Noon Rest from Work - Van Gogh
Noon Rest from Work - Van Gogh
(1853-1890), Dutch postimpressionist painter,
whose work represents the archetype of
expressionism, the idea of emotional spontaneity
in painting.
Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in
Groot-Zundert, son of a Dutch Protestant pastor.
Early in life he displayed a moody, restless
temperament that was to thwart his every
pursuit. By the age of 27 he had been in turn a
salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a
theological student, and an evangelist among the
miners at Wasmes in Belgium. His experiences as
a preacher are reflected in his first paintings
of peasants and potato diggers; of these early
works, the best known is the rough, earthy
Potato Eaters (1885, Rijksmuseum Vincent van
Gogh, Amsterdam). Dark and somber, sometimes
crude, these early works evidence van Gogh's
intense desire to express the misery and poverty
of humanity as he saw it among the miners in
Belgium.
In 1886 van Gogh went to Paris to live with his
brother, a paintings dealer, and became familiar with
the new art movements developing at the time.
Influenced by the work of the impressionists
(see IMPRESSIONISM) and by the work of such
Japanese printmakers as Hiroshige and Hokusai,
van Gogh began to experiment with current
techniques (see UKIYO-E). Subsequently, he
adopted the brilliant hues found in the
paintings of the French artists Camille Pissarro
and Georges Seurat.
In 1888 van Gogh left Paris for southern France,
where, under the burning sun of Provence, he
painted scenes of the fields, cypress trees,
peasants, and rustic life characteristic of the
region. During this period, living at Arles, he
began to use the swirling brush strokes and
intense yellows, greens, and blues associated
with such typical works as Bedroom at Arles
(1888, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), and Starry
Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York
City).
For van Gogh all visible
phenomena, whether he painted or drew them,
seemed to be endowed with a physical and
spiritual vitality. In his enthusiasm he induced
the painter Paul Gauguin, whom he had met
earlier in Paris, to join him. After less than
two months they began to have violent
disagreements, culminating in a quarrel in which
van Gogh wildly threatened Gauguin with a razor;
the same night, in deep remorse, van Gogh cut
off part of his own ear. For a time he was in a
hospital at Arles. He then spent a year in the
nearby asylum of Saint-Ray,
working between repeated spells of madness.
Under the care of a sympathetic doctor, whose
portrait he painted (Dr. Gachet, 1890, Louvre,
Paris), van Gogh spent three months at Auvers.
Just after completing his ominous Crows in the
Wheatfields (1890, Rijksmuseum Vincent van
Gogh), he shot himself on July 27, 1890, and
died two days later.
The more than 700 letters that van Gogh wrote to
his brother The
(published 1911, translated 1958) constitute a
remarkably illuminating record of the life of an
artist and a thorough documentation of his
unusually fertile output—about 750 paintings and
1600 drawings. The French painter Chaim Soutine,
and the German painters Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, owe more to van
Gogh than to any other single source. In 1973
the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, containing
over 1000 paintings, sketches, and letters, was
opened in Amsterdam.
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