Vincent van Gogh

Dutch painter

• Born: March 30, 1853
• Birthplace: Zundert, the Netherlands
• Died: July 29, 1890
• Place of death: Auvers-sur-Oise, France

Van Gogh’s artistic career was brief, but in giving expression to a passionate vision of nature and humanity, he has become one of the most revered and influential painters of his time. Following his death, his paintings came to be acknowledged by critics and the public as constituting one of the highest achievements of nineteenth century art.

Early Life

Vincent Willem van Gogh (van goh) was the son of the Reverend Theodorus van Gogh, who was thirty-one years old at the time of Vincent’s birth. His mother, Anna Cornelius Carbentus, was three years older than her husband. Among van Gogh’s three sisters and two brothers, Vincent was to be close only to his brother Theodorus (called Theo), who was an important influence in his life. Vincent’s family had been established for generations in the Dutch province of North Brabant, near the southern border with Belgium. Among his ancestors could be found preachers, craftspeople, and government officials, and his living relatives included several uncles prominent in business and government. Vincent’s father, a Protestant minister, was a handsome man but not a gifted preacher. Working quietly in several rural parishes until his death at the age of sixty-two, he was able to provide for his family in a respectable but modest fashion.

Vincent enjoyed a happy childhood and was especially attached to the natural world; drawings he made as early as age eleven show a keen observation of plant life. His skill at drawing, which seems to have been fostered by his mother, does not foreshadow his later artistic genius, but it testifies to his capacity for solitary concentration. The recollection of Vincent’s sister Elizabeth was that Vincent could be unapproachable and that he enjoyed solitude. If he seems to have had a somewhat changeable personality as a boy, his education proceeded normally when he was sent at the age of twelve to a boarding school in the nearby village of Zevenbergen, from which he progressed to a state secondary school in the town of Tilburg. By age fifteen, he was well on the way to being a literate, if not yet sophisticated, young man.

After more than a year at home in Zundert, Vincent left in the summer of 1869 to work as a junior clerk in the branch of the French firm of Goupil and Sons in The Hague, a post for which his uncle Vincent, a partner in the firm, had recommended him. He enjoyed his work, found favor with his employers, and was transferred after four years to the London branch of the firm. Beginning with this period, there is a substantially continuous documentation both of Vincent’s activities and of his emotional and intellectual experiences, for in August, 1872, he and Theo began a correspondence that was to last to the end of the artist’s life.

In the summer of 1874, the first of several romantic disappointments struck van Gogh, when he declared his love for his landlady’s daughter, Eugénie. Finding that she was engaged and had been playing upon his innocent devotion, he was cast into a despair, which he was unable to dispel during a three-month assignment to Goupil’s Paris gallery. Returning to his London job in January, 1875, he once again failed to win Eugénie’s love, and his distress, now colored by religious concerns, was intensified. In May he was permanently transferred to Paris, where his spiritual preoccupations distracted him from his work and led to his dismissal from Goupil’s in March, 1876.

Van Gogh returned to England the following month and took an unpaid position in Ramsgate as a teacher of French, German, and arithmetic. In July, he changed jobs again, teaching at a boys’ school in Isleworth and preaching occasionally. The prospect of a religious vocation began to dominate his thoughts, but with his health failing he returned to his parents’ home, which was now in Etten. Soon after, his uncle found him another job in a bookstore in the city of Dordrecht, but by May, 1877, van Gogh had determined to study for admission to the faculty of theology at the University in Amsterdam.

For a little more than a year, van Gogh studied Greek and Latin with a congenial young Jewish scholar, Mendes da Costa, but in July, 1878, declaring his inability to learn these languages, he enrolled in a preparatory course for evangelists in Brussels. Falling to qualify for a regular parish, van Gogh was given a trial appointment as a missionary in the Borinage, a coal-mining district of Belgium, but the church authorities soon dismissed him for his unconventionally zealous behavior. Continuing his work alone, van Gogh seems to have gone through a period of extreme spiritual crisis, during which he began to draw the very people to whom he had been preaching. In the autumn of 1880, believing that his destiny was to be an artist, van Gogh left the Borinage for Brussels, seeking advice there from painters and attempting to improve his drawings.

During the following spring and summer, van Gogh was again in Etten, where a second disappointment in love occurred. At his parents’ home he met a recently widowed first cousin, Kee Vos Stricker, and fell in love with her, but she fled to her parents when van Gogh declared his affection. In this affair, van Gogh’s capacity for creating strained relationships with those closest to him had reached a new peak, and as a result he left again for The Hague, where he established a small studio in January, 1882, and lived with a prostitute, Clasina Hoornik, known as “Sien.”

