Vincent van Gogh
life
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, a village close to Breda, in the predominantly Catholic province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands. He was the oldest surviving child of Theodorus van Gogh, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. Vincent was given the name of his grandfather, and of a brother stillborn exactly a year before his birth. The practice of reusing a name was not unusual. Vincent was a common name in the Van Gogh family: his grandfather, Vincent (1789–1874), received his degree of theology at the University of Leiden in 1811. Grandfather Vincent had six sons, three of whom became art dealers. Grandfather Vincent had perhaps been named in turn after his own father's uncle, the sculptor Vincent van Gogh (1729–1802). The Van Gogh family tended to gravitate towards art and religion.
His brother Theo was born on 1 May 1857. He had another brother, Cor, and three sisters: Elisabeth, Anna, and Willemina "Wil". Vincent was a serious and thoughtful child. He attended the village school at Zundert from 1860, where a single Catholic teacher taught around 200 pupils. From 1861, he and his sister Anna were taught at home by a governess, until 1 October 1864, when he was placed in Jan Provily's boarding school at Zevenbergen about 20 miles (32 km) away. He was distressed to leave his family home. On 15 September 1866, he went to the new middle school, Willem II College in Tilburg. Constantijn C. Huysmans, a successful artist in Paris, taught Van Gogh to draw at the school and advocated a systematic approach to the subject. Vincent's interest in art began at an early age. He began to draw as a child and continued making drawings throughout the years leading to his decision to become an artist. Though well-done and expressive, his early drawings do not approach the intensity he developed in his later work. In March 1868, Van Gogh abruptly returned home. In a 1883 letter to Theo he wrote, "My youth was gloomy and cold and sterile."
In July 1869, his uncle Cent helped him obtain a position with the art dealer Goupil & Cie in The Hague. After his training, in June 1873, Goupil transferred him to London, where he lodged at 87 Hackford Road, Brixton, and worked at Messrs. Goupil & Co., 17 Southampton Street. This was a happy time for Vincent; he was successful at work and at 20, earning more than his father. Theo's wife later remarked that this was the best year of his life. He fell in love with his landlady's daughter, Eugénie Loyer, but was rejected when he confessed his feelings; she said she was secretly engaged to a former lodger. Vincent grew further isolated and fervent about religion; his father and uncle arranged for his transfer to Paris where he grew resentful at how art was treated as a commodity, a fact he believed apparent to customers. On 1 April 1876, Goupil terminated his employment.
Van Gogh moved to England for unpaid work as a supply teacher in a small boarding school in Ramsgate. When the proprietor relocated to Isleworth, Middlesex, Van Gogh moved with him, taking the train to Richmond and the remainder of the journey on foot. The arrangement did not work out and he left to become a Methodist minister's assistant, following his wish to "preach the gospel everywhere". At Christmas, he returned home and for six months took work at a bookshop in Dordrecht. He was unhappy in the position and spent his time either doodling or translating passages from the Bible into English, French and German. According to his roommate of the time, a young teacher named Görlitz, Van Gogh ate frugally, and preferred not to eat meat. To support his new found religious conviction and efforts to become a pastor, his family sent him to Amsterdam to study theology in May 1877. There he stayed with his uncle Jan van Gogh, a naval Vice Admiral. Vincent prepared for the entrance exam with his uncle Johannes Stricker, a respected theologian. He failed the exam, and left his uncle Jan's house in July 1878. He then undertook but failed, a three-month course at the Vlaamsche Opleidingsschool, a Protestant missionary school in Laeken, near Brussels.
Van Gogh's home in Cuesmes in 1880; while there he decided to become an artist
In January 1879, he took a temporary post as a missionary in the village of Petit Wasmes in the coal-mining district of Borinage in Belgium at Charbonnage de Marcasse, Van Gogh lived like those he preached to, sleeping on straw in a small hut at the back of the baker's house where he was staying. The baker's wife reported hearing Van Gogh sobbing at night in the hut. His choice of squalid living conditions did not endear him to the appalled church authorities, who dismissed him for "undermining the dignity of the priesthood". He then walked to Brussels, returned briefly to the village of Cuesmes in the Borinage, but gave in to pressure from his parents to return home to Etten. He stayed there until around March the following year, a cause of increasing concern and frustration for his parents. There was particular conflict between Vincent and his father, who made inquiries about having Vincent committed to the lunatic asylum at Geel.
He moved back to Cuesmes lodging with miner Charles Decrucq until October. He was interested in the people and scenes around him and recorded his time there in his drawings, following Theo's suggestion that he take up art in earnest. He traveled to Brussels that autumn, to follow Theo's recommendation to study with the prominent Dutch artist Willem Roelofs, who persuaded him—in spite of his aversion to formal schools of art—to attend the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he registered on 15 November 1880. At the Académie, he studied anatomy and the standard rules of modeling and perspective, about which he said, "you have to know just to be able to draw the least thing." Van Gogh aspired to become an artist in God's service, stating: "to try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another in a picture."
Van Gogh's parents moved to the Etten countryside in April 1881. He continued to draw, often using neighbors as subjects. During the first summer, he took long walks with his recently widowed cousin, Kee Vos-Stricker, daughter of his mother's older sister and Johannes Stricker. Kee was seven years older and had an eight-year-old son. He proposed marriage but was refused with the words "No, nay, never" ("nooit, neen, nimmer"). Late that November, Van Gogh wrote a strongly worded letter to Johannes, and left for Amsterdam but through letters maintained close contact. Kee would not meet him, her parents wrote that his "persistence is disgusting." In desperation, he held his left hand in the flame of a lamp, with the words: "Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame." He did not recall the event well, but later assumed that his uncle blew out the flame. Kee's father made it clear to him that Kee's refusal should be heeded and that the two would not be married because of Van Gogh's inability to support himself. Van Gogh's perception of his uncle and former tutor's hypocrisy affected him deeply and put an end to his religious faith forever. That Christmas, he refused to attend church, quarreling violently with his father as a result and leading him to leave home the same day for The Hague.
He settled in The Hague in January 1882, where he visited his cousin-in-law, Anton Mauve. Mauve introduced him to painting in oil and watercolor and lent money to set up a studio, but they fell out, possibly over the viability of drawing from plaster casts. Van Gogh's uncle Cornelis, an art dealer, commissioned 12 ink drawings of views of the city which Van Gogh completed soon after arriving in the city, along with seven other drawings that May. In June he suffered a bout of gonorrhea and spent three weeks in hospital, but that summer began to paint in oil.
