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By Paul Dunwell, writing for EasyFrame
© Copyright EasyFrame 2021
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born to a preacher, Theodorus van Gogh, and to Anna Cornelia Carbentus, who came from a well-to-do family. He has come to personify the misunderstood, underachieving artist. He started several careers and bungled all of them, wrecked his health, was rarely happy with anything or anybody, was constantly broke and relied on his little brother even for his art materials. He supposedly sold only one painting of the thousands of works he made (and that to a friend's sister), and he was so unwell that he cut off his own ear and died at just 37.
Actually he sold 19 cityscapes of The Hague, commissioned by his uncle Cor, an art dealer. He bartered away others for food and drink. So don't believe everything you read. Yet most of the awful stories about Van Gogh are, it seems, depressingly true.
On the bright side, he is the Post-Impressionist we all remember, the one who has inspired everything from pop songs, notably Don McLean's 'Vincent', to a 600-drone tribute in China in 2021. A portrait he painted in the last year of his life, of the homeopathic doctor he relied on, sold for US.5 million back in 1990, which would be around US0 million now.
By one reckoning at the time of writing, his work accounts for about a tenth of the hundred most expensive paintings ever sold. The list includes his portrait of Joseph Roulin, 'Irises', a beardless self-portrait, 'Wheatfield with Cypresses', 'Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers', 'Wheat Fields', 'Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat' and the pair called 'Les Alyscamps'. Those are less than half a percent of what he produced. One portrait, of Félix Rey, was so disliked by its sitter that it was used to repair a chicken coop. In a sense Van Gogh redefined heroic failure.
Van Gogh was raised in Zundert, in the south of the Netherlands, in a family full of church ministers and art dealers. He was not a happy child, though his mother encouraged him in art, and being sent to boarding school did not help. When he complained, his parents moved him to another. There he was taught art by Constant Cornelis Huijsmans, who had been a successful artist in Paris and who cared more about capturing an impression of the subject than about technique, the thinking that would underpin Impressionism.
Van Gogh went home at 15. At 16 his uncle got him into a Dutch art dealership, which trained him and then packed him off to its London branch. He wasn't stupid. He spoke Dutch, English, French and German, and by 20 he was earning more than his father, who could afford maids, a cook and a gardener. The world was his oyster, you'd have thought. But he wasn't happy. An unrequited love made things worse. Then he griped that his employers were too mercenary and got himself fired.
A spell as an unpaid teacher didn't work out either. He then went through religious training, as if following his father, but repeatedly failed the exams. As a missionary he upset the church, which accused him of 'undermining the dignity of the priesthood', by giving up the nice lodgings it had provided, letting homeless people move in, and sleeping on straw in a small hut. Heaven forbid!
In 1880 he went to study anatomy and perspective at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. That was only a decade before his death, so at 27, in what turned out to be the twilight of his life, he had found his true calling. His mental health was already being questioned by his father and others, which can hardly have helped it. He returned to formal study when he seemed more stable, but had almighty rows with several teachers, one of whom dared to correct his drawing with a crayon and tore it. He walked off and never went back, because the academy insisted he repeat a year.
His first failure in love, in London, may have come about because he was rather too serious and turning into something of a religious zealot. The lady in question seems to have been secretly engaged already. Later objects of his affection, a cousin among them, spurned him as a man who could not support himself. What may have been his best relationship was with Sien Hoornik, a woman who had worked as a prostitute and with whom he enjoyed something like family life for a short time.
His way of living damaged his health. He caught at least one venereal disease, for which there was no good treatment then, and with his morally upright family that would have left him open to guilt and depression. He was working too hard and not eating properly. He gave up meat and lived on bread, coffee, tobacco and alcohol.
He became psychotic and delusional, hearing voices and suffering hallucinations and seizures. At times he was threatening, certainly towards Gauguin. A still-unexplained row between them led to Van Gogh cutting off his own ear and giving it to a young woman at a brothel (one theory has it that Gauguin did it and Van Gogh covered for him). At one point the locals got up a petition and had him evicted from his home. Understandably, he began to spend time in mental institutions. Even there he was creative: in one he painted 'The Starry Night'.
Van Gogh's brother Theo, also an art dealer, always stuck by him (they are buried side by side), and their huge exchange of letters is famous. They lived together in Paris for a while after Vincent quit the academy, which seemed to steady him, though Theo found his big brother hard to live with. His sister Willemina was there for him too. A cousin by marriage, Anton Mauve, himself an artist, gave some help. And no doubt the poor he gave his lodgings to, and the poor he hired as models, appreciated him as well.
Van Gogh was influenced by Paul Gauguin, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-François Millet, Rembrandt van Rijn, Gustave Doré, Émile Bernard, Peter Paul Rubens, Louis Anquetin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and John Russell (who both painted him), Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet and Japanese prints, especially those of Hiroshige.
He in turn influenced Francis Bacon, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, Tom Thomson, Maurice de Vlaminck, Pat Steir and Brad Kahlhamer, among many others.
Van Gogh preferred to paint portraits, still lifes and landscapes. You can see that he switched quite abruptly from a subdued palette to a far more daring use of colour, and Delacroix may have been the influence behind the change.
It has often been suggested that Van Gogh was colour blind. The latest medical opinion is that he wasn't, though several other well-known artists are thought to have been.
The story has always been that Van Gogh took his own life. He died of a gunshot wound to the chest. There is another possibility: that he was shot by a young man who had been winding him up, and that he kept quiet rather than see his assailant charged. Either way, he survived the shooting and walked home, but treatment was delayed, infection set in, and he died a couple of days later.
Vincent van Gogh was a timeless and colourful genius. He may not have been appreciated in his day, but for many he will never be rivalled.
You can buy unframed prints of his work easily and affordably. One source is the National Gallery at www.nationalgallery.co.uk/products/vincent-van-gogh.
You'll want to frame whatever you buy. Any good framers will show you a range of solutions and advise on what suits the work and where it will hang. EasyFrame is on 01234 856 501 and sales@EasyFrame.co.uk, and they'll always chat even if you don't want to buy!
Article Posted: 07/05/2021 11:01:18