Through a Glass, Darkly
by Phyllis Tuchman
AUGUST 19, 2010 TAGS:
In the weeks preceding his suicide at age 37, Vincent van Gogh seemed upbeat. In letters he wrote in French to his younger brother Theo, an art dealer, and in Dutch, to his mother and his youngest sister, Wil, he described the beauty of Auvers-sur-Oise, the village where he began renting a room on May 20, 1890. He mentioned how he routinely visited Paul Gachet, a local doctor and amateur artist who was monitoring his health. And, as the days passed uneventfully and the pictures he was making piled up, the artist asked his brother to send money as well as supplies, including canvas and tubes of zinc white, geranium lake, and other oil paints. In his correspondence, he included thumbnail sketches of his latest works, annotations regarding their colors, and, in some instances, explanations of what he hoped to achieve. Nothing suggested what would happen on July 29, 1890. Nothing seemed awry.
Twelve letters van Gogh sent to Theo between Tuesday May 20 and Wednesday July 23, as well as eight from his brother and a few from Paul Gauguin, a couple in Arles and some others, have survived. They are collected in the six newly translated and generously illustrated tomes published recently by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The artist’s vibrant personality is alive and immediate on every page, bringing back to us 120 years later his intellect, his verbal fluency, his energy, and his demons.
For van Gogh, Auvers resembled a rustic halfway house in Paradise. Having just left the asylum in Saint-Remy, the painter lived there on his own in “the heart of the countryside, distinctive and picturesque.” (All quotes are from volume 6 of Vincent van Gogh — The Letters.) As much as he might have preferred being situated in Paris, an hour away by train, he knew “all the noise there wasn’t what I need.”
From the beginning, van Gogh responded to Auvers’ charms. In his initial letter to Theo and sister-in-law Jo, he cited how the town is “really beautiful — among other things many old thatched roofs, which are becoming rare.” The next day, he added, “…the modern villas and the middle-class country houses [are] almost as pretty as the old thatched cottages...”
Needing supplies, partly because his trunk had not arrived, van Gogh asked his brother to send him 10 meters of canvas and 20 sheets of Ingres paper. “There’s a lot to draw here,” he explained. To stay facile, he also requested an exercise book with reproductions of classical statues by Charles Bargue (an amazing folio that helped teach even Pablo Picasso to draw).
There was plenty to paint around town, where Paul Cezanne and Camille Pissarro had preceded him — Gachet owned canvases they executed in Auvers in 1872-74. The widows of Charles Daubigny, a Barbizon School artist, and caricaturist Honoré Daumier still lived there. Unlike the more conventional landscapes of these painters, though, what van Gogh depicted was a pantheistic world. His juicy oil surfaces were covered with thick colored lines that conveyed how radiant late spring and early summer were that year.
Van Gogh painted so much work in such a short space of time, he seems to have gone indoors only to sleep, which he did every night at 9. “Lately,” he told Wil on June 13, “I’ve been working a lot and quickly; by doing so I’m trying to express the desperately swift passage of things in modern life.”
Between May 20, when he executed his first picture in Auvers of “old thatched roofs with a field of peas in flower and some wheat in the foreground, hilly background,” and July 23, his last surviving letter to Theo, van Gogh painted “wheat fields against the hills, large as a sea” as well as vineyards, chestnut trees in blossom, a road with a cypress and a star, a landscape at twilight, and a house under a night sky. The art came pouring out of him. He depicted a couple walking between rows of poplars, a thatched cottage with figures, Gachet’s garden and that of Daubigny. And there were canvases with an orchard in blossom, a field with poppies, a landscape with a carriage and a train.
Early on, he made a view of the local church – “…the building appears purplish against a sky of a deep and simple blue of pure cobalt, the stained-glass windows look like ultramarine blue patches, the roof is violet and in part orange. In the foreground a little flowery greenery and some sunny pink sand” – as well as of nearby sites such as a flag-bedecked town hall not mentioned in his correspondence. Today in Auvers placards with reproductions of van Gogh’s canvases are planted in front of the actual motifs so that tourists can compare what he depicted with what he saw.
Van Gogh also executed ravishing still-lifes. The colors of Irises in a Vase, Roses and Anemones in a Vase, and Wild Flowers in a Vase are so vivid and alluring, you can practically smell the original floral arrangements.
And, there are portraits, which he ranked among his significant works. Gachet, Gachet’s daughter Marguerite, and Adeline Ravoux, his landlords’ daughter, sat for him.
About this genre, van Gogh explained, “What I’m most passionate about, much much more than all the rest in my profession — is the portrait, the modern portrait. I seek it by way of color…. I would like to do portraits which would look like apparitions to people a century later. So I don’t try to do us by photographic resemblance but by our passionate expressions, using as a means of expression and intensification of the character our science and modern taste for color.”
In detail, the painter recounted how a portrait of his doctor “shows you a face the color of an overheated and sun scorched brick, with a reddish head of hair, a white cap, in surroundings of landscape, blue background of hills, his suit is ultramarine blue, this brings out the face and makes it paler…. Before him on a red garden table yellow novels and a dark purple foxglove flower.”
Yet amid this excitement much was amiss. Regarding Gachet, a widower, van Gogh never changed his initial impression. He thought the doctor was eccentric, even suspecting that he suffered from a nervous condition “as seriously as I am.” When he went to the Gachets for Sunday dinner, he complained that the doctor served too much food; and his house is “dark, dark, dark…”
Though van Gogh felt portraits merited special prominence, he painted very few while living in Auvers. Other than Gachet, he depicted the daughters of people he knew. Did he not make friends with anyone else? Why not? In his letters, he referred to some American artists. He also mentioned an Australian who painted in the fields with him and even asked Theo to look at his work, though van Gogh himself disliked it.
And other things bothered the artist. He seems to have agreed with Gauguin’s assessment, expressed on June 13, that they lived “in an era when art is a business regulated in advance by cold calculations.” He fretted that his newborn nephew, named for uncle Vincent, wasn’t well. He inquired frequently about Jo’s health. In mid-June, he was still waiting for his furniture to be shipped from Arles.
Surprisingly, van Gogh did not refer to his dismal living conditions. His attic room, which cost 3.5 francs a day, was not furnished — he paid extra for the bed. Why didn’t he mention that his room had no view? That it had no windows? What was it like day after day for this overly sensitive man to emerge from a pitch-black room, descend a few flights of stairs, and open a door to glaring, hot summer sunlight?
In early July, after he’d spent some time with his brother and sister-in-law, van Gogh admitted regretting he never married. As he approached 40, he didn’t think he would ever find a wife and he referred obliquely to missing the company of friends. About three large canvases he had just made, he wrote on July 10, “They’re immense sketches of wheat fields under turbulent skies and I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness.”
_-_Wheat_Field_with_Crows_(1890).jpg)
Sometime between July 10-14, as his brother’s family prepared to leave Paris for a week, van Gogh told his mother and sister that he felt calmer and experienced less turmoil these days. Nevertheless, he knew something was wrong: “I’m wholly in a mood of almost too much calm…”
When Theo returned to Paris on July 22, he referred to van Gogh’s last letter and his comments regarding a squabble he had witnessed between Jo and Theo. The art dealer said it was nothing. But he ominously added, “I’m a little afraid that there’s something that’s bothering you or that isn’t going right. In that case, do go and see Dr. Gachet, he’ll perhaps give you something that will buck you up again.”
The next day, in the last surviving correspondence between the brothers, van Gogh asked Theo to send some paint. A week later, with his brother at his bedside, van Gogh died. He’d shot himself two days earlier, and never recovered from the wound.
