Introduction
This research paper will tell the readers how Vincent Van Gogh influenced the other artist, and how he shaped the beginning of modern art.
It will also tell the readers of the important views in Van Gogh’s life, the success and failures he encountered. It will reveal the true identity of Van Gogh. The writer found the possible mental disorders which Van Gogh has, which is included in this paper. The writer chose this topic to broaden up her knowledge about Vincent Van Gogh. His unusual handling of colors and his unique brush strokes caught the eye of the writer. She wants to reveal the true reason behind this uniqueness, she wonder, is this just an extract of imagination? Or do his mental capability affects his works?
This research paper will help readers to understand Van Gogh more appreciatively. The writer wants to share this knowledge she know during the research, and it is well-organized in this documentation. Van Gogh is known to be a great post impressionist. But behind this, he struggled hard and experienced so many failures. But he still showed what a painter should be, an inspiration and a history in the world of art.
Early Life of van Gogh V
incent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in Groot- Zundert, a village close to Breda in the province of North Brabant a region in the south of the Netherlands, a predominantly Catholic area. He was the oldest child of Theodorus van Gogh, a minister of the Dutch reformed church, and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. As a child, Vincent was serious, silent and thoughtful. He attended the Zundert Village School from 1860, where the single Catholic teacher taught around 200 pupils.
From 1861, he and his sister Anna were taught at home by a governess(a private teacher), until 1 of October, 1864, when he went to Jan Provily’s Boarding School at Zevenbergen about 20 miles(32km. ) away. He was distressed to leave his family home as he recalled later as an adult. On 15 of September 1866, he went to the new middle school, Willem II College in Tillburg. Constantijn Huysmans, a successful artist in Paris, taught van Gogh to draw at the school and advocate 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 develop in his later work. In March 1868, van Gogh abruptly left school and returned home. At the age of 16, van Gogh went to work for Goupil and Company in The Hague, an art gallery with which one of his uncles had long been associated. After his training, in June 1873, Goupil transferred him to London, where ho lodge at 87 Hackford Road, Brixton, and worked at Messrs. Goupil ang Co. , 17 Southampton Street.
This was a happy time for Vincent; he was successful at work and was, at 20, earning more than his father. The wife of Theo(van Gogh’s brother) remarked that this was a happiest year of Vincent’s life. He fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, Eugenie Loyer, but when he finally confessed his feelings to her, she rejected him, saying that she was secretly engaged to a former lodger. He became increasingly isolated, and prevent about religion; his father and uncle arranged for him to be transferred to Paris, where he become resentful at how art was treated as a commodity, a fact apparent to customers.
On 1 of April 1876, Goupil terminated his employment.
His Religious Life
Van Gogh disliked art dealing, and, rejected in love, he became increasingly solitary. His religious zeal grew until he felt he had found his true vocation. To support his effort to become a pastor, his family sent him to Amsterdam to study theology in May 1877, where he stayed with his uncle Johannes Stricker; a respected theologian who published the first “Life of Jesus” in the Netherlands. Van Gogh failed the exam, and left his uncle Jan’s house in July 1878.
He then undertook, bu failed, a three-month course at the Vlaamsche Opleidings School, a protestant missionary school in Laeken, near Brussels. 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. Taking Christianity to what he saw as its logical conclusion, 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 nut.
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; Theodorus made inquiries about having his son committed to the lunatic asylum at Geel.
The Birth of His Art Career
In 1880, he chose art as a vocation and became dependent on his brother Theo for money. He soon realized the limitations of being self-taught and went to Brussels to study drawing. In 1881, he moved to The Hague to work with the dutch landscape painter Anton Mauve, and the next summer van Gogh began to experiment with oil paints. His urge to be “alone with nature” took him to dutch villages, and his subjects—still life, landscape, and figure—all related to the peasants’ daily hardships and surroundings. In 1885, at Nuenen he produced his first masterpiece, “The Potato Eaters”.
Feeling too isolated, he left for Antwerp, Belgium, and enrolled in the academy there. He did not respond well to the school’s rigid discipline, but while in Antwerp hr was inspired by the pi[aitings of Peter Paul Rubens and discovered Japanese prints. He moved to Paris, where he lived with Theo, in 1886. His brother introduced him to Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulose-Lautrec, and the combined influence of impressionism and Japanese art had a revolutionary effect on van Gogh. His two years in Paris shaped hi personal style of painting—more colorful, less traditional, with lighter tonalities and distinctive brushwork.
The Paris period(March 1886-February 1888) is extremely important because it enabled Vincent to see and to hear discussed the work of virtually every major artist there. Numerous self-portraits, still lifes, and cityscapes date from this period, such as self-portrait with a straw hat, a pair of shoes, and restaurant de la Sirene at Asnieres. During these years van Gogh’s style shifted from the darker manner characteristic of his Nuenen period to a postimpressionist style heavily influenced by divisionism(also called pointillism).
Van Gogh left Paris and moved to Arles in February 1888. His mature work and many of his most famous paintings date from the ensuing year. He raented and decorated a yellow house in which he hoped to found a community of “impressionists of the south. ” He painted fruit trees all aglow with sunlight; the great sunflowers; the plain room in which he lives, and a portrait of himself with his strange, restless blue eyes. In October 1888, Paul Gauguin came to live and work with van Gogh.
After only two months, however, following the first of Vincent’s attacks of dementia, in which he amputated his own earlobe, Gauguin left, having first summoned Theo from Paris. Van Gogh realized the extent of his mental disorder. In 1889, he voluntarily entered the asylum of Saint-Paul in Saint-Remy, France from May 1889 until May 1890. He continued to paint, painting the view seen from his window, mainly cypresses and olive trees. Despite his deteriorating mental condition, van Gogh’s time in the asylum proved to be his greatest productive periods. In June 1889, he executed the Starry Night and the Extraordinary Self-portrait.
In the three months following his release from the hospital in May 1890, at the village of Auvers-sur-Oise outside Paris, Vincent produced many notable works including the portrait or Dr. Gachet, Field Under Thunderclouds, and the famous Crows in the Wheatfields. Van Gogh’s artistic career lasted only ten years, and only one of his paintings was sold during his lifetime. Within a generation after hid death, however, his genius was recognized. His greatest influence was in the handling of color, which led directly to the Fauvist movement in France and to the early German Expressionism.
He always looked for color ang more color. Hw even tried to show shape, weight, and the feeling of a landscape through his use of color. Van Gogh’s thoughts and feelings are revealed in several hundred letters, most of them to his brother, Theo—the only one who believed in his art and helped him.
His Famous Works
Approximately 750 paintings, 1600 drawings, 9 lithographs and 1 etching was the total number of works that van Gogh did, and it is well-documented in more than 700 letters that he wrote to Theo and others. But here are some of the famous works of van Gogh:
The Potato Eaters. This is a chief work of van Gogh during his stay in Nuenen, in 1885. It is a study of a group of laborers seated at a table beneath a lamplight; their faces show all the misery and dullness of their lives. It is placed at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
The Starry Night (Dutch: De sterrennacht) is a painting by the Dutch post-impressionist artistVincent van Gogh. The painting depicts the view outside his sanitarium room window at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (located in southern France) at night, although it was painted from memory during the day.
The Death of Van Gogh
On 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”. This period lasted until the end of April, during which time he was unable to write though he did continue to draw and paint. Hughes writes that from May 1889 to May 1890 He, “had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, and in between them, long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstacy. ” On 27th of July 1890, aged 37, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver.
Where he was when he shot himself is unclear. Ingo Walther writes that, “some think Van Gogh shot himself in the wheat field that had engage 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. He was attended by two physicians, neither with the capability to perform surgery to remove the bullet, who left him alone in his room, smoking his pipe.
The following morning (Monday), as soon as he was notified, Theo rushed to be with Vincent, to find him in surprisingly good shape; within hours, however, He began to fail, the result of untreated infection in the wound. Vincent died in the evening, 29 hours after he shot himself. Theo reported his last words as “the sadness will last forever. ”
His Mental and Physical Health
Hundreds of physicians and psychiatrists have tried to define Van Gogh’s medical conditions over the years. The following are some of the more probable mental and physical diagnoses.
Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. Van Gogh suffered from seizures which doctors, including Dr. Felix Rey and Dr. Peyron, believed to be caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. Van Gogh was born with a brain lesion that many doctors believe was aggravated by his prolonged use of absinthe causing his epileptic condition. Dr. Gachet, another of Van Gogh’s physicians, was thought to have treated his epilepsy with digitalis. This prescription drug can cause one to see in yellow or see yellow spots. This may have been one of the reasons why Van Gogh loved this color.
Bipolar disorder. Due to Van Gogh’s extreme enthusiasm and dedication to first religion and then art coupled with the feverish pace of his art production many believe that mania was a prominent condition in Van Gogh’s life. However, these episodes were always followed by exhaustion and depression and ultimately suicide. Therefore, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder or manic depression makes sense with the accounts of these episodes in Van Gogh’s life.
Thujone poisoning. In order to counter act his attacks of epilepsy, anxiety, and depression, Van Gogh drank absinthe, a toxic alcoholic drink popular with many artists at the time.
Thujone is the toxin in absinthe. Unfortunately, the Thujone worked against Van Gogh aggravating his epilepsy and manic depression. High doses of thujone can also cause one to see objects in yellow. Various physicians have differing opinions on whether or not this is what caused Van Gogh’s affinity with yellow.
Lead poisoning. Because Van Gogh used lead based paints there are some who believe he suffered from lead poisoning from nibbling at paint chips. It was also noted by Dr. Peyron that during his attacks Van Gogh tried to poison himself by swallowing paint or drinking kerosene. One of the symptoms of lead poisoning is swelling of the retinas which can cause one to see light in circles like halos around objects. This can be seen in paintings like The Starry Night.
Hypergraphia. Hypergraphia is a condition causing one to need to write continuously; this disorder is commonly linked to mania and epilepsy. Some believe that the massive collection of over 800 letters Van Gogh wrote during his lifetime could be attributed to this condition.
Sunstroke. Because Van Gogh strived for realism in his paintings he was often painting outdoors especially during his times in the South of France. Some of his episodes of hostility and the nausea and “bad stomach” he refers to in his letters may have been the effects of sunstroke.
The Night Café
The Night Café (original French title: Le Café de nuit) is an oil painting created in Arles in September 1888, by Vincent van Gogh. Its title is inscribed lower right beneath the signature. The interior depicted is the Café de la Gare, 30 Place Lamartine, run by Joseph-Michel and his wife Marie Ginoux, who in November 1888 posed for Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s Arlésienne; a bit later, Joseph Ginoux evidently posed for both artists, too.
Irises
Irises was painted while Vincent van Gogh was living at the asylum at Saint Paul de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in the last year before his death in 1890. It was painted before his first attack at the asylum. There is a lack of the high tension which is seen in his later works. He called the painting “the lightning conductor for my illness”, because he felt that he could keep himself from going insane by continuing to paint.
Conclusion
Although his painting career lasted only ten years, Van Gogh’s influence in modern artistry was really remarkable.
His failures in life didn’t affect his capacity to imagine, he has shown that failure only occurs when a person decides to quit, which is the opposite of what Van Gogh try to find ways to change it. He worked at the age of 20, and was rejected. This was a time when Van Gogh became isolated and thought of being a pastor, but he failed the examinations. Frustrated in love and his religious career, Vincent began to draw. He studied in different schools of art, and met different artist, which shaped his own style of painting. His art career brought a high impact in the world of art.
Today he’s known to be the most appreciated representative of postimpressionism. He has created so many great paintings which have influenced the other artist to discover more techniques and designs. But due to his mental health, Van Gogh voluntarily entered his career when he shot himself, and leaves the earth with his legacy. Although we have known what his mental condition was, it only shows that Van Gogh’s mental state was not healthy, but, behind his mental condition, he was a genius in art. He deserves what praises he is receiving, “The Great Trailblazer of Modern Art”.
