art essay
Gogh, Vincent (Willem) van
(b Zundert, March 30, 1853; d Auvers-sur-Oise, July 29, 1890).
· Evert van Uitert
· https://doi-org.dcccd.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T033020
· Published online: 2003
· This version: 20 January 2016
· updated and revised, 20 January 2016
Dutch painter. His life and work are legendary in the history of late 19th- and 20th-century art. Van Gogh was active as an artist for ten years, but as a full-fledged painter only five years, during which time he produced some 1000 watercolours, drawings, and sketches and about 1250 paintings ranging from a dark, Realist style to an intense, colourful expressionistic one. Almost more than on his oeuvre, his fame has been based on the extensive, diary-like correspondence he maintained, in particular with his brother Theo (1857–91).
In the popular view, van Gogh has become the prototype of the misunderstood, tormented artist, who might have sold only one painting in his lifetime, but whose work has sold posthumously for record sums, including the sale of Portrait of Dr Gachet for $51 million in 1990 and the sale of Vase with Cornflowers and Poppies for $60 million in 2014. Another Romantic cliché suggests that van Gogh paid with insanity for his genius, which was understood only by his supportive brother Theo. In fact, within five years after Vincent had started as a painter, his talent was not only recognized by some of his colleagues, but also valued by the critic Albert Aurier who in 1890, a few months before Vincent’s suicide, published a glorifying article, ‘The Isolated Ones: Vincent van Gogh’. Aurier characterized him as ‘This robust and true artist, a thoroughbred with the brutal hands of a giant, the nerves of a hysterical woman, the soul of a mystic’ and said that ‘he will never be fully understood except by his brothers, the true artists…’. At that moment no one could have foreseen van Gogh’s immense impact, nor the enduring effect of his letters, establishing his image as a tragic hero.
1. Life and work.
(i) Early life and training, 1853–86.
In his early years there was nothing to suggest that the Rev. Theodorus van Gogh’s eldest son Vincent was to become an artist. Most of the members of the van Gogh family were clergymen or art dealers by profession. Vincent left school in 1869 to become an apprentice at Goupil & Co. in The Hague, the art dealership with which his Uncle Vincent was associated. In 1873 he was posted to the firm’s London branch and in 1875 he was transferred to the Paris office. During this period he learnt a great deal about both Old Master and conventional contemporary painting. Born and brought up in the countryside, he was deeply impressed by the life of the poor in the big cities of London and Paris. While in England he began collecting illustrations (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.) by such artists as Frank Holl, Hubert von Herkomer, and Luke Fildes from The Graphic and the Illustrated London News; these stark black-and-white images of contemporary British social problems made a lasting impression on him. He also became an avid reader of Dutch, French, German, and English poetry, novels, and histories, with a preference for those of George Eliot and Dickens, for Victor Hugo, Balzac, and the historian Jules Michelet.
Van Gogh did not prove suited to the art trade. His religious fervour developed to an extreme in London and Paris and extended to his appreciation of art. His convictions conflicted with the commercial interests of the art dealership, and in 1876 he was fired. Van Gogh then went to England, where he found teaching jobs in Ramsgate and Isleworth; these, however, offered few prospects, and he returned to the Netherlands in early 1877. After a short stay in Dordrecht, where he worked in a bookshop, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a minister. He went to Amsterdam in May 1877 to begin his studies. To avoid the long period of university preparation required, he enrolled in 1878 in a short course of study in Brussels to qualify for work as an evangelist among the miners in the depressed Borinage district of Belgium. In the autumn of 1878 he moved to the Borinage and worked there as a lay preacher until 1880. When he proved a failure at this job as well, the 27-year-old van Gogh underwent a serious crisis. He even interrupted his correspondence with his brother. During the winter of 1879–80 he undertook a pilgrimage to the village of Courrières in northern France, to visit Jules Breton , known for his paintings of peasants, an extremely popular genre at the time. In a letter to his brother van Gogh described his grim journey, which was apparently a turning-point in his life: he had found his new calling, to be a peasant painter after the example not only of Breton but above all of Jean-François Millet and other painters of the Barbizon School such as Théodore Rousseau, Jules Dupré, and Charles Daubigny. He favoured these painters his whole life because they combined in a happy manner the Romanticism of 1830 (Delacroix) and the Realism of 1848 (Courbet), that is to say: sentiment and truth. However, the first thing he needed to do was to learn the craft, basically drawing after the model, and for that he went to Brussels in October 1880.There he met Anthon van Rappard, a student in the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, and he helped van Gogh, who was an outspoken enemy of all official religious and other conservative institutions with iron rules. Van Gogh did not enter an academy class at that moment; he lacked the funds to do so.