Given the nature and frequency of the posts between the brothers, it is astonishing that no letters from the last days of the artist’s life survive. Were they destroyed? After all, van Gogh always acknowledged when money or tubes of oil colors arrived. But no letter records the last shipment. Then, too, he never referred to owning a gun or knowing someone who did.
The only hint we get at his state of mind appears in something he wrote to his mother on June 13. Knowing what will happen, we recognize the ominous thoughts. “For me life might well remain solitary,” he stated. “I haven’t perceived those to whom I’ve been most attached other than through a glass, darkly.”
Phyllis Tuchman writes about art and artists for Obit.
Twelve letters van Gogh sent to Theo between Tuesday May 20 and Wednesday July 23, as well as eight from his brother and a few from Paul Gauguin, a couple in Arles and some others, have survived. They are collected in the six newly translated and generously illustrated tomes published recently by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The artist’s vibrant personality is alive and immediate on every page, bringing back to us 120 years later his intellect, his verbal fluency, his energy, and his demons. For van Gogh, Auvers resembled a rustic halfway house in Paradise. Having just left the asylum in Saint-Remy, the painter lived there on his own in “the heart of the countryside, distinctive and picturesque.” (All quotes are from volume 6 of Vincent van Gogh — The Letters.) As much as he might have preferred being situated in Paris, an hour away by train, he knew “all the noise there wasn’t what I need.”
From the beginning, van Gogh responded to Auvers’ charms. In his initial letter to Theo and sister-in-law Jo, he cited how the town is “really beautiful — among other things many old thatched roofs, which are becoming rare.” The next day, he added, “…the modern villas and the middle-class country houses [are] almost as pretty as the old thatched cottages...”
Needing supplies, partly because his trunk had not arrived, van Gogh asked his brother to send him 10 meters of canvas and 20 sheets of Ingres paper. “There’s a lot to draw here,” he explained. To stay facile, he also requested an exercise book with reproductions of classical statues by Charles Bargue (an amazing folio that helped teach even Pablo Picasso to draw).
There was plenty to paint around town, where Paul Cezanne and Camille Pissarro had preceded him — Gachet owned canvases they executed in Auvers in 1872-74. The widows of Charles Daubigny, a Barbizon School artist, and caricaturist Honoré Daumier still lived there. Unlike the more conventional landscapes of these painters, though, what van Gogh depicted was a pantheistic world. His juicy oil surfaces were covered with thick colored lines that conveyed how radiant late spring and early summer were that year.
Van Gogh painted so much work in such a short space of time, he seems to have gone indoors only to sleep, which he did every night at 9. “Lately,” he told Wil on June 13, “I’ve been working a lot and quickly; by doing so I’m trying to express the desperately swift passage of things in modern life.”
Between May 20, when he executed his first picture in Auvers of “old thatched roofs with a field of peas in flower and some wheat in the foreground, hilly background,” and July 23, his last surviving letter to Theo, van Gogh painted “wheat fields against the hills, large as a sea” as well as vineyards, chestnut trees in blossom, a road with a cypress and a star, a landscape at twilight, and a house under a night sky. The art came pouring out of him. He depicted a couple walking between rows of poplars, a thatched cottage with figures, Gachet’s garden and that of Daubigny. And there were canvases with an orchard in blossom, a field with poppies, a landscape with a carriage and a train.
Early on, he made a view of the local church – “…the building appears purplish against a sky of a deep and simple blue of pure cobalt, the stained-glass windows look like ultramarine blue patches, the roof is violet and in part orange. In the foreground a little flowery greenery and some sunny pink sand” – as well as of nearby sites such as a flag-bedecked town hall not mentioned in his correspondence. Today in Auvers placards with reproductions of van Gogh’s canvases are planted in front of the actual motifs so that tourists can compare what he depicted with what he saw.
Van Gogh also executed ravishing still-lifes. The colors of Irises in a Vase, Roses and Anemones in a Vase, and Wild Flowers in a Vase are so vivid and alluring, you can practically smell the original floral arrangements. And, there are portraits, which he ranked among his significant works. Gachet, Gachet’s daughter Marguerite, and Adeline Ravoux, his landlords’ daughter, sat for him.