Life’s Work

Through his employment at the Goupil establishments, van Gogh had been exposed to much art that was merely fashionable, but he had also seen the paintings of notable French and English painters such as Jean-François Millet, Thomas Gainsborough, and John Constable. In his own early work, however, he was guided less by artistic precedents than by a profound urge to render the life of laboring peasants and miners and to evoke compassion for the suffering of his fellow man.

Van Gogh was, from the start, temperamentally incapable of following a commonplace path in his art, but he valued the advice of his fellow painters, including popular ones such as his cousin by marriage, Anton Mauve, from whom he received instruction in The Hague during the winter of 1881–1882. Perhaps for family considerations, van Gogh’s uncle, Cornelius, also lent the struggling artist encouragement in 1882 by commissioning from him a series of drawings of city views, but it was Theo’s regular allowance that kept van Gogh from abject poverty throughout his artistic career. Just as important, Theo gave moral support to his erratic and socially inept elder brother, becoming a spiritual as well as financial guardian. He was also the recipient of much of van Gogh’s best work, as van Gogh did not sell a painting until the last year of his life.

Van Gogh’s passionate devotion to his artistic self-education yielded solid results during his stay in The Hague; to the emotional conviction of his drawings he was able to add increasing fluency of form. His subjects, principally peasants and workers, are often shown in a wintry landscape that seems both accurately rendered and true to the artist’s social vision. There is experimentation with materials, but it is always aimed at rendering a particular subject rather than at producing an attractive appearance.

In the summer of 1883, van Gogh began to work in earnest with oil paints and during the next two years, living again at home with his parents in the village of Nuenen, he produced dozens of canvases of the countryside and its people. The culmination of this work is a masterpiece, The Potato Eaters , completed in October of 1885. It is a canvas approximately three feet high and four feet wide, depicting a family of five peasants seated around a rough table, about to eat a meal of boiled potatoes. Each figure, including that of a girl whose face cannot be seen, is a distinct portrait of human dignity in the face of adversity. Darkly monochromatic and roughly textured, The Potato Eaters is an uncompromising study of the human condition and has none of the sentimentality that van Gogh sometimes found appealing in other artists and writers.

The year 1885 brought important new influences to van Gogh. In October, he saw old master paintings in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and found special inspiration in the work of Rembrandt and Frans Hals. In late November, while studying briefly in Antwerp, he first saw Japanese prints, which were just beginning to be widely appreciated in Europe. The clarity and brilliance of the Japanese woodblock print, together with the freshness of van Gogh’s seventeenth century Dutch predecessors, helped change his conception of light and color, which had been dominated by earth colors and dark tones.

Early in 1886, this change was accelerated by van Gogh’s move to Paris, where the Impressionist painters were gaining recognition for their innovative style of rendering effects of light and color by applying brilliant, unblended pigments to their canvases. Van Gogh was soon associating with the Impressionists and befriending such artists as Camille Pissarro and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec . Theo, as a representative of the new owners of Goupil’s, was an agent for Impressionist paintings and fueled van Gogh’s appreciation and understanding of them.

During the summer of 1886, Theo and Vincent took an apartment together in the Paris suburb of Montmartre. Despite the deep affection of the brothers for each other, their relationship was often strained almost to the breaking point; perhaps the remarkable progress of van Gogh’s painting was Theo’s reward for tolerating his volatile and inconsiderate brother. For van Gogh, however, the Paris years of 1886 and 1887 were a time of relative stability. He became acquainted with many personalities with valuable experiences and opinions to share.

Among these people were artists such as Émile Bernard, who later wrote perceptively about van Gogh, and the celebrated Julien Tanguy, an art-supply dealer who offered a haven—and quiet financial help—to many painters who were subsequently recognized as leading artists of their day. Van Gogh’s 1887 portrait of “Père” Tanguy shows the quiet gentleman seated against a wall on which Japanese prints—which he also sold—are hung. In this celebrated work, van Gogh unites his affection for Tanguy and his reverence for Japanese art with a post-Impressionist technique likely borrowed from Paul Signac.