Vincent van Gogh: Road in Etten, chalk, pencil, pastel, watercolour, 15 1/2 x 22 3/4 in. (39.4 x 57.8 cm), 1881 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975, Accession ID:1975.1.774); photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/150000244
From this time onward Theo, who also worked for Goupil’s, financially supported him. In order to save money van Gogh moved in the spring of 1881 to the home of his parents in the village of Etten in Brabant. By doing so he adopted the custom, common among painters during the late 19th century, of spending the summer working in the country or at the seashore, and he started collecting clothes worn by fishermen, peasants, and labourers. From 1881 van Gogh’s development as an artist can be traced through his drawings, which feature hard, graphic outlines and hatched shadowing (e.g. Road in Etten , 1881; New York, Met.). His early work didn’t show evidence of a natural ability. He relied on drawing after prints and learnt from books; sometimes he could find people willing to pose for him. But most of all he put his faith in the ideal of the Christian workman who should eat his bread ‘by the sweat of [his] brow’ as the Bible (Gen. 3:19) prescribes and who knew his Christian duties.
Following conflicts with his father about his improper relationship with a widowed cousin, and because of his need for contact with other artists, van Gogh moved in the autumn of 1881 to Hague, The , then the centre of Dutch painting and the home of such painters as Jozef Israëls, whom van Gogh greatly admired. While there he received profitable instruction from his cousin Anton Mauve. He still favoured the English black-and-white prints published in illustrated periodicals, which he had already discovered in London, and became, together with his friend Anthon van Rappard, a passionate collector and defender of this ‘art for the people’.
In The Hague van Gogh lived with Sien (Clasina) Hoornik, an abandoned, pregnant woman who earned her living as a laundress and occasional prostitute. She and her children formed a substitute family, and they also served as his models (e.g. Sien as Sorrow, drawing, 1882; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.). Van Gogh’s family and acquaintances reacted with shock at his plans to marry Sien. In the autumn of 1883 he was forced by his family to leave ‘the woman’ and he moved alone to Hoogeveen in the northern province of Drenthe. Vincent took inspiration from an often-quoted statement from the sage Thomas Carlyle: ‘Blessed is who has found his work.’ There was also another reason for leaving The Hague: he longed for the countryside and the peasants, for it was still his ambition to become a painter of the working people. At this time he wrote a number of long letters in which he tried to convince Theo to abandon the art trade and to join him in Drenthe in order to draw and paint, but this plan was not realized.
In December 1883 van Gogh returned out of sheer necessity to his parents’ home, who now lived in Nuenen, where he received a very cool reception. His ideas and opinions, including his preference for the naturalist works of Emile Zola, clashed with his father’s views on life. He expressed this contrast in a still-life, Open Bible, Extinguished Candle and Novel (1885; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.), that he painted in memory of his father, who died in 1885. In this work he juxtaposed an opened Bible to Zola’s novel La Joie de vivre. His father considered Zola’s writings, as most Christians did, as indecent and therefore dangerous. As a personal statement his recalcitrant son subsequently included books with clearly legible titles in a number of his portraits. Van Gogh strongly identified with the work of the de Goncourt brothers, Guy de Maupassant, Zola, and other contemporary French authors, whose renditions of reality with such unvarnished starkness made their writings immoral and inflammatory. Van Gogh remained in Nuenen until November 1885, working in its environs. It was during this period that he made the first watercolours and paintings that he did not consider as mere studies or exercises, but as full-fledged works of art suitable for public exhibition. These are largely interiors with weavers, and he gave several works French titles with a view to the Paris art market, in which his brother was to play the role of intermediary (e.g. Cimetière de paysans and La Chaumière; both Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.). In his large and ambitious composition of The Potato-eaters (1885; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.), he gave form to his ideas on peasant painting, also with an eye on the art market. Van Gogh made a lithograph (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.) of this composition, not an unusual practice at the time, to enable the work to reach a larger audience and also to earn some money.
These first conscious efforts to gain the acceptance of the art world failed, partly because by 1885 the Impressionists were painting in the more modern and colourful style, which van Gogh had not yet seen. What’s more, the paintings of peasant subjects that received acclaim at the Salon in Paris, like those of Jules Breton, were more idyllic in conception and painted in a polished, academic technique. Van Gogh took seriously the criticisms of his work that reached him from Paris and from his friend Anthon van Rappard, but he defended himself by referring to Zola’s dictum that a work of art is ‘a slice of nature, viewed through a temperament’ meaning that you can meet an artistic temperament in the work of art. At the same time van Gogh threw himself energetically into the study of colour. In 1885 he visited the newly opened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in order to admire and study Dutch Old Master paintings, especially Frans Hals and Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride. As did so many other self-taught artists, he sought assistance in Charles Blanc’s Grammaire des arts du dessin, architecture, sculpture, peinture (1867) and he read about Eugène Delacroix’s technique. Delacroix delineated his forms through modelling rather than contour lines, and this influenced van Gogh’s style. The lessons taken in the museums of Amsterdam and Antwerp had focused his attention on the painters’ handicraft. More conscious of his own way of painting, he realized that such highly praised painters as Ary Scheffer or Delaroche (formerly also praised by van Gogh), could not paint at all; they simply lacked temperament.
To learn more about colour and the modern painters—till then he hadn’t seen one Impressionist painting—he planned a move to Paris. As a halfway station he travelled in November 1885 to Antwerp, the nearest city with museums and an academy where he could draw after plaster casts and live models, so as to lay a stronger foundation for his art. He arrived in Paris, the true centre of modernity, in February 1886. There he painted a large flower-piece as an exercise in the use of strong contrasting colours, which he painted over a study of two men posing as wrestlers done at the Antwerp academy. This means that at that time he still hoped to become a history painter, an ideal he never was able to realize, except for a few copies after reproductions from works by Rembrant, Millet, Delacroix, Doré, and Daumier which he called ‘translations in colour’.
(ii) Paris, 1886–8.
In Paris van Gogh proved a fast learner, who wanted to gain a position within the avant-garde. He shared an apartment with Theo, who was attempting, on a modest scale, to sell Impressionist paintings; Theo organized exhibitions of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro among others, and it was thus through his brother that van Gogh became acquainted with modern art in Paris.
Van Gogh’s great admiration for Georges Seurat’s Pointillist works, which he saw at the alternative Salon des Indépendants, prompted him to analyse the operative laws of colour. His experiments with the Pointillist technique, primarily in a large series of flower still-lifes (e.g. Flowers in a Copper Pot, 1887; Paris, Mus. Orsay), and his use of contrasting hues of complementary colours led ultimately to his abandonment of a darker palette. The principle of complementary colours fascinated him, and among his later works are numerous examples of compositions that are based on two colours complementing one another. Although he was unable to discipline himself to emulate the rigorous Pointillist technique, he did learn to employ the brush to create rhythmic patterns, modelling with colour. Around this time, he also discovered the mature works of the Romantic painter Adolphe Monticelli , which inspired him to paint in thicker layers of paint (impasto).
Vincent van Gogh: Père Tanguy, oil on canvas, 920×750 mm, 1887–8 (Paris, Musée Rodin); Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY
Another vital source of inspiration for van Gogh was Japanese ukiyoe woodcuts. Like many other avant-garde artists, he collected and traded these and made a number of carefully studied copies, for example after Hiroshige’s Ohashi Bridge in Rain (c. 1886–8; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.). He also used Japanese prints as background decoration in such paintings as his portrait of the colour merchant and art dealer Père Tanguy (1887–8; Paris, Mus. Rodin). Van Gogh admired Japanese woodcuts for their expressive character as early as during his stay in Antwerp; in Paris the effects of colour, perspective lines running into the depths, and cut-off forms attracted his attention. The younger generation of avant-garde artists strove for the simplicity and flat areas of colour found in these Japanese prints (see Japonisme). Endeavour toward simplification and abstraction were tried out by two artists with whom van Gogh was involved in intensely personal relationships at various times: Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin. He met Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other artists at the Cormon academy where artists worked from models (March–June 1886). This indicates that van Gogh continued to follow at least a part of an academic programme. Despite his flower still-lifes and townscapes (e.g. View from Vincent’s Room in Rue Lepic, 1887; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.), he still wanted to become a figure painter. However, this high but expensive ambition was and remained unattainable. Instead he painted scenes in Antwerp, Paris, Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers, as both a substitute for this aim and an attempt to earn some money. He painted several self-portraits (e.g. Self-portrait with a Straw Hat , c. 1887; New York, Met.) and concluded his period in Paris with his gloomy Self-portrait at the Easel (1888; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.) in a technique that was his own variant of Seurat’s Pointillism. Years later he wrote to his sister Willemien, looking back to his time in Paris: ‘No matter what people say: we painters work better in the country, everything there speaks more clearly, everything holds on, everything explains itself, now in a city when one is tired one no longer understands anything and you feels as if you are lost.’
(iii) Arles, 1888–9.
Vincent van Gogh: Sower with Setting Sun, oil on canvas, 640×805 mm, 1888 (Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller); photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
In February 1888, sick of Paris and exhausted, van Gogh moved to Arles, in the south of France, in order to realize his original ambition of becoming a peasant painter in his own way. As was his custom, he explored his new environment by making drawings and paintings: the flowering orchards were a favourite colourful subject, much like the flower-pieces he did in Paris. For him Provence was Japan, and moreover the canals and wooden drawbridges reminded him of the Netherlands, as did the Camargue plains, which lie between Arles and the Mediterranean. In June he travelled to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, which he depicted in a number of drawings and paintings, representing its characteristic cottages with thatched roofs and the fishing boats at sea and on the beach (e.g. of 1888; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.). These were motifs that had already occupied him in the Netherlands, but which he now rendered in a far more intense palette and with a more spontaneous touch. He was experimenting to find his own personal style. He let his colleague Bernard know: ‘I follow no system at all, I hit the canvas with irregular strokes, which I leave as they are, impastos, uncovered spots of canvas—corners here and their left inevitably unfinished—reworkings, roughnesses; well I’m inclined to think that the result is sufficiently worrying and annoying not to please people with preconceived ideas about technique.’ This is demonstrated in his painting of orchards in spring 1888. But he also returned to one of Millet’s favourite themes The Sower, the biblical connotations of which he must have found appealing. He now placed the sowing figure in a landscape dominated by the setting sun (e.g. Sower with Setting Sun , 1888; Otterlo, Rijksmus. Kröller-Müller).
Vincent van Gogh: L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux (Marie Julien, 1848–1911), oil on canvas, 36 x 29 in. (91.4 x 73.7 cm), 1888 or 1889 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 1951, Accession ID: 51.112.3); photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110000971
When he had to economize on paint for several weeks, van Gogh made numerous pen-and-ink drawings from and of the hill of Montmajour near Arles. He considered these large drawings as important as finished paintings. Such works as La Crau Seen from Montmajour (1888; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.) were executed with a reed pen, the use of which was inspired by Rembrandt and by Japanese prints. Rock formations, pine trees, the abbey ruins, and the sprawling fields in the plain of La Crau were translated on to paper into a wealth of shapes and forms composed of lines and dots. Aside from this series of landscapes van Gogh continued work on his series of portraits, using local people as his models (e.g. L’Arlésienne, 1888–9; New York, Met.). The postman, his wife, and their children sat for him (Postman Roulin, 1888; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.; La Berceuse , 1888–9; Otterlo, Rijksmus. Kröller-Müller and New York, Met.). This was the sort of project that once again could have given van Gogh the feeling of belonging to a family. Van Gogh painted several versions of the portraits of Roulin and his wife, which exhibit minor differences. If he thought a work important, he wanted to keep it for himself and then made copies as a present for the sitter, for Theo, and friends. There exist no fewer than five slightly different copies of Madame Roulin as La Berceuse. The painter Eugène Boch became The Poet (Paris, Mus. Orsay), and the portrait of gardener Patience Escalier (1888; priv. col., see McQuillan, p. 61) embodies the Provencal countryside: he is the sun-burnt companion of the potato-eaters from Brabant.
Vincent van Gogh:Vase with Sunflowers, oil on canvas, 950×730 mm, 1889 (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum); photo credit: Art Resource, NY
In Arles van Gogh wanted to found a community of artists; in particular he hoped that the modernists Bernard and Gauguin would join him. As a first step he asked them to send him a self-portrait with, at Van Gogh’s special request, a portrait of the other in it (both 1888; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.). In return Gauguin received an extraordinary self-portrait of van Gogh as ‘a Bonze, a simple worshipper of the eternal Buddha’ (1888; Cambridge, MA, Fogg). In this manner van Gogh had his companions around him in his Yellow House that he had rented. A series of sunflowers in a vase (e.g. Vase with Sunflowers , 1889; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.; London, N.G.; Sunflowers , 1887; New York Met.) was painted as a decoration of the living- and working-quarters of the Yellow House. This decorative scheme was meant to impress Gauguin, whose response is reflected in his Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers (1888; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.). The van Gogh brothers eventually convinced Gauguin to leave Brittany, and in October 1888 he arrived in Arles to live and work with Vincent. Van Gogh had great respect for his colleague, and he had already tried to follow his and Bernard’s theory of abstraction, for example in his series of sunflowers and in La Berceuse, building up in flat areas of saturated colours circumscribed by heavy contour lines. The differences in van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s dispositions and temperaments, however, precluded successful collaboration. Their disagreements came into the open when they visited the Musée Fabre in Montpellier on 16 or 17 December 1888, where they had vehement discussions. Following an argument at Christmas 1888, during a mental breakdown, van Gogh in all likelihood cut off a part of his own ear and was then transported to the hospital, where he experienced his first serious episode of mental illness. The frightened Gauguin immediately left Arles. The two artists nevertheless remained in contact and continued to respect each other’s work. Van Gogh no longer followed the path of abstraction and painting from the imagination that Bernard and Gauguin had advocated.
(iv) Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise, 1889–90.
Vincent van Gogh: Self-portrait, oil on canvas, 650×545 mm, 1889 (Paris, Musée d’Orsay); photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
The attacks of mental illness, called epilepsy at that time, were to recur, and from May 1889 to May 1890, van Gogh allowed himself to be institutionalized in Saint-Rémy not far from Arles. Between attacks he drew and painted in the garden and in the building, making self-portraits (e.g. Self-portrait , 1889; Paris, Mus. Orsay), portraits of the staff and patients, and depicting the view from his window. His room looked out on to a wheat-field fenced off by a low wall, with the Alpilles mountain range in the background, as seen in Enclosed Field at Sunrise (1890; Otterlo, Rijksmus. Kröller-Müller).
Vincent van Gogh: Starry Night, oil on canvas, 736×921 mm, 1889 (New York, Museum of Modern Art); photo © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY
In the summer of 1889 van Gogh painted one of his most famous works, Starry Night (New York, MOMA). In this work he reverted to an old idea, that of painting a nocturnal sky, which he had attempted and abandoned the year before in Starry Night over the Rhône (1888; Paris, Mus. Orsay). The handling of the new version in whirling lines is expressionistic, and this time composed not directly from nature, but with the help of sketches. The painting has strong religious overtones, accentuated by the spire of a church that in reality wasn’t there. He left no written explanation of this composition, but he did mention a formal source for its particular style: the old, rather brutal woodcuts that illustrate the Household edition of The Works of Charles Dickens, which he so loved.
Vincent van Gogh: First Steps, after Millet, oil on canvas, 28 1/2 x 35 7/8 in. (72.4 x 91.1 cm), 1890 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of George N. and Helen M. Richard, 1964, Accession ID: 64.165.2); photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110000968
When he was not allowed to paint outside the asylum, van Gogh copied prints—translations, as he called them, from black-and-white into colour—again by Millet (e.g. First Steps, after Millet , 1890; New York, Met.), and also by Honoré Daumier, Doré, Delacroix, and Rembrandt. The prints and most of the paintings are in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam). Delacroix’s Pietà (Paris, St Denys du St Sacrement) and Rembrandt’s the Raising of Lazarus (version; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.) supplied him with religious subjects.
When in November 1889 van Gogh received a letter from Gauguin with a coloured drawing of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (untraced) and from Bernard photographs of his works with religious subjects, he got very angry. Gauguin painted Christ on the Mount of Olives (West Palm Beach, FL, Norton, Gal. & Sch. A.) which in the eyes of van Gogh was ‘a nightmare’. Instead of painting Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, as Gauguin had done, he painted real olive garden with and without olive pickers after drawings made on the spot (e.g. Olive Grove, 1889; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.). Abstraction no longer interested van Gogh. As a positive outcome of this clash van Gogh formulated his own conviction of ‘immersing oneself in reality, with no plan made in advance’. To Bernard he wrote that it was ‘right to be moved by the Bible’, but he also let Bernard know that ‘modern reality has such a hold over us that even when trying abstractly to reconstruct ancient times in our thoughts—just at that very moment the pretty events of our lives tear us away from these meditations and our own adventures throw us forcefully to personal sensations: joy, boredom, suffering, anger or smiling’. Van Gogh’s earlier painting of the open Bible with Zola’s novel Joie de Vivre echoes this idea.
