PAINTING FOR THE POSTERITY
It is a little over 150 years since Vincent van Gogh was born, and 110 years since he died.
The name Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh should suffice to cause qualms among many of us. Somerset Maugham in The Moon and Six Pence sketched Gauguin, though satirically and in a legendary manner, tugging, torturing, and distorting the image of the painter. Irving Stone in Lust for Life portrayed Van Gogh.
Dawn and morning
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was born in the Van Gogh family in a small Dutch village. He seldom developed any enduring relationship with anyone, save his younger brother, Theo. They were strongly attached to each other from childhood. In fact, it was Theo’s affinity, attachment, patience, love and understanding that supported Van Gogh in his persistent struggle to express on canvas.
Storm and stress
At age 16 Van Gogh started his career as an art-dealer, his family’s profession. A ‘lost-love’ at twenty, left him depressed, and desolate. This possibly turned him to creativity. At age 23, Van Gogh turned an evangelist, and worked among the coal miners of the Borinage in Belgium, nursing the sick, suffering, and the wounded. He was dismissed from evangelical work as his extremities were seen as incompatible with the ‘canon’ of the Church Council that ‘a person who neglected himself could not be an example to others’.
Van Gogh had started drawing rough sketches in Brussels in 1878, and resumed this in the Borinage. But after his dismissal from evangelical work he took up drawing seriously. At age 26 Van Gogh realised that he was cut out for a particular vocation, and the creative impulse in him impelled him to
painting, though this was a continuous journey through agony and anguish, as he was frequently afflicted by penury and starvation. However, Theo, who by this time secured a job, assisted him in word and deed, and remained extremely good and helping.
At age 28, another unrequited love with a cousin widow, whose heart he tried to win through her four years’ old son whom he loved deeply, shattered him.
Shortly after this, he took under protection a destitute and her children. He lavished his pent up love and energy on her and the children, particularly the youngest one. This liaison deprived him of the love and sympathy of many who looked down upon him as a reprobate. He, however, continued this relationship for nearly a year hoping to own them. But he was forced to leave them as he was in heavy debts.
Van Gogh in Paris
Van Gogh loved harsh, coarse, and crude colours, which he used in his
paintings with streaky, brush strokes. At Antwerp, the place of his second sojourn in painting, Japanese prints attracted him and he soon adopted a more colourful palette.
In the third phase of his creative life, he moved to Paris. He got acquainted with Paul Gauguin. Here his painting became freer, and his colours grew fresher and throbbing. The intense need for Sunshine later made him move to Arles in Provence, where he painted for the rest of his life. He found this place so pleasant and sunny that he persuaded Gauguin to join.
In his sojourns as a painter, his paintings at the Brabant village of Nuenen conveyed an obsessive vision of coarse and crude peasant life in black and brown. At Antwerp he adopted a colourful palette as a result of his love of Japanese prints. In Paris he emulated the clarity and freshness of Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. At Arles his artistic gifts flowed out freely.
His major works were painted in the two and a half years that he spent here. He expressed the violent emotions aroused in him by the glorious spring blossoms, the wheat fields at harvestine under the burning Sun, the richness of the autumn, the beauty of the gardens and parks, and the human face, using most simple and personal means – in his Self-Portrait, Portrait of Postman Roulin, The Night Café, The Poet’s Garden, The Sunflower, The Starry Night, etc.
Journey’ss end
After a violent quarrel with Gauguin, Van Gogh cut off his right ear and presented to a courtesan (the versions on this vary). He was soon taken to hospital. Though he recovered, his life became more traumatic. His neighbours, who looked at him with suspicion and fear, petitioned the mayor and he was again sent to hospital. This whole affair affected him so badly and caused recurring attacks. After this, he did not have the courage to start a new studio, and thought it best to go to an asylum. On the evening of July 27, 1890, possibly under extreme depression Van Gogh shot himself in the groin and died at age 37.
The paintings he did for nearly a year when he was in the asylum were not the same buoyant, works he had done earlier. Here his palette was more sober, and the harmonies of his paintings passed into a minor key.
Posthumously, many have written about Van Gogh. His malady has been variously interpreted as insanity, epilepsy, psychopathic psychogenic attacks, and so on. Some Art historians believe that his madness was only an overlay on his genius, but for which he would have probably continued as a peddler of painted pieces.