After a remarkable two years in Paris, van Gogh may have believed that he had exhausted the city’s possibilities; in any case, the stress underlying his relationship with Theo could not continue indefinitely, and in February, 1888, he left Paris abruptly for the town of Arles, near the Mediterranean coast, arriving on February 20. The south of France had then, as it has continued to have, rich associations for artists. In addition to the many reminders of classical Latin culture, the climate, light, and atmosphere could be powerful stimuli to creative work. In van Gogh’s case, Arles and its environs was in some sense the cause of the astonishing outpouring of drawings and paintings that occurred between February, 1888, and May, 1890.

Ironically for an argumentative person such as van Gogh, he had been preoccupied by the idea of creating a brotherhood of artists, and his move to Arles was partly intended as a step in that direction. During the early months in Arles, he associated with several artist acquaintances, but more typically he formed friendships with local people such as the postman Joseph Roulin, whose portrait he painted many times. However, in mid-October, van Gogh welcomed to his rooms in the “Yellow House” the stockbroker-turned-artist Paul Gauguin, another strong, even rebellious, personality with whom conflict might have been foreseen.

Gauguin had traveled to Arles and was to be maintained there at Theo’s expense in exchange for paintings. For a time, van Gogh and Gauguin valued their artistic relationship, but the domestic situation abruptly deteriorated, culminating—by Gauguin’s account—in van Gogh’s attack upon him with a razor blade. Before Gauguin could effect a departure from Arles, van Gogh had cut off part of his own earlobe, delivering it to the door of a local prostitute before returning, delirious and bleeding profusely, to his room at the Yellow House.

Following his recovery in the local hospital, van Gogh returned to the Yellow House on January 7 and began painting on the following day. The next month, he suffered hallucinations and was interned in a hospital cell for ten days, then released. By early May, he had agreed with Theo that he ought to enter an asylum in Saint-Rémy, several miles northeast of Arles, where he remained under the humane but ineffectual care of the asylum staff for slightly more than one year. A diagnosis of epilepsy, easily doubted but less easily supplanted by modern speculation, was made by the director, Dr. Peyron.

Throughout van Gogh’s year at Saint-Rémy, his condition varied enormously; sometimes he was not only calm and productive but also optimistic, and at other times he was uncommunicative and even suicidal. Remarkably, during his period of lucidity and physical well-being, he created many of his great masterpieces, including The Starry Night and a Self-Portrait of 1889. Like many of the works painted during his stay at Saint-Rémy, these canvases are characterized by vibrant color and the use of a sinuous line that make the surface of the painting seem to pulsate with energy. The Starry Night and another Saint-Rémy picture of irises were included in a fall exhibition in Paris, where they attracted attention.

In January, 1890, the first article on van Gogh, and the only one published in his lifetime, appeared in Mercure de France. Entitled “The Isolated Ones: Vincent van Gogh,” the article was the work of a perceptive young critic named G.-Albert Aurier, who had seen many of van Gogh’s works at Theo’s home. Aurier’s observations were overwhelmingly enthusiastic, yet van Gogh wrote to Theo asking him to dissuade Aurier from writing any more about him. Although there was an element of modesty in this, it was more Vincent’s accelerating exhaustion of spirit that caused him to be wary of acclaim. Events that buoyed his spirit, such as Theo’s marriage and the birth of a nephew—also named Vincent Willem—could also have created new strains in his fragile mind.

Van Gogh left the asylum at Saint-Rémy on May 16, 1890, and traveled alone to Paris without incident, where he stayed four days with Theo and his family before traveling to nearby Auvers-sur-Oise to live under the supervision of Paul Gachet, an art-loving doctor of sixty-two. For several weeks, van Gogh carried on with his painting and even printed an etching using Gachet’s press, but on July 27 he walked several hundred yards to a farm near Auvers and shot himself in the stomach. He managed to return to his room, and in the last thirty-six hours of his life he dozed, smoked his pipe, and spoke at length with Theo, who had been summoned from Paris. He died during the early morning hours of July 29, 1890. Only weeks later, Theo suffered a breakdown that seemed clearly connected to his grief over his brother’s death, and on January 25, 1891, he died in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Significance

Vincent van Gogh’s tumultuous life is so well documented by his letters and the recollections of family, friends, and associates, that an unusual degree of study and speculation has been devoted to his personal circumstances and particularly to the tragedy of his illness. In this respect, van Gogh has become virtually an archetype of the modern artist—a man ill at ease with himself and society, and restless in the personal as well as the artistic sphere. Van Gogh himself was well aware of the implications of his personality and his social situation, accepting his dependence upon his brother as well as his status as an outsider in order to pursue his art without compromise.

