There, close once again to the peasants who had inspired him early on, he concentrated on painting landscapes, portraits (of himself and others), domestic interiors, and still lifes full of personal symbolism. In a letter to his sister Willemien, touching upon the mind and temperament of artists, van Gogh once wrote that he was “very sensitive to color and its particular language, its effects of complementaries, contrasts, harmony.” 2īy 1888, van Gogh had returned to the French countryside, where he would remain until his death. The style he developed in Paris and carried through to the end of his life became known as Post-Impressionism, a term encompassing works made by artists unified by their interest in expressing their emotional and psychological responses to the world through bold colors and expressive, often symbolic images. Inspired by these artists’ harmonious matching of colors, shorter brushstrokes, and liberal use of paint, he brightened his own palette and loosened his brushwork, emphasizing the physical application of paint on the canvas. In 1886, van Gogh moved to Paris, where he encountered the works of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, and the Pointillist compositions of Georges Seurat. Van Gogh was particularly taken with the peasants he saw working the countryside his early compositions featured portraits of Dutch peasants and rural landscapes, rendered in dark, moody tones. Driven in part by their dissatisfaction with the modern city, many artists sought out places resembling earthly paradises, where they could observe nature firsthand, feeding its psychological and spiritual resonances into their work. Landscapes remained a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century art.
It was nature, and the people living closely to it, that first stirred van Gogh’s artistic inclinations. “ Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.” 1 “Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that’s the real way to learn to understand art better and better,” he wrote in 1874. He also wrote scores of letters, especially to his brother Theo, in which he worked out his thoughts about art. Largely self-taught, van Gogh produced more than 2,000 oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sketches, which became in demand only after his death. Van Gogh found his place in art and produced emotional, visually arresting paintings over the course of a career that lasted only a decade. But to know van Gogh is to get past the caricature of the tortured, misunderstood artist and to become acquainted instead with the hardworking, deeply religious, and difficult man. This stark act, committed in 1888, marked the beginning of the depression that would plague him until the end of his life.
Mention Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890) and one of the first things likely to come to many people’s minds is the fact that he cut off his own ear.
Vincent van Gogh: Emotion, Vision, and A Singular Style
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