About this genre, van Gogh explained, “What I’m most passionate about, much much more than all the rest in my profession — is the portrait, the modern portrait. I seek it by way of color…. I would like to do portraits which would look like apparitions to people a century later. So I don’t try to do us by photographic resemblance but by our passionate expressions, using as a means of expression and intensification of the character our science and modern taste for color.”
In detail, the painter recounted how a portrait of his doctor “shows you a face the color of an overheated and sun scorched brick, with a reddish head of hair, a white cap, in surroundings of landscape, blue background of hills, his suit is ultramarine blue, this brings out the face and makes it paler…. Before him on a red garden table yellow novels and a dark purple foxglove flower.”
Yet amid this excitement much was amiss. Regarding Gachet, a widower, van Gogh never changed his initial impression. He thought the doctor was eccentric, even suspecting that he suffered from a nervous condition “as seriously as I am.” When he went to the Gachets for Sunday dinner, he complained that the doctor served too much food; and his house is “dark, dark, dark…”
Though van Gogh felt portraits merited special prominence, he painted very few while living in Auvers. Other than Gachet, he depicted the daughters of people he knew. Did he not make friends with anyone else? Why not? In his letters, he referred to some American artists. He also mentioned an Australian who painted in the fields with him and even asked Theo to look at his work, though van Gogh himself disliked it.
And other things bothered the artist. He seems to have agreed with Gauguin’s assessment, expressed on June 13, that they lived “in an era when art is a business regulated in advance by cold calculations.” He fretted that his newborn nephew, named for uncle Vincent, wasn’t well. He inquired frequently about Jo’s health. In mid-June, he was still waiting for his furniture to be shipped from Arles.
Surprisingly, van Gogh did not refer to his dismal living conditions. His attic room, which cost 3.5 francs a day, was not furnished — he paid extra for the bed. Why didn’t he mention that his room had no view? That it had no windows? What was it like day after day for this overly sensitive man to emerge from a pitch-black room, descend a few flights of stairs, and open a door to glaring, hot summer sunlight?
In early July, after he’d spent some time with his brother and sister-in-law, van Gogh admitted regretting he never married. As he approached 40, he didn’t think he would ever find a wife and he referred obliquely to missing the company of friends. About three large canvases he had just made, he wrote on July 10, “They’re immense sketches of wheat fields under turbulent skies and I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness.”
Sometime between July 10-14, as his brother’s family prepared to leave Paris for a week, van Gogh told his mother and sister that he felt calmer and experienced less turmoil these days. Nevertheless, he knew something was wrong: “I’m wholly in a mood of almost too much calm…”
When Theo returned to Paris on July 22, he referred to van Gogh’s last letter and his comments regarding a squabble he had witnessed between Jo and Theo. The art dealer said it was nothing. But he ominously added, “I’m a little afraid that there’s something that’s bothering you or that isn’t going right. In that case, do go and see Dr. Gachet, he’ll perhaps give you something that will buck you up again.”
The next day, in the last surviving correspondence between the brothers, van Gogh asked Theo to send some paint. A week later, with his brother at his bedside, van Gogh died. He’d shot himself two days earlier, and never recovered from the wound.
Given the nature and frequency of the posts between the brothers, it is astonishing that no letters from the last days of the artist’s life survive. Were they destroyed? After all, van Gogh always acknowledged when money or tubes of oil colors arrived. But no letter records the last shipment. Then, too, he never referred to owning a gun or knowing someone who did.
The only hint we get at his state of mind appears in something he wrote to his mother on June 13. Knowing what will happen, we recognize the ominous thoughts. “For me life might well remain solitary,” he stated. “I haven’t perceived those to whom I’ve been most attached other than through a glass, darkly.”
Phyllis Tuchman writes about art and artists for Obit.
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