Vincent van Gogh: Church at Auvers-sur-Oise, oil on canvas, 940×740 mm, 1890 (Paris, Musée d’Orsay); Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY
Van Gogh spent the last period of his life from May to 27 July 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, slightly to the north of Paris. He interrupted his journey there to visit on 17–19 May his brother, sister-in-law, and his newborn nephew. In their apartment he saw his own paintings that he had sent to Theo over the years, and he visited an art exhibition. In Auvers Dr Paul Gachet, a homeopathic practitioner with an interest in art, kept an eye on van Gogh. In his portrait from June 1890, van Gogh depicted Gachet as a melancholic, that is to say, as a patient like himself. As a painter he was satisfied with the result and dreamed of making more modern portraits that would express the specific character of their own time. As he had done previously, van Gogh explored the village and made paintings of the town hall (priv. col.), the Romanesque church (e.g. Church at Auvers-sur-Oise , 1890; Paris, Mus. Orsay), which he associated with the tower he had painted in 1885 in Nuenen (La Cimetiere). ‘Almost the same’, van Gogh wrote despite the great stylistic differences marking his development from a painter with a dark, tonal palette in the Netherlands to an original colourist in France. Furthermore, he chose the houses with their thatched roofs as a theme and the new mansions, in particular the house of Daubigny, clearly as a homage to this painter of the Barbizon school so beloved and respected by van Gogh. He also depicted the hilly countryside with its vast wheat-fields (e.g. Wheat-field and Cypress Trees , 1889; London, N.G.), including the tempestuous Crows in a Wheat-field (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Mus.), long mistakenly thought to be his last painting, and other landscapes. As he had done in Paris, Arles, and Saint-Rémy, van Gogh painted portraits, landscapes, houses, huts, and flower-pieces. Only now, after five years, he did reap a number of successes. Not only had the art critic Albert Aurier published an extremely favourable article about him in the prestigious Mercure de France in January 1890, but he was also invited to exhibit with the avant-garde Brussels artists’ society Les XX. There he sold a painting of a grape harvest, the Red Vineyard (1888; Moscow, Pushkin Mus.), to the painter Anna Boch. This bit of recognition both pleased and perturbed him. In a letter of thanks to Aurier he credited Gauguin and Monticelli, who in his view were more important as innovators. He doubted that he could make a valuable contribution to modern art, and he also feared new attacks. Moreover, he was greatly concerned that Theo should withdraw his financial support. He shot himself in the chest on 27 July 1890. Two days later he died calmly in the presence of Theo, who outlived him by only six months. In 1914 the two brothers were reinterred next to each other at the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise. Statues by Ossip Zadkine in commemoration of van Gogh are to be found both in Auvers and Zundert.
2. Correspondence and collections.
Van Gogh’s fame rests to a great extent on his more than 800 extraordinary letters, the most numerous of which were sent to Theo. From France he also posted a series of 23 letters to his sister Wilhelmina, in which he regularly included explanations of artistic concepts that he considered superfluous in his letters to Theo. In addition, two other sets of letters have been preserved: those to Anthon van Rappard (58) from 1881 to 1885, and those to Emile Bernard (22) between 1887 and 1889. He also corresponded and exchanged paintings with Gauguin. All of these letters, as well as a number of others, were published first in fragmentary form in the 1890s and subsequently in their entirety.
The abundance of biographical data and the diary-like character of the letters were important contributory factors in the making of van Gogh’s reputation. Due to the existence of the letters, many of the works are provided with the interpretation and commentary of van Gogh himself, to a far greater extent than with his predecessors and contemporaries. The letters have also provided the basis of a voyeuristic analysis of the sad elements of his life; the romantic version of van Gogh’s life is rendered in Irving Stone’s novel Lust for Life (1934) and the film (1956) of the same name, for example.
After Theo’s death in 1891 his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, moved from Paris to the Netherlands, taking with her the majority of van Gogh’s production, and in 1909 Helene Kröller-Müller started her collection of his works advised by H. P. Bremmer, which later became the nucleus of Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger produced the first edition of the letters published in 1914 and sold paintings from Theo’s collection although she kept most of the van Gogh’s and propagated his work. The collection was eventually given a home in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, designed by Gerrit Rietveld and opened in 1972. In later years the building was enlarged and renovated. The museum houses the archives of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, which owns the majority of van Gogh’s letters, as well as a library and documentary material on van Gogh. As a result the two largest collections of his works are preserved in the Netherlands. Restoration departments were able to throw new light on the most important aspect of van Gogh’s paintings: the darkening, discoloration, and fading of colours have distorted the original colour harmonies, and that is truly a great loss.