Mauve appears to have suddenly gone cold towards Van Gogh and stopped returning of his letters. He supposed that Mauve had learned of his new domestic arrangement with an alcoholic prostitute, Clasina Maria "Sien" Hoornik (1850–1904), and her young daughter. He had met Sien towards the end of January, when she had a five-year-old daughter and was pregnant. She had already borne two children who died, although Van Gogh was unaware of this; and on 2 July, she gave birth to a baby boy, Willem. When Van Gogh's father discovered the details of their relationship, he put pressure on his son to abandon Sien and her children, although Vincent at first defied him. Vincent considered moving the family out of the city, but in the autumn of 1883 left Sien and the two children. Perhaps lack of money pushed Sien back into prostitution; the home became less happy while Van Gogh may have felt family life was irreconcilable with his artistic development. When he left, Sien gave her daughter to her mother and baby Willem to her brother. She then moved to Delft, and later to Antwerp.
In Nuenen, Van Gogh devoted himself to drawing and gave money to boys to bring him birds' nests for subject matter for paintings, and he made many sketches and paintings of weavers in their cottages In autumn 1884, Margot Begemann, a neighbor's daughter and ten years his senior, often joined him on his painting forays. She fell in love, and he reciprocated – though less enthusiastically. They decided to marry, but the idea was opposed by both families. As a result, Margot took an overdose of strychnine. She was saved when Van Gogh rushed her to a nearby hospital. On 26 March 1885, his father died of a heart attack, and he grieved deeply at the loss.
For the first time there was interest from Paris in his work. That spring he completed what is generally considered his first major work, The Potato Eaters, the culmination of several years work painting peasant character studies. In August 1885, his work was first exhibited in the windows of the paint dealer Leurs in The Hague. After one of his young peasant sitters became pregnant that September, Van Gogh was accused of forcing himself upon her and the Catholic village priest forbade parishioners from modeling for him.
He painted several groups of still-life paintings in 1885; Still-Life with Straw Hat and Pipe and Still-life with Earthen Pot and Clogs are characterized by smooth, meticulous brushwork and fine shading of colors. During his two-year stay in Nuenen, he completed numerous drawings and watercolors and nearly 200 oil paintings. His palette consisted mainly of somber earth tones, particularly dark brown, but showed no sign of developing the vivid coloration that distinguishes his later work. When he complained that Theo was not making enough effort to sell his paintings in Paris, his brother responded that the paintings were too dark and not in line with the current style of bright Impressionist paintings. He moved to Antwerp in November 1885, where he rented a small room above a paint dealer's shop in the Rue des Images (Lange Beeldekensstraat). He lived in poverty and ate poorly, preferring to spend money Theo sent on painting materials and models. Bread, coffee and tobacco were his staple intake. In February 1886, he wrote to Theo saying that he could only remember eating six hot meals since May of the previous year. His teeth became loose and painful. In Antwerp he applied himself to the study of color theory and spent time in museums, particularly studying the work of Peter Paul Rubens, gaining encouragement to broaden his palette to carmine, cobalt and emerald green. He bought Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts in the docklands, and incorporated their style into the background of some of his paintings.
Van Gogh began to drink absinthe heavily. He was treated by Dr. Amadeus Cavenaile, whose practice was near the docklands, possibly for syphilis; the treatment of alum irrigation and sitz baths was jotted down by Van Gogh in one of his notebooks. Despite his rejection of academic teaching, he took the higher-level admission exams at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and, in January 1886, matriculated in painting and drawing. For most of February, he was ill and run down by overwork, a poor diet, and excessive smoking.
Van Gogh traveled to Paris in March 1886, where he shared Theo's Rue Laval apartment on Montmartre, to study at Fernand Cormon's studio. In June, they took a larger apartment at 54 Rue Lepic. Because they had no need to write letters to communicate, little is known about this stay in Paris. In Paris, he painted portraits of friends and acquaintances, still-life paintings, views of Le Moulin de la Galette, scenes in Montmartre, Asnières, and along the Seine. During his stay he collected more Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints; he became interested in Japonaiserie when, in 1885 in Antwerp, he used them to decorate the walls of his studio. He collected hundreds of prints, examples are visible in the backgrounds of several of his paintings; several can be seen hanging on the wall of his 1887 Portrait of Père Tanguy. In The Courtesan or Oiran (after Kesai Eisen) (1887), Van Gogh traced the figure from a reproduction on the cover of the magazine Paris Illustre, which he then graphically enlarged in the painting. His 1888 Plum Tree in Blossom (After Hiroshige) is a vivid example of the admiration he had for the prints he collected. His version is slightly bolder than Hiroshige's original.
After seeing Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli at the Galerie Delareybarette Van Gogh adopted a brighter palette and a bolder attack, particularly in paintings such as his Seascape at Saintes-Maries (1888). Two years later, Vincent and Theo paid for the publication of a book on Monticelli paintings, and Vincent bought some of his works, to add to his collection.
For months, Van Gogh worked at Cormon's studio, where he frequented the circle of the British-Australian artist John Peter Russell, and met fellow students like Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – who painted a portrait of Van Gogh with pastel. The group congregated at Julien "Père" Tanguy's paint store (which was, at that time, the only place where Paul Cézanne's paintings were displayed). He had easy access to Impressionist works in Paris at the time. In 1886, two large vanguard exhibitions were staged; shows where Neo-Impressionism was first exhibited, bringing attention to Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Though Theo kept a stock of Impressionist paintings in his gallery on Boulevard Montmartre, Van Gogh seemingly had problems acknowledging developments in how artists view and paint their subject matter.
Conflicts arose between the brothers. At the end of 1886, Theo found that living with Vincent was "almost unbearable". By the spring of 1887, they were again at peace, although Van Gogh moved to Asnières, a northwestern suburb of Paris, where he became acquainted with Signac. With Émile Bernard, he adopted elements of Pointillism, a technique in which a multitude of small colored dots are applied to the canvas such that—when seen from a distance—they create an optical blend of hues. The style stresses the value of complementary colors—including blue and orange—to form vibrant contrasts that are enhanced when juxtaposed.
While in Asnières, he painted parks and restaurants and the Seine, including Bridges across the Seine at Asnieres. In November 1887, Theo and Vincent befriended Paul Gauguin who had just arrived in Paris. Towards the end of the year, Vincent arranged an exhibition alongside Bernard, Anquetin, and probably Toulouse-Lautrec, at the Grand-Bouillon Restaurant du Chalet, 43 Avenue de Clichy, Montmartre. In a contemporary account, Émile Bernard wrote: "On the avenue de Clichy a new restaurant was opened. Vincent used to eat there. He proposed to the manager that an exhibition be held there .... Canvases by Anquetin, by Lautrec, by Koning ...filled the hall....It really had the impact of something new; it was more modern than anything that was made in Paris at that moment." There Bernard and Anquetin sold their first paintings, and Van Gogh exchanged work with Gauguin, who soon departed to Pont-Aven. Discussions on art, artists, and their social situations that started during this exhibition continued and expanded to include visitors to the show, like Pissarro and his son Lucien, Signac, and Seurat. Finally, in February 1888, feeling worn out from life in Paris, Vincent left, having painted over 200 paintings during his two years in the city. Only hours before his departure, accompanied by Theo, he paid his first and only visit to Seurat in his atelier (studio).