As compelling as van Gogh’s story has been for critics and public alike, it is his paintings, and to a lesser extent his drawings, that are the cornerstone of his lasting significance. From the early drawings made during his ministry in the Borinage to the final paintings made in the weeks preceding his death in Auvers-sur-Oise, van Gogh’s works are characterized by passionate sincerity. As important as their psychological authenticity is their adventurous form. Starting during the early 1880s from a vigorous but rather insular style, he assimilated the heritage of Dutch painting, then went on to adapt the lessons of Impressionism to new and visionary purposes. Van Gogh’s singular artistic triumph, differentiating him from his post-Impressionist colleagues such as Gauguin and Georges Seurat, was his ability to communicate both his visual experience of nature and his insight into humankind’s social and spiritual condition.

Van Gogh, whose personal relationships were often catastrophic, saw his art as an act of love for humanity, and one avenue of psychological analysis views the fervor of his career as compensation for the emotional failures of his life. Although there is doubtless some truth to this view, if taken too literally it can reduce the immense complexity of his life to a formula. Van Gogh was both highly intelligent and acutely self-aware, and it seems likely that even as he descended toward a tragic suicide, he was aware of the great, though painfully forged, achievement of his life as a painter.

Van Gogh's legacy lives on, as later generations recognized his genius and he became one of the most well-recognized artists in history. As his paintings grew in popularity they influenced many other artists, and he is seen as a progenitor of Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and modern art in general. The Van Gogh Museum was opened in Amsterdam to commemorate the artist, featuring many works from Theo's collection. The huge popularity of van Gogh's work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries also led several of his paintings to sell for record prices, helping to redefine the economics of the art world. In 1987 his painting Irises sold for $53.9 million at auction, an unprecedented amount at the time, and kicked off the concept of art as an investment. In 1990 van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million, driving the top tier of art collecting up another notch; as of 2015 it was still the seventh most expensive painting ever sold when adjusted for inflation.

Bibliography

Barr, Alfred H., Jr., ed. Vincent van Gogh: With an Introduction and Notes Selected from the Letters of the Artist. New York: Arno, 1966. This reprint edition of the catalog to a 1935 exhibition of the artist’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is joined to an annotated bibliography, originally published in 1942, of articles, books, and other materials on van Gogh.

Gogh, Vincent van. Complete Letters, with Reproductions of All Drawings in the Correspondence. 3 vols. Greenwich: New York Graphic Soc., 1958. Van Gogh’s letters rank among the finest literary artifacts in the sphere of visual art. Books of selected letters are useful but almost inevitably omit even items of general interest.

Gogh, Vincent van. Van Gogh: A Retrospective. Edited by Susan Alyson Stein. New York: Macmillan, 1986. A magnificent collection of documentary material and excellent color plates, this large book also contains a lengthy chronology of the artist’s life, which corrects a number of factual errors scattered throughout many earlier sources.

Gogh, Vincent van. Vincent van Gogh. Text by Meyer Schapiro. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1950. This volume, in a uniform series of artist monographs, contains a fine essay coupled with large color plates annotated on the facing page. The text is excellent as an introduction to the artist, but the plates do not reach the quality of modern reproductions.

Gogh, Vincent van. The Works of Vincent van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings. Text by J.-B. de la Faille. New York: Morrow, 1970. A complete (so far as scholarship can ascertain) catalog of the artist’s works, each one illustrated, follows an essay, “Van Gogh and the Words,” by A. M. Hammacher, which provides a history of the appreciation of van Gogh’s works by leading writers and critics.

Krauss, André. Vincent van Gogh: Studies in the Social Aspects of His Work. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1983. This compact study is a doctoral dissertation investigating the issue of social messages in the painter’s work. Though it is specialized, it is very readable.

The Portable Van Gogh. New York: Universe, 2002. Focuses on Van Gogh’s paintings, providing a comprehensive overview of all genres and periods of his work. Includes an essay about Van Gogh by Robert Hughes, a prominent art critic.

Sedghi, Ami. "The 10 Most Expensive Paintings Ever Sold." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 10 Feb. 2015. Web. 5 May. 2015.

Sund, Judy. Van Gogh. New York: Phaidon, 2002. Biography using Van Gogh’s correspondence to trace his artistic development and personal vision.

Wallace, Robert. The World of Van Gogh, 1853-1890. New York: Time-Life, 1969. Aimed at a popular audience, the text of this well-illustrated book is reliable, though sketchy. A justifiable, and even valuable, limitation is that van Gogh is presented alongside his contemporaries Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat.