Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890)

Précis

Vincent Van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands, son of a small town preacher. He began his working life employed by Groupil & Cie, an international art dealer, but then left to consider a career with the church as his religious zeal grew. In 1879, having grown disenchanted with both formal religious education and the evangelist path, he decided to become an arist. Over the course of the next ten years, before he took his own life, he produced an enormous body of work. While it is not quite true that he never sold a piece of art, during his lifetime his primary supporters were his brother Theo and other artists. Van Gogh also relied on Theo for financial support. While some art historians question how much of Van Gogh current popularity is due to romantic mythology around the "insane genius", his work is unquestionably powerful and unique.

Self-Portrait dedicated to Paul Gaughin, o/c. 1888
Harvard Fogg Museum
Image courtesy of Mark Harden's Artchive

His use of paint was extremely physical (it is a shame one cannot get a sense of the thick, powerful, green swirls around the head in the above self-portrait)-- a benefit of never having learned painting, he wrote his brother in 1882 -- and his artistic style is as intense and intelligent as his writings. Among other painters, he greatly respected Millet, Delacroix, and Daumier.

Excerpts from Vincent Van Gogh's Letters (source)

Van Gogh to his brother Theo, 21 July 1882

"Art is jealous, she doesn't like taking second place an indisposition. Hence I shall humor her. ... What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don't think I am raising my sights to high. I want to do drawings that touch some people."

Van Gogh to Theo, 20 August 1882

"What I find such a pleasant surprise about painting is that you can, with the same effect you put into a drawing, take something home with you that conveys the impression much better and is much more pleasing to look at. And at the same time more accurate, too. In a word, it is more rewarding than drawing. But it is absolutely essential to be able to draw the proportions correctly and to position the objects fairly confidently before you start. If you make a mistake here, it will all come to nothing."

Van Gogh to Theo, 3 September 1882

"I said to myself while I was doing it: don't let me leave before there is something of the autumnal evening in it, something mysterious, something important. However -- because this effect doesn't last -- I had to paint quickly, putting the figures in all at once, with a few forceful strokes of a firm brush. It had struck me how firmly the saplings were planted in the ground -- I started on them with the brush, but because the ground was already impasted, brush strokes simply vanished into it. Then I squeezed roots and trunks in from the tube and modelled them a little with the brush.
     Well, they are in there now, springing out of it, standing strongly rooted in it.
     In a way I am glad that I never learned painting. In all probability I would then have learned to ignore such effects as this. Now I can say to myself, this is just what I want. If it is impossible, it is impossible, but I'm going to try it even though I don't know how it ought to be done."

Van Gogh to Theo, 22 October 1882

[editor's note: Van Gogh was writing of figures versus landscape, looking at a Daumier drawing]

"What impressed me so much at the time was something so stout and manly in Daumier's conception, something that made me think it must be good to think and to feel like that and to overlook or ignore a multitude of things and to concentrate on what makes us sit up and think and what touches us as human beings more directly and personally than meadows or clouds."

"What is drawing? How does one come to it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall -- since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently."

Van Gogh to Anton van Rappard, March 1884

"I certainly forsee that as I gain more of what I shall call expressive force, people will say not less but even more than they do now that I have no technique." ... "Do you really think I don't care about technique or that I don't try for it? Oh, but I do, although only inasmuch as it allows me to say what I want to say (and if I cannot do that yet, or not yet perfectly, I am working hard to improve), but I don't give a damn whether my language matches that of the rhetoricians..."

Van Gogh to Theo, October 1884

"You don't know how paralysing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter: you can't do a thing." ... "Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all."

Van Gogh to Theo, c. 30 April 1885

"When weavers weave that cloth which I think they call cheviot, or those curious multicoloured Scottish tartan fabrics, then they try, as you know, to get strange broken colours and greys into the cheviot -- and to get the most vivid colours to balance each other in the multicoloured chequered cloth -- so that instead of the fabric being a jumble, the effect produit of the pattern looks harmonious from a distance.
     A grey woven from red, blue, yellow, off-white & black threads -- a blue broken by a green and an orange, red or yellow thread -- are quite unlike plain colours, that is, they are more vibrant, and primary colours seem hard, cold and lifeless beside them.
     Yet the weaver, or rather the designer, of the pattern or the colour combination does not always find it easy to make an exact estimate of the number of threads and their direction -- no more than it is easy to weave brush strokes into a harmonious whole."

Van Gogh to Theo, July 1885

"All academic figures are put together in the same way, and, let us admit, 'on ne peut mieux' -- impeccably -- faultlessly. You will have gathered what I am driving at -- they do not lead us to any new discoveries."
     "... a Parisian who has learned his drawing at the academy, will always convey the limbs and the structure of the body in the ame way -- sometimes charming, accurate in proportion and anatomical detail. But when Israëls, or say, Daumier or Lhermitte, draw a figure, one gets much more of a sense of the shape of the body, and yet -- and that's the very reason I'm pleased to include Daumier - the proportions will sometimes be almost arbitrary, the anatomy and structure often anything but correct in the eyes of the academicians. But it will live. And Delacroix too, in particular."
     "... if one were to photograph a digger, he would certainly not be digging then. ... I long most of all to learn how to produce those very inaccuracies, those very aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality, as may turn it into, well -- a lie if you like -- but truer than the literal truth."

Van Gogh to Theo, 3 September 1888

"...suffering as I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something which is my life -- the power to create.
     And if, deprived of the physical power, one tries to create thoughts instead of children, one is still very much part of humanity. And in my pictures I want to say something consoling, as music does. I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our colouring."