Ill from drink and suffering from smoker's cough Van Gogh moved to take refuge in Arles. He arrived on 21 February 1888, and took room at the Hôtel-Restaurant Carrel, which he had expected to look like a Hokusai (1760–1849) or Utamaro's (1753–1806) print. He seems to have moved to the town with thoughts of founding a utopian art colony. The Danish artist Christian Mourier-Petersen (1858–1945) became his companion for two months, and at first Arles appeared exotic and filthy. In a letter, he described it as a foreign country: "The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes going to their First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world." Van Gogh was enchanted by the local landscape and light and his works from this period are richly draped in yellow, ultramarine, and mauve. His portrayals of the Arles landscape are informed by his Dutch upbringing; the patchwork of fields and avenues appear flat and lacking perspective, but excel in their colorisation. The light in Arles excited him, and his newfound appreciation is seen in the range and scope of his work. That March he painted landscapes using a gridded "perspective frame"; three of these paintings were shown at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In April, he was visited by the American artist Dodge MacKnight, who was living nearby at Fontvieille. On 1 May, he signed a lease for 15 francs per month in the eastern wing of the Yellow House at No. 2 Place Lamartine. The rooms were unfurnished and uninhabited for some time. He was still living at the Hôtel Restaurant Carrel, but found the rate of 5 francs a week excessive. He argued over the price, brought it to a local arbitrator, and was awarded a twelve franc reduction on the bill.
He moved from the Hôtel Carrel to the Café de la Gare on 7 May, where he befriended the proprietors, Joseph and Marie Ginoux. Although the Yellow House had to be furnished before he could fully move in, Van Gogh was able to utilize it as a studio. Hoping to have a gallery to display his work, his project at this time was a series of paintings including Van Gogh's Chair (1888), Bedroom in Arles (1888), The Night Café (1888), Cafe Terrace at Night (September 1888), Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888), and Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (1888), all intended to form the décoration for the Yellow House. Van Gogh wrote about The Night Café: "I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime."
When Gauguin agreed to visit Arles, Van Gogh hoped for friendship, and the realization of his utopian idea of an artists collective. That August he painted sunflowers. When Boch visited again, Van Gogh painted a portrait of him, as well as the study The Poet Against a Starry Sky. Boch's sister Anna (1848–1936), also an artist, purchased The Red Vineyard in 1890. In preparation for Gauguin's visit, Van Gogh bought two beds on advice from his friend the station's postal supervisor Joseph Roulin, whose portrait he painted, and on 17 September spent the first night in the still sparsely furnished Yellow House. When Gauguin consented to work and live side-by-side in Arles with Van Gogh, he started to work on The Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most ambitious effort he ever undertook. Van Gogh completed two chair paintings: Van Gogh's Chair and Gauguin's Chair.
Gauguin, after much pleading, finally arrived in Arles on 23 October. That November, the two finally painted together. Gauguin depicted Van Gogh in his The Painter of Sunflowers: Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, while, uncharacteristically, Van Gogh painted pictures from memory (deferring to Gauguin's ideas) and his The Red Vineyard. Notable amongst these "imaginative" paintings is Memory of the Garden at Etten. Their first joint outdoor venture was at the Alyscamps, when they produced Les Alyscamps.
They visited Montpellier that December, where they saw works by Courbet and Delacroix in the Musée Fabre. However, their relationship began to deteriorate. Van Gogh admired Gauguin and desperately wanted to be treated as his equal, but Gauguin was arrogant and domineering, something that often frustrated Van Gogh. They quarreled about art; Van Gogh increasingly feared that Gauguin was going to desert him, and the situation, which Van Gogh described as one of "excessive tension," rapidly headed towards a crisis point.
The exact sequence of events that led to Van Gogh's removal of his ear is not known. The only account attesting a supposed earlier razor attack on Gauguin comes from Gauguin himself some fifteen years later, and biographers agree this account must be considered unreliable and self-serving. However, it does seem likely that, by 23 December 1888, Van Gogh had realized that Gauguin was proposing to leave and that there had been some kind of contretemps between the two. That evening, Van Gogh severed his left ear (either wholly or in part; accounts differ) with a razor, inducing a severe haemorrhage. He bandaged his wound, wrapped the ear in paper, and delivered the package to a brothel frequented by both him and Gauguin, before returning home and collapsing. He was found unconscious the next day by the police and taken to the hospital. The local newspaper reported that Van Gogh had given the ear to a prostitute with an instruction to guard it carefully.
Gauguin's account implies that Van Gogh left his ear with the doorman as a memento for Gauguin. Van Gogh himself had no recollection of these events, and it is plain that he had suffered an acute psychotic episode. Family letters of the time make it clear that the event had not been unexpected. He had suffered a nervous collapse in Antwerp some three years before, and as early as 1880 his father had proposed committing him to an asylum (at Gheel). The hospital diagnosis was "generalized delirium", and within a few days Van Gogh was sectioned.
Limited access to the world outside the clinic resulted in a shortage of subject matter. He was left to work on interpretations of other artist's paintings, such as Millet's The Sower and Noon – Rest from Work (after Millet), as well as variations on his own earlier work. Van Gogh was an admirer of the Realism of Jules Breton, Gustave Courbet, and Millet, and he compared his copies to a musician's interpreting Beethoven. His The Round of the Prisoners (1890) was painted after an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883). It is suggested that the face of the prisoner in the center of the painting and looking toward the viewer is Van Gogh himself, although the noted Van Gogh scholar Jan Hulsker discounts this. During the initial few days of his treatment, Van Gogh repeatedly asked for Gauguin, but Gauguin stayed away. Gauguin told one of the policeman attending the case, "Be kind enough, Monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal for him." Gauguin wrote of Van Gogh, "His state is worse, he wants to sleep with the patients, chase the nurses, and washes himself in the coal bucket. That is to say, he continues the biblical mortifications." Theo was notified by Gauguin and visited, as did both Madame Ginoux and Roulin. Gauguin left Arles never to see Van Gogh again.
Despite the pessimistic diagnosis, Van Gogh recovered and returned to the Yellow House by the beginning of January. However he spent the following month between hospital and home, suffering from hallucinations and delusions of poisoning. That March, the police closed his house after a petition by 30 townspeople (including the Ginoux family) who described him as "le fou roux" (the redheaded madman). Paul Signac spend time with him in the hospital, and Van Gogh was allowed home in his company. In April, he moved into rooms owned by his physician Dr. Rey after floods damaged paintings in his own home. Around this time, he wrote, "Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant." Two months later, he left Arles and, at his own request, entered an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
Van Gogh entered the hospital at Saint Paul-de-Mausole on 8 May 1889 accompanied by his caregiver, the Reverend Salles. The hospital was a former monastery in Saint-Rémy less than 20 miles (32 km) from Arles, and located in an area of cornfields, vineyards, and olive trees, and at the time run by a former naval doctor, Dr. Théophile Peyron. He had two small rooms: adjoining cells with barred windows. The second was to be used as a studio.
During his stay, the clinic and its garden became the main subjects of his paintings. He made several studies of the hospital interiors, such as Vestibule of the Asylum and Saint-Remy (September 1889). Some of the work from this time is characterized by swirls, including The Starry Night, his best-known painting. He was allowed short supervised walks, which led to paintings of cypresses and olive trees, such as Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background 1889, Cypresses 1889, Cornfield with Cypresses (1889), Country road in Provence by Night (1890). That September, he also produced a further two versions of Bedroom in Arles.
Between February and April 1890 Van Gogh suffered a severe relapse. Nevertheless, he was able to paint and draw a little during this time, and he later wrote Theo that he had made a few small canvases "from memory ... reminisces of the North." Amongst these was Two Peasant Women Digging in a Snow-Covered Field at Sunset. Hulsker believes that this small group of paintings formed the nucleus of many drawings and study sheets depicting landscapes and figures that Van Gogh worked on during this time. He comments that—save for this short period—Van Gogh's illness had hardly any effect on his work, but in these he sees a reflection of Van Gogh's mental health at the time. Also belonging to this period is Sorrowing Old Man ("At Eternity's Gate"), a color study that Hulsker describes as "another unmistakable remembrance of times long past."
In February 1890, he painted five versions of L'Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux), based on a charcoal sketch Gauguin had produced when Madame Ginoux sat for both artists at the beginning of November 1888.[128] The version intended for Madame Ginoux is lost. It was attempting to deliver this painting to Madame Ginoux in Arles that precipitated his February relapse. His work was praised by Albert Aurier in the Mercure de France in January 1890, when he was described as "a genius". That February, he was invited by Les XX, a society of avant-garde painters in Brussels, to participate in their annual exhibition. At the opening dinner, Les XX member Henry de Groux insulted Van Gogh's work. Toulouse-Lautrec demanded satisfaction, while Signac declared he would continue to fight for Van Gogh's honor if Lautrec should surrender. Later, while Van Gogh's exhibit was on display with the Artistes Indépendants in Paris, Monet said that his work was the best in the show. In February 1890, following the birth of his nephew Vincent Willem, he wrote in a letter to his mother that, with the new addition to the family, he "started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky."
In May 1890, Van Gogh left the clinic in Saint-Rémy to move nearer the physician Dr. Paul Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise, and also to Theo. Gachet was recommended by Camille Pissarro who had treated several other artists and was himself an amateur artist. Van Gogh's first impression was that Gachet was "...sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much." In June 1890, he painted several portraits of the physician, including Portrait of Dr. Gachet, and his only etching; in each, the emphasis is on Gachet's melancholic disposition. Van Gogh stayed at the Auberge Ravoux, where rented a small attic room.
During his last weeks at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh's thoughts returned to his "memories of the North", and several of the approximately 70 oils painted during his 70 days in Auvers-sur-Oise, such as The Church at Auvers, are reminiscent of northern scenes.
Wheat Field with Crows, painted in July 1890, is among his most haunting and elemental works. It is often mistakenly believed to be his last work, but Hulsker lists seven paintings that postdate it.
Barbizon painter Charles Daubigny had moved to Auvers in 1861, and this in turn drew other artists there, including Camille Corot and Honoré Daumier. In July 1890, Van Gogh completed two paintings of Daubigny's Garden; one of which is likely his final work. There are other paintings that show evidence of being unfinished, including Thatched Cottages by a Hill.
On 22 February 1890, Van Gogh suffered a new crisis that was "the starting point for one of the saddest episodes in a life already rife with sad events," according to Hulsker. From February until the end of April he was unable to bring himself to write, though he did continue to draw and paint, which follows a pattern begun the previous May, in 1889. For a year he "had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, between long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy."
On 27 July 1890, aged 37, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver (although no gun was ever found). There were no witnesses and the location where he shot himself is unclear. Ingo Walther writes, "Some think Van Gogh shot himself in the wheat field that had engaged his attention as an artist of late; others think he did it at a barn near the inn." Biographer David Sweetman writes that the bullet was deflected by a rib bone and passed through his chest without doing apparent damage to internal organs—probably stopped by his spine. He was able to walk back to the Auberge Ravoux, where he was attended by two physicians. However, without a surgeon present the bullet could not be removed. After tending to him as best they could, the physicians left him alone in his room, smoking his pipe. The following morning, a Monday, Theo rushed to his brother as soon as notified, and found him in surprisingly good shape. But within hours Vincent began to fail, suffering from an untreated infection resulting from the wound. He died that evening, 29 hours after the gunshot wound. According to Theo, Vincent's last words were: "The sadness will last forever".
Van Gogh was buried on 30 July in the municipal cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise. The funeral was attended by Theo van Gogh, Andries Bonger, Charles Laval, Lucien Pissarro, Émile Bernard, Julien Tanguy and Dr. Gachet amongst some 20 family, friends and locals. The funeral was described by Émile Bernard in a letter to Albert Aurier. Theo suffered from syphilis and his health declined rapidly after Vincent's death. Weak and unable to come to terms with Vincent's absence, he died six months later, on 25 January, at Den Dolder, and he was buried in Utrecht. In 1914, the year she had Van Gogh's letters published, Jo Bonger had Theo's body exhumed, moved from Utrecht and re-buried with Vincent at Auvers-sur-Oise.
While many of his late paintings are somber, they can be seen as essentially optimistic and reflective of a desire to return to lucid mental health. Yet some of his final works reflect deepening concerns. Referring to his paintings of wheatfields under troubled skies, he commented in a letter to his brother Theo: "I did not have to go out of my way very much in order to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness." Nevertheless, he mentions that: "these canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words, that is, how healthy and invigorating I find the countryside."
