Vincent van Gogh, the Man

"I am a man of passions," said Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).

When I read Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, I was surprised to learn they were sons of a pastor and, in fact, Vincent toyed with becoming a minister. Although his first job at age 16 was clerking for an art dealership, his two interests--art and religion--distracted him from his dreary work and he was eventually fired.

The next ten years were a collage of dead ends as Vincent bounced around northern Europe (England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands), pursuing one path after another. In his letters to Theo and their parents, he writes of launching into each project with incredible energy, then becoming disillusioned and moving on to something else: teacher at a boarding school, assistant preacher, bookstore apprentice, preacher again, theology student, English student, literature student, art student. He fell in love but was rejected; he quarreled with his family and was estranged; he lived with a prostitute and her daughter, offending the few friends he had. Finally, in his late 20s, worn out, flat broke, and in poor health, Vincent returned to his family and made peace. That's when he started to paint.

The self-portrait by the artist (top) was painted in 1888 while he was living in Paris with Theo (March 1886 - February 1888). The budding young artist proudly displayed his new palette full of bright new colors. He was trying his hand at Impressionism techniques--building a scene using dabs of different-colored paint. A whole new world of art--and life--had opened up to him in Paris.

While there, along other Impressionist painters, Vincent learned the shimmering effect which comes from placing dabs of different colors side by side on the canvas. At a distance, the two colors blend in the eye of the viewer to become a third color. In the "Self-Portrait with Straw Hat" above (1887), Vincent used separate strokes of blue, yellow, green, and red to create a brown beard--a beard which seems to throb with excitement.

"You wouldn't recognize Vincent, he has changed so much... The doctor says that he is now perfectly fit again. He is making tremendous strides with his work... He is also far livelier than he used to be and is popular with people." - Theo van Gogh to their mother

Van Gogh's use of color is world-famous. Many of his theories can be traced back to that of complimentary colors. In "Irises," yellow and purple--colors that reinforce each other, according to the theory--thus maximize their effect. The purple (a mixture of red and blue) is now mainly blue, since the red pigment has faded.

Despite his new sociability, as referenced by Theo, Vincent never quite fit in with his Impressionist friends. As he developed into a good painter, he became anxious to strike out on his own. Also, he thought the social life of the big city was distracting him from serious work. Wanting peace and quiet, a place where he could throw himself completely into his work, he headed for the sunny south of France.

"The worse I get along with people, the more I learn to have faith in Nature and concentrate on her."

He saw sunflowers as his signature subject and he painted a half-dozen versions of them, each a study of intense yellow. Even a simple work like the one above, painted in 1889, bursts with life. But during his time in Provence, he swung from flurries of ecstatic activity to bouts of great loneliness. And after his friend, fellow artist Paul Gauguin, arrived, things went sour very fast. This began his spiral into "acute mania with hallucinations," as diagnosed by an Arles' doctor. (By the way, in January 2014, the painting above was displayed at London's National Gallery next to the sunflowers he painted in 1888--the first time in six decades they have been hung side by side.)

Vincent spent some time--productive time, actually--in a St. Remy mental hospital, still painting as his health seemed to improve: pictures of his hospital room, the gardens of the asylum, and landscapes (when he was allowed outside) like "The Garden of Saint Paul's Hospital" painted in 1889 (or, as it's also known, "The fall of the leaves"). The stark brown trees are blown by the wind, and a solitary figure (Vincent?) makes his way along a narrow winding path as the wind rains leaves down on him. The colors are surreal--blue, green, and red tree trunks with heavy black outlines. A road runs away from us, heading nowhere.

How much of these paintings reflect Vincent's spiral into total depression and finally putting a bullet through his chest? Although his life was sad and tragic, the record he left us is one of beauty. And I'm beginning to appreciate that beauty more and more.

Believe it or not, Vincent sold only one of his canvases during his lifetime--to a woman in Brussels. In 1987, one of his "Sunflowers" sold for $40 million and three years later, a portrait of his doctor for more than $80 million. Sadly, this "famous after the fact" was not uncommon for some of Europe's most renown artists.