FREE ESSAY ON VINCENT VAN GOGH

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Vangogh
The rapid evolution of a style characterized by canvases filled with swirling, bright
colors depicting 
people and nature is the essence of Vincent Van Gogh's extremely prolific but tragically
short career. 
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Holland, son of a Dutch Protestant
pastor 
and eldest of six children. His favorite brother Theo was four years younger. When
Vincent was twelve to 
sixteen years old, he went to a boarding school. That next year he was sent to The Hague
to work for an 
uncle who was an art dealer, but van Gogh was unsuited for a business career. Actually,
his early interests 
were in literature and religion. Very dissatisfied with the way people made money and
imbued with a 
strong sense of mission, he worked for a while as a lay preacher among proverty-stricken
miners. Van 
Gogh represented the religious society that trained him in a poor coal-mining district in
Belgium. Vincent 
took his work so seriously that he went without food and other necessities so he could
give more to the 
poor. The missionary society objected to Vincent's behavior and fired him in 1879.
Heartsick, van Gogh 
struggled to keep going socially and fin!
ancially, yet he was always rejected by other people, and felt lost and forsaken. 
Then, in 1880, at age 27, he became obsessed with art. The intensity he had for religion,
he now focused 
on art. His early drawings were crude but strong and full of feeling: It is a hard and a
difficult struggle to 
learn to draw well... I have worked like a slave .... His first paintings had been still
lifes and scenes of 
peasants at work. That which fills my head and heart must be expressed in drawings and in
pictures...I'm 
in a rage of work. 
In 1881, he moved to Etten. He very much liked pictures of peasant life and labor.
Jean-Francois Millet 
was the first to paint this as a main theme and his works influenced van Gogh. His first
paintings here were 
crude but improving. Van Gogh's progress was interrupted by an intense love for his
widowed cousin Kee 
Vos. On her decisive rejection of him he pursued her to Amsterdam, only to suffer more
humiliation.
Anton Mauve, a leading member of the Hague school was a cousin of van Gogh's mother. This

opportunity to be taught by him encouraged van Gogh to settle in Den Hague with Theo's
support. When 
van Gogh left Den Hague in September 1883 for the northern fenland of Drenth, he did so
with mixed 
feelings. He spent hours wandering the countryside, making sketches of the landscape, but
began to feel 
isolated and concerned about the future. He had rented a little attic in a house but
found it melancholy, and 
was depressed with the quality of his equipment. Everything is too miserable, too
insufficient, too 
dilapidated. 
Physically and mentally unable to cope with these conditions any longer, he left for his
parents' new 
home in Nuenen in December 1883. Van Gogh had a phase in which he loved to paint birds
and bird's 
nests. This phase did not last long. It only lasted until his father's death six months
later. The Family 
Bible which he painted just before leaving his house for good, six months after his
father's death in 1885, 
must have meant a great deal to him. Van Gogh had broken with Christianity when he was
fired from the 
missionary which proved to be the most painful experience of his life, and one from which
he never quite 
recovered. 
At Nuenen, van Gogh gave active physical toil a remarkable reality. It's impact went far
beyond what 
the realist Gustave Corbet had achieved and beyond even the quasi-religious images of
Jean-Francois 
Millet. He made a number of studies of peasant hands and heads before embarking on what
would be his 
most important work at Nuenen. The pinnacle of his work in Holland was The Potato Eaters,
a scene 
painted in April 1885 that shows the working day to be over. It was the last and most
ambitious painting of 
his pre-Impressionist period, 1880-1885. When van Gogh painted the The Potato Eaters, he
had not yet 
discovered the importance of color. 
Van Gogh went to Antwerp in November 1885, partly to escape local gossip. 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 
acute 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. 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 him in his use of harmonized color.
Van Gogh pinned 
them on his walls, and they appear in the background of some of his paintings. 
While refining his technique as 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 Cezanne, usually considered the most monstrous painter among
the outcasts, for 
Gauguin, under the combined influence of Cezanne and of the Orient; and for Seraut,
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 work by Delacroix (whom he
later said had 
more influence on him than the Impressionists) and by Pissaro, Cezanne, 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 the 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 ne!
w means at this command, he went to Arles in the south of France. It was there, between
1888 and 1889, 
that he produced his greatest pictures. 
While Cezanne 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, proto-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: 
Cezanne, 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, as well as Mile
Bernard who was a 
friend of van Gogh, all 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. 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. Later, in 1890, 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.
But 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 
St. Remy Hospital as a voluntary patient. Dr. Peyron interviewed him and entered in the
register that van 
Gogh Suffers from fits which last from fifteen days to a month. During these fits the
patient is victim to 
terrifying terrors and on several occasions has attempted to poison himself....During the
intervals between 
fits he is perfectly quiet and paints ardently. He was possibly having a seizure when he
threatened to kill 
Paul Gauguin. Since his death, investigators have come to feel that his fits were due to
epilepsy. 
Despairing of a cure and fearing !
he would no longer be able to paint, van Gogh committed suicide in July 1890. He felt
very deeply that art 
alone made his life worth living. 
We know a good deal about his inner life as a result of a massive, stirring and deeply
moving 
autobiography in the form of hundreds of letters written to his brother Theo. The letters
he sent to his 
brother include many eloquent descriptions of his choice of hues and the emotional
meaning he attached to 
them. 
In one of his letters to Theo he wrote the following:
I do not intend to spare myself, nor to avoid emotions or difficulties - I don't care
much whether I live 
a longer or shorter time...The world concerns me insofar as I feel a certain indebtedness
and duty toward 
it because I have walked this earth for thirty years, and, out of gratitude, want to
leave some 
souvenir in the shape of drawings and pictures - not made to please a certain taste in
art, but to express a 
sincere human feeling. 
I feel that he succeeded.