Van Gogh: Life and Works

Wonderful monograph of Vincent Van Gogh containing a seven-page biography, 50 colored reproductions and 25 details. Each painting is primary explained by quotes from Van Gogh himself in his letters to Theo. A clear, minimalist and straightforward book.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890)

“The painter of the future will be a colorist such as has never yet existed.” VVG

“The pictures which must be made so that painting should be wholly itself and should raise itself to a heigh equivalent to the severe summits which the Greek sculptors, the German musicians, the writers of the French novel reach, are far beyond the powers of an isolated individual.” VVG

Biography

Van Gogh was born in 1853 in Brabant, at the border of Netherlands and Belgium. His father was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church ; his mother, the daughter of a bookseller and bookbinder. Two of his uncles were art dealers. Van Gogh's early attempts to find a career embraced each of these professions: he was an art dealer, a book dealer and a trainee candidate for the Church of England.

In 1869, at the age of 16, he began to work at La Hague for Goupil and Co., an international firm of art specialized in contemporary French art and photographic reproductions. In 1873, he was transfered in London. Inspired by the novelists George Eliot and Charles Dickens. In 1875, transfered to Goupil in Paris.

“When I entered the hall of the Hôtel Drouot, where they were exhibiting Millet, I felt like saying, ‘Take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

Brief periods in London, Holland, Amsterdam and finally Belgium where he became a lay preacher. In 1880, he decides to become a graphic artist and studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, then moved to La Hague.

He lives with Clasina Hoornik, a prostitute and her two children. After pressure from his family, he breaks up with her and moves to Holland.

“It is necessary to thoroughly feel the link between nature and pictures in general. I have had to renew that in myself.” He now begins to paint in oil and commits to be a peasant painter. He studies plaster casts and live model for several months at Antwerp.

In 1886, he moves to Paris, where his brother Theo lives. He meets Fernand Cormon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Emile Bernard. He also admired Signac and Seurat. Strong interest in Japanese woodcuts.

“One can hardly be said to belong to one's time if one has paid no attention to it.”

In 1888, he moves to Arles. “I kept looking out of the window to see if it was beginning to look like Japan.” Friendship with Gauguin. Short stay at the asylum of Saint-Rémy.

He spends the last months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, North of Paris. He committed suicide in July 1890, and his brother Theo died six months later.

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My favorites:

Sorrow, 1882
The State Lottery Office, 1882
Women Miners, 1882
Weaver, 1884
Peasant Woman Gleaning, 1885
Wheatfields with Sheaves, 1888
The Old Peasant (Patience Escalier), 1888
Memory of the Garden at Etten, 1888
Wheatfields with Cypresses, 1889
Self-portrait, 1889
Midday, 1889-1890

Sorrow, 1882
The starting point for this drawing was a woodcut by Millet: “Last Summer, when you showed me The Sheperdess, I thougth, ‘how much can be done with a single contour?'” He includes the lines from Michelet's La Femme, ‘How can it be that a woman is left alone, anywhere on earth'. In a letter to Teo: I wanted to express the struggle for life in both that white, slender figure of the woman, and those angry, gnarled black roots.The State Lottery Office, The Hague, 1882: Women Miners, 1882:Weaver, 1884:Peasant Women Gleaning, 1885:Wheatfields with Sheaves, 1888The Old Peasant (Patience Escalier), 1888:Memory of the Garden at Etten, 1888:It was not Van Gogh's habit to paint from his imagination, but Gauguin encouraged him to do so. Van Gogh wrote to his sister: “there is not the least vulgar and fatuous ressemblance, yet the deliberate choice of the color, the sombre violet with the blotch of violent citron yellow of the dahlias suggest Mother's personality to me. The figure in the scotch plaid... against the sombre green of the cypress... further accentuated by the red parasol... gives me an impression of you like those in Dicken's novels.”Wheatfields with Cypresses, 1889Self-portrait, 1889:Midday, 1888-1889:L'Arlésienne: Madame Ginoux, 1889