In november 1885, van Gogh decided to move to Antwerp. He vainly attempted to make money from painting portraits, townscapes, and trades men's signs. Then he enrolled at the Antwerp Academy to make use of the live models. Shortage of money led to van Gogh's undernourishment and physical distress. When van Gogh enrolled at the Academy in January 1886, he had just finished drawings that one day would be compared to the masters. In Agostina Segatori in Her Café du Tambourin, the colors are irresistibly lively and the brushwork delicate and quick. Of the works done in 1886 and the following year, particularly important is Interior of a Restaurant, in which van Gogh uses a personal interpretation of the pointillist techniques of Seurat. In Four Sunflowers, the petals seem to burst out in prelude to the flamelike shimmer of the cypresses that he would paint later at Saint-Rémy.
Although willing to learn, he astonished fellow students by refusing to abandon the rapidity and boldness of his own methods. Possibly because of this, he was downgraded to the beginner class and consequently he left for Paris to live with his brother. It was through his brother Theo and an art gallery devoted to living artists that he discovered the Impressionists, and became familiar with the new art movements developing at the time. Before Paris, van Gogh had not even known who the Impressionists were. He admired pictures by Degas and Monet and through Toulouse-Lautrec he was in touch with the local members of the art world. He was also influenced by Japanese print makers. The Impressionists discovered Japanese prints long before van Gogh's arrival. These prints influenced his use of harmonized color. Van Gogh pinned them on his walls and they appear in the background of some of his paintings. The series of Japanese pictures, including Plum Blossoms and Bridge in the Rain, were inspired by the works of Hiroshige, greatly in fashion in contemporary Paris. But perhaps the painting that best represents van Gogh’s period in the French capital is the famous Portrait of Pére Tanguy. In this picture, Julien Tanguy, a familiar figure of the Impressionists, is depicted in the foreground facing outward, without being separated in any way from his surroundings. Van Gogh was evidently quite willing to sacrifice the objective reality of the scenes he painted, if he could concentrate on the representation of the interior world.
While refining his technique as a painter in Paris, the home of the Impressionist school, he soon found that his real affinity was not for this school but for three men who had left their company to carry the torch of revolt a step further: for Cézanne, usually considered the most monstrous painter among the outcasts, for Gauguin, under the combined influence of Cezanne and of the Orient; and for Seurat, obsessed with experimental vision of art.
Until 1886, he had only known the Dutch painters and a handful of French landscape painters including Millet and the Barbizon group. Now, for the first time, he saw works by Delacroix (whom he later said had more influence on him than the Impressionists) and by Pissaro, Cézanne, Renoir and Sisley. Light, color and brilliance burst upon him. He went about the streets with a palette of bright colors, as delighted by the cosmopolitan bustle of the city as Manet, Monet, Renoir, and others, had been twenty years before him. Van Gogh's Impressionist phase lasted two years.
Although it was vitally important for his development, he had to integrate it with the style of his earlier years before his genius could fully unfold. Paris opened his eyes to the senses and beauty of the visible world and taught him the pictorial language of the color patch, but painting continued to be a vessel for his personal emotions. To investigate this spiritual reality with the new means at this command, he went to Arles in the south of France. In Arles he painted Peach Blossoms and the two versions of Langlois Bridge. He evolved a new concept of tonality in painting in which color no longer had a close relationship to reality but served only to illustrate the reality that lay in his innermost soul. This can be clearly seen in Harvest and Starry Sky Above the Rhone.
In Arles, between 1888 and 1889, he produced his greatest pictures. While Cézanne and Seurat were making a more severe, classical art, out of the Impressionists style, van Gogh felt Impressionist art was pretty decorations and did nothing to evoke the sorrow of the human soul. He led the way in a different direction. He believed that impressionism did not allow the artist enough freedom to express his inner feelings. Since this was his main concern, he is sometimes called an expressionist. Expressionism is the idea of emotional spontaneity in painting.
The portrait of Dr. Gachet is a perfect example of his melancholy, Expressionist late work. By setting certain colors side by side he achieved effects of unearthly splendor. To color he brought dignity and form, the opposite of the abstractions into which Monet was heading and which seemed the inevitable limit of Impressionist techniques. Van Gogh thought it was the color, not the form, that determined the expressive content of his pictures.
Three painters of genius emerged, overlapping the Impressionists in time and manner, whose names have become synonymous with the post-Impressionists movement: Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Between them they set European painting on a path which turned Impressionism into something solid and durable, like the art of the museums, a return in effect, to the main stream, but with minds alight with discovery and purpose. These three artists believed in the importance of color to express the state of mind of the model represented.
Work of the Post-Impressionists reveals a freely expressive use of color and form. In 1888, while living at Arles, he began to use the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens, and blues. He loved bright colors especially yellow because of the sun which was bright in southern France and he painted what he saw and felt. He painted in colors with bright hues and high value. Two paintings that show this is Café Terrace at Night and The Night Café, where he uses reds, greens and a lemon-yellow light that illuminates figures sunk in desolation. Vincent would sometimes put paints on his canvas with his palette knife or right from the tube and mix it around with his fingers which would make it quite coarse. In Arles he attached the greatest importance to his portraits, although he also painted many landscapes.