There has been much debate as to the source of Van Gogh's illness and its effect on his work. Over 150 psychiatrists have attempted to label its root, with some 30 different diagnoses. Diagnoses include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, temporal lobe epilepsy, and acute intermittent porphyria. Any of these could have been the culprit, and could have been aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia, and consumption of alcohol, especially absinthe.
His brother Theo was born on 1 May 1857. He had another brother, Cor, and three sisters: Elisabeth, Anna, and Willemina "Wil". Vincent was a serious and thoughtful child. He attended the village school at Zundert from 1860, where a single Catholic teacher taught around 200 pupils. From 1861, he and his sister Anna were taught at home by a governess, until 1 October 1864, when he was placed in Jan Provily's boarding school at Zevenbergen about 20 miles (32 km) away. He was distressed to leave his family home. On 15 September 1866, he went to the new middle school, Willem II College in Tilburg. Constantijn C. Huysmans, a successful artist in Paris, taught Van Gogh to draw at the school and advocated a systematic approach to the subject. Vincent's interest in art began at an early age. He began to draw as a child and continued making drawings throughout the years leading to his decision to become an artist. Though well-done and expressive, his early drawings do not approach the intensity he developed in his later work. In March 1868, Van Gogh abruptly returned home. In a 1883 letter to Theo he wrote, "My youth was gloomy and cold and sterile."
In July 1869, his uncle Cent helped him obtain a position with the art dealer Goupil & Cie in The Hague. After his training, in June 1873, Goupil transferred him to London, where he lodged at 87 Hackford Road, Brixton, and worked at Messrs. Goupil & Co., 17 Southampton Street. This was a happy time for Vincent; he was successful at work and at 20, earning more than his father. Theo's wife later remarked that this was the best year of his life. He fell in love with his landlady's daughter, Eugénie Loyer, but was rejected when he confessed his feelings; she said she was secretly engaged to a former lodger. Vincent grew further isolated and fervent about religion; his father and uncle arranged for his transfer to Paris where he grew resentful at how art was treated as a commodity, a fact he believed apparent to customers. On 1 April 1876, Goupil terminated his employment.
Van Gogh moved to England for unpaid work as a supply teacher in a small boarding school in Ramsgate. When the proprietor relocated to Isleworth, Middlesex, Van Gogh moved with him, taking the train to Richmond and the remainder of the journey on foot. The arrangement did not work out and he left to become a Methodist minister's assistant, following his wish to "preach the gospel everywhere". At Christmas, he returned home and for six months took work at a bookshop in Dordrecht. He was unhappy in the position and spent his time either doodling or translating passages from the Bible into English, French and German. According to his roommate of the time, a young teacher named Görlitz, Van Gogh ate frugally, and preferred not to eat meat. To support his new found religious conviction and efforts to become a pastor, his family sent him to Amsterdam to study theology in May 1877. There he stayed with his uncle Jan van Gogh, a naval Vice Admiral. Vincent prepared for the entrance exam with his uncle Johannes Stricker, a respected theologian. He failed the exam, and left his uncle Jan's house in July 1878. He then undertook but failed, a three-month course at the Vlaamsche Opleidingsschool, a Protestant missionary school in Laeken, near Brussels.
Van Gogh's home in Cuesmes in 1880; while there he decided to become an artist
In January 1879, he took a temporary post as a missionary in the village of Petit Wasmes in the coal-mining district of Borinage in Belgium at Charbonnage de Marcasse, Van Gogh lived like those he preached to, sleeping on straw in a small hut at the back of the baker's house where he was staying. The baker's wife reported hearing Van Gogh sobbing at night in the hut. His choice of squalid living conditions did not endear him to the appalled church authorities, who dismissed him for "undermining the dignity of the priesthood". He then walked to Brussels, returned briefly to the village of Cuesmes in the Borinage, but gave in to pressure from his parents to return home to Etten. He stayed there until around March the following year, a cause of increasing concern and frustration for his parents. There was particular conflict between Vincent and his father, who made inquiries about having Vincent committed to the lunatic asylum at Geel.
He moved back to Cuesmes lodging with miner Charles Decrucq until October. He was interested in the people and scenes around him and recorded his time there in his drawings, following Theo's suggestion that he take up art in earnest. He traveled to Brussels that autumn, to follow Theo's recommendation to study with the prominent Dutch artist Willem Roelofs, who persuaded him—in spite of his aversion to formal schools of art—to attend the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he registered on 15 November 1880. At the Académie, he studied anatomy and the standard rules of modeling and perspective, about which he said, "you have to know just to be able to draw the least thing." Van Gogh aspired to become an artist in God's service, stating: "to try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another in a picture."
Van Gogh's parents moved to the Etten countryside in April 1881. He continued to draw, often using neighbors as subjects. During the first summer, he took long walks with his recently widowed cousin, Kee Vos-Stricker, daughter of his mother's older sister and Johannes Stricker. Kee was seven years older and had an eight-year-old son. He proposed marriage but was refused with the words "No, nay, never" ("nooit, neen, nimmer"). Late that November, Van Gogh wrote a strongly worded letter to Johannes, and left for Amsterdam but through letters maintained close contact. Kee would not meet him, her parents wrote that his "persistence is disgusting." In desperation, he held his left hand in the flame of a lamp, with the words: "Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame." He did not recall the event well, but later assumed that his uncle blew out the flame. Kee's father made it clear to him that Kee's refusal should be heeded and that the two would not be married because of Van Gogh's inability to support himself. Van Gogh's perception of his uncle and former tutor's hypocrisy affected him deeply and put an end to his religious faith forever. That Christmas, he refused to attend church, quarreling violently with his father as a result and leading him to leave home the same day for The Hague.
He settled in The Hague in January 1882, where he visited his cousin-in-law, Anton Mauve. Mauve introduced him to painting in oil and watercolor and lent money to set up a studio, but they fell out, possibly over the viability of drawing from plaster casts. Van Gogh's uncle Cornelis, an art dealer, commissioned 12 ink drawings of views of the city which Van Gogh completed soon after arriving in the city, along with seven other drawings that May. In June he suffered a bout of gonorrhea and spent three weeks in hospital, but that summer began to paint in oil.
Mauve appears to have suddenly gone cold towards Van Gogh and stopped returning of his letters. He supposed that Mauve had learned of his new domestic arrangement with an alcoholic prostitute, Clasina Maria "Sien" Hoornik (1850–1904), and her young daughter. He had met Sien towards the end of January, when she had a five-year-old daughter and was pregnant. She had already borne two children who died, although Van Gogh was unaware of this; and on 2 July, she gave birth to a baby boy, Willem. When Van Gogh's father discovered the details of their relationship, he put pressure on his son to abandon Sien and her children, although Vincent at first defied him. Vincent considered moving the family out of the city, but in the autumn of 1883 left Sien and the two children. Perhaps lack of money pushed Sien back into prostitution; the home became less happy while Van Gogh may have felt family life was irreconcilable with his artistic development. When he left, Sien gave her daughter to her mother and baby Willem to her brother. She then moved to Delft, and later to Antwerp.
In Nuenen, Van Gogh devoted himself to drawing and gave money to boys to bring him birds' nests for subject matter for paintings, and he made many sketches and paintings of weavers in their cottages In autumn 1884, Margot Begemann, a neighbor's daughter and ten years his senior, often joined him on his painting forays. She fell in love, and he reciprocated – though less enthusiastically. They decided to marry, but the idea was opposed by both families. As a result, Margot took an overdose of strychnine. She was saved when Van Gogh rushed her to a nearby hospital. On 26 March 1885, his father died of a heart attack, and he grieved deeply at the loss.
For the first time there was interest from Paris in his work. That spring he completed what is generally considered his first major work, The Potato Eaters, the culmination of several years work painting peasant character studies. In August 1885, his work was first exhibited in the windows of the paint dealer Leurs in The Hague. After one of his young peasant sitters became pregnant that September, Van Gogh was accused of forcing himself upon her and the Catholic village priest forbade parishioners from modeling for him.
He painted several groups of still-life paintings in 1885; Still-Life with Straw Hat and Pipe and Still-life with Earthen Pot and Clogs are characterized by smooth, meticulous brushwork and fine shading of colors. During his two-year stay in Nuenen, he completed numerous drawings and watercolors and nearly 200 oil paintings. His palette consisted mainly of somber earth tones, particularly dark brown, but showed no sign of developing the vivid coloration that distinguishes his later work. When he complained that Theo was not making enough effort to sell his paintings in Paris, his brother responded that the paintings were too dark and not in line with the current style of bright Impressionist paintings. He moved to Antwerp in November 1885, where he rented a small room above a paint dealer's shop in the Rue des Images (Lange Beeldekensstraat). He lived in poverty and ate poorly, preferring to spend money Theo sent on painting materials and models. Bread, coffee and tobacco were his staple intake. In February 1886, he wrote to Theo saying that he could only remember eating six hot meals since May of the previous year. His teeth became loose and painful. In Antwerp he applied himself to the study of color theory and spent time in museums, particularly studying the work of Peter Paul Rubens, gaining encouragement to broaden his palette to carmine, cobalt and emerald green. He bought Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts in the docklands, and incorporated their style into the background of some of his paintings.
Van Gogh began to drink absinthe heavily. He was treated by Dr. Amadeus Cavenaile, whose practice was near the docklands, possibly for syphilis; the treatment of alum irrigation and sitz baths was jotted down by Van Gogh in one of his notebooks. Despite his rejection of academic teaching, he took the higher-level admission exams at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and, in January 1886, matriculated in painting and drawing. For most of February, he was ill and run down by overwork, a poor diet, and excessive smoking.
Van Gogh traveled to Paris in March 1886, where he shared Theo's Rue Laval apartment on Montmartre, to study at Fernand Cormon's studio. In June, they took a larger apartment at 54 Rue Lepic. Because they had no need to write letters to communicate, little is known about this stay in Paris. In Paris, he painted portraits of friends and acquaintances, still-life paintings, views of Le Moulin de la Galette, scenes in Montmartre, Asnières, and along the Seine. During his stay he collected more Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints; he became interested in Japonaiserie when, in 1885 in Antwerp, he used them to decorate the walls of his studio. He collected hundreds of prints, examples are visible in the backgrounds of several of his paintings; several can be seen hanging on the wall of his 1887 Portrait of Père Tanguy. In The Courtesan or Oiran (after Kesai Eisen) (1887), Van Gogh traced the figure from a reproduction on the cover of the magazine Paris Illustre, which he then graphically enlarged in the painting. His 1888 Plum Tree in Blossom (After Hiroshige) is a vivid example of the admiration he had for the prints he collected. His version is slightly bolder than Hiroshige's original.
After seeing Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli at the Galerie Delareybarette Van Gogh adopted a brighter palette and a bolder attack, particularly in paintings such as his Seascape at Saintes-Maries (1888). Two years later, Vincent and Theo paid for the publication of a book on Monticelli paintings, and Vincent bought some of his works, to add to his collection.
For months, Van Gogh worked at Cormon's studio, where he frequented the circle of the British-Australian artist John Peter Russell, and met fellow students like Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – who painted a portrait of Van Gogh with pastel. The group congregated at Julien "Père" Tanguy's paint store (which was, at that time, the only place where Paul Cézanne's paintings were displayed). He had easy access to Impressionist works in Paris at the time. In 1886, two large vanguard exhibitions were staged; shows where Neo-Impressionism was first exhibited, bringing attention to Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Though Theo kept a stock of Impressionist paintings in his gallery on Boulevard Montmartre, Van Gogh seemingly had problems acknowledging developments in how artists view and paint their subject matter.
Conflicts arose between the brothers. At the end of 1886, Theo found that living with Vincent was "almost unbearable". By the spring of 1887, they were again at peace, although Van Gogh moved to Asnières, a northwestern suburb of Paris, where he became acquainted with Signac. With Émile Bernard, he adopted elements of Pointillism, a technique in which a multitude of small colored dots are applied to the canvas such that—when seen from a distance—they create an optical blend of hues. The style stresses the value of complementary colors—including blue and orange—to form vibrant contrasts that are enhanced when juxtaposed.
While in Asnières, he painted parks and restaurants and the Seine, including Bridges across the Seine at Asnieres. In November 1887, Theo and Vincent befriended Paul Gauguin who had just arrived in Paris. Towards the end of the year, Vincent arranged an exhibition alongside Bernard, Anquetin, and probably Toulouse-Lautrec, at the Grand-Bouillon Restaurant du Chalet, 43 Avenue de Clichy, Montmartre. In a contemporary account, Émile Bernard wrote: "On the avenue de Clichy a new restaurant was opened. Vincent used to eat there. He proposed to the manager that an exhibition be held there .... Canvases by Anquetin, by Lautrec, by Koning ...filled the hall....It really had the impact of something new; it was more modern than anything that was made in Paris at that moment." There Bernard and Anquetin sold their first paintings, and Van Gogh exchanged work with Gauguin, who soon departed to Pont-Aven. Discussions on art, artists, and their social situations that started during this exhibition continued and expanded to include visitors to the show, like Pissarro and his son Lucien, Signac, and Seurat. Finally, in February 1888, feeling worn out from life in Paris, Vincent left, having painted over 200 paintings during his two years in the city. Only hours before his departure, accompanied by Theo, he paid his first and only visit to Seurat in his atelier (studio).
Ill from drink and suffering from smoker's cough Van Gogh moved to take refuge in Arles. He arrived on 21 February 1888, and took room at the Hôtel-Restaurant Carrel, which he had expected to look like a Hokusai (1760–1849) or Utamaro's (1753–1806) print. He seems to have moved to the town with thoughts of founding a utopian art colony. The Danish artist Christian Mourier-Petersen (1858–1945) became his companion for two months, and at first Arles appeared exotic and filthy. In a letter, he described it as a foreign country: "The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes going to their First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world." Van Gogh was enchanted by the local landscape and light and his works from this period are richly draped in yellow, ultramarine, and mauve. His portrayals of the Arles landscape are informed by his Dutch upbringing; the patchwork of fields and avenues appear flat and lacking perspective, but excel in their colorisation. The light in Arles excited him, and his newfound appreciation is seen in the range and scope of his work. That March he painted landscapes using a gridded "perspective frame"; three of these paintings were shown at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In April, he was visited by the American artist Dodge MacKnight, who was living nearby at Fontvieille. On 1 May, he signed a lease for 15 francs per month in the eastern wing of the Yellow House at No. 2 Place Lamartine. The rooms were unfurnished and uninhabited for some time. He was still living at the Hôtel Restaurant Carrel, but found the rate of 5 francs a week excessive. He argued over the price, brought it to a local arbitrator, and was awarded a twelve franc reduction on the bill.
He moved from the Hôtel Carrel to the Café de la Gare on 7 May, where he befriended the proprietors, Joseph and Marie Ginoux. Although the Yellow House had to be furnished before he could fully move in, Van Gogh was able to utilize it as a studio. Hoping to have a gallery to display his work, his project at this time was a series of paintings including Van Gogh's Chair (1888), Bedroom in Arles (1888), The Night Café (1888), Cafe Terrace at Night (September 1888), Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888), and Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (1888), all intended to form the décoration for the Yellow House. Van Gogh wrote about The Night Café: "I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime."
When Gauguin agreed to visit Arles, Van Gogh hoped for friendship, and the realization of his utopian idea of an artists collective. That August he painted sunflowers. When Boch visited again, Van Gogh painted a portrait of him, as well as the study The Poet Against a Starry Sky. Boch's sister Anna (1848–1936), also an artist, purchased The Red Vineyard in 1890. In preparation for Gauguin's visit, Van Gogh bought two beds on advice from his friend the station's postal supervisor Joseph Roulin, whose portrait he painted, and on 17 September spent the first night in the still sparsely furnished Yellow House. When Gauguin consented to work and live side-by-side in Arles with Van Gogh, he started to work on The Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most ambitious effort he ever undertook. Van Gogh completed two chair paintings: Van Gogh's Chair and Gauguin's Chair.
Gauguin, after much pleading, finally arrived in Arles on 23 October. That November, the two finally painted together. Gauguin depicted Van Gogh in his The Painter of Sunflowers: Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, while, uncharacteristically, Van Gogh painted pictures from memory (deferring to Gauguin's ideas) and his The Red Vineyard. Notable amongst these "imaginative" paintings is Memory of the Garden at Etten. Their first joint outdoor venture was at the Alyscamps, when they produced Les Alyscamps.
They visited Montpellier that December, where they saw works by Courbet and Delacroix in the Musée Fabre. However, their relationship began to deteriorate. Van Gogh admired Gauguin and desperately wanted to be treated as his equal, but Gauguin was arrogant and domineering, something that often frustrated Van Gogh. They quarreled about art; Van Gogh increasingly feared that Gauguin was going to desert him, and the situation, which Van Gogh described as one of "excessive tension," rapidly headed towards a crisis point.
The exact sequence of events that led to Van Gogh's removal of his ear is not known. The only account attesting a supposed earlier razor attack on Gauguin comes from Gauguin himself some fifteen years later, and biographers agree this account must be considered unreliable and self-serving. However, it does seem likely that, by 23 December 1888, Van Gogh had realized that Gauguin was proposing to leave and that there had been some kind of contretemps between the two. That evening, Van Gogh severed his left ear (either wholly or in part; accounts differ) with a razor, inducing a severe haemorrhage. He bandaged his wound, wrapped the ear in paper, and delivered the package to a brothel frequented by both him and Gauguin, before returning home and collapsing. He was found unconscious the next day by the police and taken to the hospital. The local newspaper reported that Van Gogh had given the ear to a prostitute with an instruction to guard it carefully.
Gauguin's account implies that Van Gogh left his ear with the doorman as a memento for Gauguin. Van Gogh himself had no recollection of these events, and it is plain that he had suffered an acute psychotic episode. Family letters of the time make it clear that the event had not been unexpected. He had suffered a nervous collapse in Antwerp some three years before, and as early as 1880 his father had proposed committing him to an asylum (at Gheel). The hospital diagnosis was "generalized delirium", and within a few days Van Gogh was sectioned.
Limited access to the world outside the clinic resulted in a shortage of subject matter. He was left to work on interpretations of other artist's paintings, such as Millet's The Sower and Noon – Rest from Work (after Millet), as well as variations on his own earlier work. Van Gogh was an admirer of the Realism of Jules Breton, Gustave Courbet, and Millet, and he compared his copies to a musician's interpreting Beethoven. His The Round of the Prisoners (1890) was painted after an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883). It is suggested that the face of the prisoner in the center of the painting and looking toward the viewer is Van Gogh himself, although the noted Van Gogh scholar Jan Hulsker discounts this. During the initial few days of his treatment, Van Gogh repeatedly asked for Gauguin, but Gauguin stayed away. Gauguin told one of the policeman attending the case, "Be kind enough, Monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal for him." Gauguin wrote of Van Gogh, "His state is worse, he wants to sleep with the patients, chase the nurses, and washes himself in the coal bucket. That is to say, he continues the biblical mortifications." Theo was notified by Gauguin and visited, as did both Madame Ginoux and Roulin. Gauguin left Arles never to see Van Gogh again.
