 1886 and then in Paris, he had begun collecting them and even organized exhibitions in cafés. In the background of this painting, on the right, we can see a few of them hanging on the wall of the Café du Tambourin.

This painting of Montmartre is part of a group of views of the area painted during the spring of 1887. They are dominated by light, luminous colors, according to the examples of Seurat and Signac even if the brushstroke is freer and more varied in breadth and direction, far distant from the scientific rigor with which the Neo-Impressionists distributed color. The painting was done during the period that Van Gogh met Emile Bernard, who – like him – frequented the paint shop of “père” Tanguy, an old shopkeeper who, in his youth, had fought for the Paris Comune. Other clients included Pissarro, Monet and Renoir who had also displayed their paintings there for sale. Following the example of the Impressionists, Van Gogh like Cézanne, Bernard and Gauguin showed his works in the store, but they were never sold.

Van Gogh arrived in Paris in March 1886. Through his brother, Theo, he came into contact with the artistic milieu and became friends with Seurat, Matisse, Signac and Toulouse-Lautrec. His painting began to change: colors burst onto the canvas and short, stringy brushstrokes of pure pigment transformed the Impressionistic views. The intensity of his palette revealed a phase of creative vitality that went well beyond the dark atmospheres of his earlier Dutch period.

This painted, that he did at Arles, reveals Van Gogh’s focus on color as the medium for expressing his feelings when he was in touch with reality, whether the subject was a landscape or the interior of a café. In a letter to his brother, Theo, written in September of 1888 he explained that it was not “a color that was locally ‘true’ from the realistic “trompe-l’oeil” standpoint, but a color that suggests a feeling of an ardent temperament.” In this sense, even the central image of the sun, with its radial echo of light takes on a symbolic value.

Painted immediately after The Sower, this picture portrays the interior of a café located in Place Lamartine at Arles. To his brother, Theo, Van Gogh wrote of the emotional role that color played in his works and regarding this particular painting he said, “I tried to express the terrible human passions with red and green. The room is blood red and dull yellow, there is a green billiard table in the middle and four lemon yellow lamps cast an orange and green light. Everywhere there is a struggle and antithesis of the most diverse greens and reds, in the small figures of the sleeping bums, in the sad, empty room and in the purple against blue.” In this way Van Gogh seems to renounce the Impressionists’ manner of rendering light to return to the exaltation of strong sentiments as expressed by Delacroix’s use of color.

In May 1888 Van Gogh rented a house at Place Lamartine, 2 in Arles. There were four, brightly lit rooms where the artist could use the southern light to the fullest. His plan was to host his artist friends with whom he had begun working closely and to organize an exhibition of their works. As he had written to his brother, Theo, “outside it is yellow, the interior is whitewashed and is full of sun.” In the painting, as in the views of the city’s surroundings, the artist forced himself to render the chromatic liveliness, so that every shape is transformed into a splash of color creating intense contrasts.

Van Gogh painted this self-portrait during the last month of his Parisian sojourn, before he moved to Arles. It clearly reveals his psychological turmoil in a city that was increasingly drawn towards the whirl of modernity and productivity. The painter looks aged and tired, even though his letters to his sister Wilhelmina tell of his enthusiasm for painting and how, in this phase he was concentrating on portraits and the question of color…the main reason for his move to the South of France.

A few paintings and drawings of views of the beach and sea remain from Van Gogh’s brief stay at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in June. Here, he grasped the opportunity offered by vast space to imbue the image with luminosity. In this particular case the landscape is played out in chalky, rather uniform tones, while the boats are rendered in bright colors arranged in clean, flat areas. A sense for graphics is evident in the clear outlines which reveal the strong influence that Japanese prints had on the artists of the period.

Van Gogh painted several copies of this famous painting with minor variations. The subject is his bedroom in the Yellow House at Arles, done just before Gauguin’s arrival. The artist wanted to recreate the atmosphere of a simple, yet cozy room, rendered in an essential style “à la Seurat” as he explained in his letters. To Theo he wrote, “it is my bedroom; in this case, the color has to do it, with its simplifying effect it confers more style on things and it should, on the whole, suggest the calm of sleep.”

This is the first of six portraits of Madame Ginoux, L’Arlésienne; Gauguin, who joined Van Gogh at Arles also painted her portrait. Every day Van Gogh took his meals at the Café de la Gare, owned by M. and Mme Ginoux and soon became friends with the proprietors. This portrait was done from life. The pose appears natural, with her arm supporting her head, while the contrast between the clearly marked light and dark areas evokes the Japanese prints that were in vogue among the artists of the period.

The idea for this painting that Van Gogh did in 1888 during his stay at Arles came from a drawing by Samuel Luke Fildes, The Empty Chair (1870), painted in memory of Charles Dickens who had just died. Vincent had certainly seen – and admired – the piece in his youth. It is a “portrait” of a person who is absent, a still-life of “memory” consisting of objects that belonged to someone who is remembered without being shown. Therefore, the chair with the books and lit candle evoke the presence-absence of Paul Gauguin in a melancholy mode. Gauguin had, in fact, shared the famous “yellow house” at Arles with Vincent for three months when they attempted an artistic partnership. Living together proved fruitful and difficult: it degenerated into a violent argument that led Vincent first to attack his friend, and then to turn the blade on himself, and cut off his ear. The two artists never met again.

As Andreas Blühm wrote, the French painter Millet “exerted his influence on Van Gogh throughout his life, becoming the yardstick for all of his artistic judgments.” In fact, during his Paris sojourn between 1886 and 1889, notwithstanding his direct contacts with the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, Vincent preferred to follow Millet’s slightly conservative painting style. It was there that he found the themes, ideals and moral values he believed in along with an iconography linked to farmers working the fields. In his choice of models, Vincent always demonstrated attention towards those who favored message and content over form. When writing about another Millet painting that he had copied he wrote “[…]This is the greatness of art that sometimes reveals itself to be superior to nature – such as Millet’s Sower for example, a figure with more humanity that a real sower in the field.” Night is similar in style, spirit and iconography to the painting The Two Mothers (1889) by Giovanni Segantini, the Divisionist artist from Trento who was also fascinated by Millet.

Ever since the beginning, Vincent had always been interested in and curious about the works of his contemporaries, especially the artists from the school of The Hague and Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) whom he considered the most important French landscape artist of the first half of the nineteenth century, that is, prior to the Impressionist “revolution.” Until the intense industrial development of the eighteen-eighties Millet, who was against conventional historic and academic painting, had pursued an ideal of rural and sentimental realism. This is evident in the profound and intense painting Shearing Sheep (1860) that Vincent used as the model for this painting. Millet’s paintings and drawings were very popular among art dealers and artists who often copied them, even through printed reproductions. In this painting Vincent was quite free with the model: In fact, he said, “I have the feeling that painting from Millet’s drawings requires translating them into another language rather than copying them.”

This is one of the last paintings he did in Provence before he left Arles for Auvers-sur-Oise. He rendered the night sky with thick brushstrokes of cobalt blue and green, dotted with luminous circles – the stars. Actually, the thick paint tends to absorb the light of the stars that are captured by a vortex of lines and colors. Only the crescent moon and the white stars below appear more radiant without, however, brightening the landscape that remains wrapped in the dark colors of the night. In the foreground there are the stark outlines of some cypresses, trees that Van Gogh liked very much because of their slim majestic shape and deep, dark color.

In this painting Van Gogh depicted the landscape behind the institute where he was hospitalized, a barley field rendered in the September light. The reaper, intent on his work, recalls paintings by Millet whom the Dutch painter carefully studied during that period, even though in this canvas the figure seems absorbed by the landscape and light, without any of the celebratory character that is typical of Millet’s peasants.

Between October and December of 1888 Van Gogh and Gauguin worked together at Arles. Van Gogh’s nervous state soon made this type of collaboration impossible; there were too many differences of opinion between them concerning the value of painting and the artists of the era. After a violent argument the Dutch painter threatened his friend with a razor and then cut off part of his own left ear. This frightened Gauguin who left Arles. The news quickly spread through the town and prompted the citizens to demand that Van Gogh be committed to an asylum. Perhaps because of an unconscious desire to atone for his deed, this painting reveals a close similarity to Gauguin’s solutions in the broad, even areas of color, à plat, and in the thick outlines that enclose the image, known as cloisonnisme.

Painted in January 1889, this is a copy of the picture done in August of the previous year that is now in the National Gallery, London. Van Gogh painted twelve pictures of sunflowers that were to decorate the rooms in the Yellow House at Arles, where he was supposed to work with Gauguin. His enthusiasm for the arrival of his friend had prompted Van Gogh to make the house more welcoming and cozy. The choice of sunflowers can also be interpreted in a symbolic key since they refer to the sun, light and hence the divine. Gauguin also happened to like Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and in fact already owned one painting of them. The technique, with thick, short brushstrokes, arranged like inlays, is similar to what Cézanne had been doing at that time, is also very significant.

Cypresses were a recurring theme in Van Gogh’s paintings, especially after his move to the south of France: the dark green of the trees created an extraordinary contrast with the fiery golden wheat fields. “The cypress, he wrote to Theo, “is as beautiful as a wood and in its proportions, it is like an Egyptian obelisk.” This painting was done while he was at the asylum in Saint-Remy, not far from Arles, after his mental condition had worsened. Since he could not leave, he dedicated himself to painting the landscape he could see from the hospital, the garden and the cloister. He also painted countless copies of some Millet prints that his brother sent him.

Van Gogh spent his time at the hospital of Saint-Remy working intensely so that he would not lose all contract with reality. “My sad illness,” he wrote to Theo “makes me work with a deaf fury, very slowly, but from morning until evening without a break.” In this phase the artist felt that he had to revive his attention for figures because “it is the study of the figure that teaches us how to grasp the essential and to simplify.” Since he did not have models, he used himself or the nurses in addition to prints of paintings by Delacroix or Millet.

Still-lifes with flowers are a recurrent subject in Van Gogh’s paintings, especially brightly colored blossoms such as sunflowers and irises. The contrasting harmony between the blue-violet and yellow was a favorite of his and in this painting it is reproposed with an à plat brushstroke and the distinctive cloisonnisme, the dark outlines around the shapes. In addition, there is artist’s typical, brilliant juxtaposition of the different shades of blue-violet in the petals.

Early in 1890 Van Gogh left the asylum of Saint-Remy. Even though his condition had not improved significantly, he had to return north. In May he arrived in Paris to see his grandson, Vincent Willelm, Theo’s son. He settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Pontoise, far from the city’s noise. The Gothic church in the village gave him the opportunity to concentrate on new chromatic contrasts. “I painted a large picture with the village church in which the structure seems purple against a deep and flat cobalt blue sky; the windows seem like splotches of ultramarine blue; the roof is purple and partly orange.”

This painting of a wheat field, executed with swirling, tormented brushstrokes is one of Van Gogh’s last works. His health had deteriorated. A visit to his brother in Paris upset him because of Theo’s professional problems and little Vincent’s frail health. About this painting he wrote, “…I painted three more large canvases. They are huge expanses of wheat beneath tormented skies, and I had no problem in expressing sadness, extreme solitude.” It was in one of those fields that, a few days later, he would shoot himself and die two days later attended by Dr. Gachet and Theo.

It was Van Gogh’s brother, Theo, who encouraged him to settle in Auvers-sur-Oise not only because of the beautiful countryside but mainly because it was the home of Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, physician and amateur painter, a lover of the arts and acquaintance of the Impressionists who soon became a friend to Vincent. This doctor’s presence gave the artist new strength so that within the space of three months he painted about eighty pictures including several portraits of Gachet and his daughter Marguerite. In one of his last letters, this to his sister Wilhelmina, he wrote; “I would like to do portraits a century from now, of the people of the future so that they seem like apparitions. Therefore, I am not trying to create a photographic image, but through our impassioned expressions, using science and the modern tastes in color as the means of expression and for exalting the character.”

In this painting, which is a “copy” of a detail from the Raising of Lazarus, by Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent may have wanted to portray himself as Lazarus in the context of his constant quest for expressivity and personal interpretations of the works of his favorite masters. The painting’s symbolism has been the subject of in-depth critical analyses, that identified Lazarus’s sisters as Madame Roulin – the blonde, and Madame Ginoux – with the black hair, both friends of Vincent and characterized by great feelings of charity and compassion for suffering. The two female figures have also been identified with Vincent’s mother and sister whom he often mentioned with almost agonizing nostalgia in his letters from this period. Copying from favorite cultural models such as Millet, Delacroix or the great, seventeenth century Dutch painters actually consisted of reworking the selected themes with stylistic and chromatic innovations and transforming the iconography into a personal, “symbolic-psychological” dimension.