The year 1888 was indeed prolific, and in November van Gogh produced two more noteworthy portraits, L’Arlésienne and Portrait of Armand Roulin. In the first one of these he used the technique of cloisonnisme. Vincent used this tecnique in other works but in such cases the outline was the result of a specific theoretical concept of painting, and he used the technique only when it was called for by the work. The second portrait, of Armand Roulin, demonstrated again Vincent’s talent for enriching his work with warm tones of humanity when he feels a particular affection for his subject. The Roulin family were the only neighbors with whom he had anything more than a mere nodding acquaintance.
Later, in 1889, he devoted his main energy to landscape painting. In southern France van Gogh lived for a time with Paul Gauguin, whom he had met in Paris. It is therefore not surprising that he used some of Gauguin’s techniques, as in the L’Arlésienne. In two paintings of this period Van Gogh’s Chair at Arles and Gauguin’s Chair at Arles, Vincent showed a pair of empty chairs, and succeeded in representing the differences between the personalities of the two artists. After two months they had violent arguments, culminating in a quarrel in which van Gogh threatened Gauguin with a razor. The same night, in a deep remorse, van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. This episode marked the beginning of a periodic insanity that plagued him until his death.
On May 8, 1889, he was admitted to Saint-Rémy Hospital as a voluntary patient. In no way, however, did van Gogh intend to abandon painting. His works at this time included Two Cypresses, characterized by a frantic rhythm of brush strokes laden with emotion, and The Starry Night, a nocturnal picture that also shows cypresses. Also from this period was Irises, in which he exploits the sheer power of light, albeit to a lesser degree than in The Starry Night, succeding with such great effectiveness in expressing the passions that moved him. In 1890 he produced Almond Blossoms, a picture that shows self-control unusual in his late works, and features perhaps the most luminous shades of blue that van Gogh ever used.
By may, 1890, Vincent moved to the home of Dr. Gachet, a friend of the leading Impressionists and himself a painter, who had declared himself willing to care for van Gogh. Stimulated by the diversity of his surroundings, van Gogh immediately set to work on a series of canvases, including The Church of Auvers, one of his last masterpieces, painted with vigorous but orderly strokes. In July, the work that symbolizes van Gogh’s pictorial universe and was his spiritual testament, Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies, was painted, a canvas that vibrates with a fury of expression in which a veritable cry of anguish can be heard with remarkable clarity.
Vincent’s condition deteriorated, and his letters show that he was in a constant state of excitation. On July 27, he decided to bring his tormented life to end, and shot himself in the stomach. He died two days after in his brother’s arms. In his last letter to his brother he wrote “I risk my life for my work, and my reason has almost been wrecked”. Six months later, Theo died and they now lie buried side by side in the cementery of Auvers.
Van Gogh is one of the most fascinating individuals in the history of art. The emotional crises from which he suffered epitomize the cliché of the tormented artist that is so much a part of romantic imagery. Rarely has a painter met with such a total lack of interest during his lifetime, even from fellow artists by no means lacking of perception, and then achived such an immense fame and complete revaluation after his death. Critics now agree that van Gogh, despite his troubled life, or perharps even because of it, was able to create a highly individual style of chronomatic harmony that was hitherto unknown, and in the same way to invent the sinuous forms that are his hallmark, forms that symbolize his yearning to break free of artistic conventions. In addition to opening a new direction that would later be followed by the expressionists-of which some critics claim he was the first exponent-van Gogh has left works of absolute perfection, example of an artistic commitment pursued to the very depths of desperation, and for which the ultimate price was self-destruction.
Calvinism: The religious doctrines of John Calvin, emphasizing the omnipotence of God and the salvation of the elect by God's grace alone.
French painter noted for his depictions of peasant life.
French novelist and critic, the founder of the Naturalist movement in literature.
The painter Courbet started and dominated the French movement toward realism.
Painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism.
French artist, acknowledged as the master of drawing the human figure in motion. Degas worked in many mediums, preferring pastel to all others. He is perhaps best known for his paintings, drawings, and bronzes of ballerinas and of race horses.
French painter, initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style.
French artist, observed and captured in his art the Parisian nightlife of the period.
Japanese painter and printmaker, known especially for his landscape prints.
French painter, one of the greatest of the Postimpressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism.
One of the leading French painters of the Postimpressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art.
The Barbizon School was a group of landscape artists working in the region of the French town of Barbizon. They rejected the Academic tradition, abandoning theory in an attempt to achieve a truer representation of the countryside, and are considered to be part of the French Realist movement.
The greatest French Romantic painter, whose use of colour was influential in the development of both Impressionist and Postimpressionist painters.
French Impressionist painter, who endured prolonged financial hardship in keeping faith with the aims of Impressionism.
French painter originally associated with the Impressionist movement. His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light. By the mid-1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women.
French painter who was one of the creators of French Impressionism.
The name of which was derived from a French word meaning “divided”. Typical of Gauguin but also used by many simbolist painters, and consisted of surrounding every object with a distint ouline.