Despite the pessimistic diagnosis, Van Gogh recovered and returned to the Yellow House by the beginning of January. However he spent the following month between hospital and home, suffering from hallucinations and delusions of poisoning. That March, the police closed his house after a petition by 30 townspeople (including the Ginoux family) who described him as "le fou roux" (the redheaded madman). Paul Signac spend time with him in the hospital, and Van Gogh was allowed home in his company. In April, he moved into rooms owned by his physician Dr. Rey after floods damaged paintings in his own home. Around this time, he wrote, "Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant." Two months later, he left Arles and, at his own request, entered an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
Van Gogh entered the hospital at Saint Paul-de-Mausole on 8 May 1889 accompanied by his caregiver, the Reverend Salles. The hospital was a former monastery in Saint-Rémy less than 20 miles (32 km) from Arles, and located in an area of cornfields, vineyards, and olive trees, and at the time run by a former naval doctor, Dr. Théophile Peyron. He had two small rooms: adjoining cells with barred windows. The second was to be used as a studio.
During his stay, the clinic and its garden became the main subjects of his paintings. He made several studies of the hospital interiors, such as Vestibule of the Asylum and Saint-Remy (September 1889). Some of the work from this time is characterized by swirls, including The Starry Night, his best-known painting. He was allowed short supervised walks, which led to paintings of cypresses and olive trees, such as Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background 1889, Cypresses 1889, Cornfield with Cypresses (1889), Country road in Provence by Night (1890). That September, he also produced a further two versions of Bedroom in Arles.
Between February and April 1890 Van Gogh suffered a severe relapse. Nevertheless, he was able to paint and draw a little during this time, and he later wrote Theo that he had made a few small canvases "from memory ... reminisces of the North." Amongst these was Two Peasant Women Digging in a Snow-Covered Field at Sunset. Hulsker believes that this small group of paintings formed the nucleus of many drawings and study sheets depicting landscapes and figures that Van Gogh worked on during this time. He comments that—save for this short period—Van Gogh's illness had hardly any effect on his work, but in these he sees a reflection of Van Gogh's mental health at the time. Also belonging to this period is Sorrowing Old Man ("At Eternity's Gate"), a color study that Hulsker describes as "another unmistakable remembrance of times long past."
In February 1890, he painted five versions of L'Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux), based on a charcoal sketch Gauguin had produced when Madame Ginoux sat for both artists at the beginning of November 1888.[128] The version intended for Madame Ginoux is lost. It was attempting to deliver this painting to Madame Ginoux in Arles that precipitated his February relapse. His work was praised by Albert Aurier in the Mercure de France in January 1890, when he was described as "a genius". That February, he was invited by Les XX, a society of avant-garde painters in Brussels, to participate in their annual exhibition. At the opening dinner, Les XX member Henry de Groux insulted Van Gogh's work. Toulouse-Lautrec demanded satisfaction, while Signac declared he would continue to fight for Van Gogh's honor if Lautrec should surrender. Later, while Van Gogh's exhibit was on display with the Artistes Indépendants in Paris, Monet said that his work was the best in the show. In February 1890, following the birth of his nephew Vincent Willem, he wrote in a letter to his mother that, with the new addition to the family, he "started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky."
In May 1890, Van Gogh left the clinic in Saint-Rémy to move nearer the physician Dr. Paul Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise, and also to Theo. Gachet was recommended by Camille Pissarro who had treated several other artists and was himself an amateur artist. Van Gogh's first impression was that Gachet was "...sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much." In June 1890, he painted several portraits of the physician, including Portrait of Dr. Gachet, and his only etching; in each, the emphasis is on Gachet's melancholic disposition. Van Gogh stayed at the Auberge Ravoux, where rented a small attic room.
During his last weeks at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh's thoughts returned to his "memories of the North", and several of the approximately 70 oils painted during his 70 days in Auvers-sur-Oise, such as The Church at Auvers, are reminiscent of northern scenes.
Wheat Field with Crows, painted in July 1890, is among his most haunting and elemental works. It is often mistakenly believed to be his last work, but Hulsker lists seven paintings that postdate it.
Barbizon painter Charles Daubigny had moved to Auvers in 1861, and this in turn drew other artists there, including Camille Corot and Honoré Daumier. In July 1890, Van Gogh completed two paintings of Daubigny's Garden; one of which is likely his final work. There are other paintings that show evidence of being unfinished, including Thatched Cottages by a Hill.
On 22 February 1890, Van Gogh suffered a new crisis that was "the starting point for one of the saddest episodes in a life already rife with sad events," according to Hulsker. From February until the end of April he was unable to bring himself to write, though he did continue to draw and paint, which follows a pattern begun the previous May, in 1889. For a year he "had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, between long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy."
On 27 July 1890, aged 37, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver (although no gun was ever found). There were no witnesses and the location where he shot himself is unclear. Ingo Walther writes, "Some think Van Gogh shot himself in the wheat field that had engaged his attention as an artist of late; others think he did it at a barn near the inn." Biographer David Sweetman writes that the bullet was deflected by a rib bone and passed through his chest without doing apparent damage to internal organs—probably stopped by his spine. He was able to walk back to the Auberge Ravoux, where he was attended by two physicians. However, without a surgeon present the bullet could not be removed. After tending to him as best they could, the physicians left him alone in his room, smoking his pipe. The following morning, a Monday, Theo rushed to his brother as soon as notified, and found him in surprisingly good shape. But within hours Vincent began to fail, suffering from an untreated infection resulting from the wound. He died that evening, 29 hours after the gunshot wound. According to Theo, Vincent's last words were: "The sadness will last forever".
Van Gogh was buried on 30 July in the municipal cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise. The funeral was attended by Theo van Gogh, Andries Bonger, Charles Laval, Lucien Pissarro, Émile Bernard, Julien Tanguy and Dr. Gachet amongst some 20 family, friends and locals. The funeral was described by Émile Bernard in a letter to Albert Aurier. Theo suffered from syphilis and his health declined rapidly after Vincent's death. Weak and unable to come to terms with Vincent's absence, he died six months later, on 25 January, at Den Dolder, and he was buried in Utrecht. In 1914, the year she had Van Gogh's letters published, Jo Bonger had Theo's body exhumed, moved from Utrecht and re-buried with Vincent at Auvers-sur-Oise.
While many of his late paintings are somber, they can be seen as essentially optimistic and reflective of a desire to return to lucid mental health. Yet some of his final works reflect deepening concerns. Referring to his paintings of wheatfields under troubled skies, he commented in a letter to his brother Theo: "I did not have to go out of my way very much in order to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness." Nevertheless, he mentions that: "these canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words, that is, how healthy and invigorating I find the countryside."
There has been much debate as to the source of Van Gogh's illness and its effect on his work. Over 150 psychiatrists have attempted to label its root, with some 30 different diagnoses. Diagnoses include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, temporal lobe epilepsy, and acute intermittent porphyria. Any of these could have been the culprit, and could have been aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia, and consumption of alcohol, especially absinthe.
Paintings at Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo
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Paintings at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam