Everything but the Ear
By: Eve Bigaj
Tags: Art

Painting from nature was van Gogh’s antidepressant. And, for the most part, his paintings were not so much anguished as perfect. For the most part, they were a joyful celebration of color, natural beauty, and human psychology in all its forms. For the most part, van Gogh was just a hard-working painter who squeezed everything he could — from Rembrandt to a pair of old shoes, from Hiroshige to suffering — onto his perfect canvases.

Maybe Vincent’s mental illness (if that’s what it was) played a role in his art. Maybe not. Either way, so many other factors contributed to his unique style.

This is a post about these other things. About the events which transformed Vincent from a 27-year-old nobody to a 32-year-old painter of overly dark, old-fashioned portraits, to a 35-year-old genius. About everything but the cut-off ear.

The Time of Ashes

It’s easy to imagine that great artists are born with a mark to set them off from the rest of us, with an unwavering attraction to the one thing for which they were put on this earth. This was emphatically not the case for van Gogh. He was 27 when he decided to take up painting, 29 when he first started using oil paints; 34 when he created his first masterpieces.

Before Vincent was a painter, he was a (mostly) unsuccessful art dealer, a failed theology student and equally failed missionary, and an unemployed grown man living with his parents, spending his time reading Shakespeare and Dickens.

In 1880 — at the age of 27 — van Gogh leaves his family home after an altercation with his parents. He is completely adrift. And then, in June, he writes the most extraordinary letter.

He’s been more or less unemployed for the past five years, but he pleads his case to Theo with a fire of emotion: he isn’t lazy.

Then there’s the other idler, the idler truly despite himself, who is gnawed inwardly by a great desire for action, who does nothing because he finds it impossible to do anything since he’s imprisoned in something, so to speak, because he doesn’t have what he would need to be productive, because the inevitability of circumstances is reducing him to this point. Such a person doesn’t always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, I’m good for something, even so! I feel I have a raison d’être! I know that I could be a quite different man! For what then could I be of use, for what could I serve! There’s something within me, so what is it!

At this vertiginous moment, he’s only exchanged his question marks for exclamation points — not for answers. He’s made up his mind to act, and act big—without knowing what the action might be. But what he does know — before he knows of brushstrokes and sunflowers — is that he will, he must work hard.

But on the road that I’m on I must continue; if I do nothing, if I don’t study, if I don’t keep on trying, then I’m lost, then woe betide me. That’s how I see this, to keep on, keep on, that’s what’s needed. But what’s your ultimate goal, you’ll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless [sic] it becomes firm.

Sower at Sunset, 1888.

Vincent instinctively reaches for a painterly metaphor — but at this stage, it’s only a metaphor. He doesn’t yet know that it is precisely making sketches into paintings that will be his business for the next ten years. He speaks vaguely but passionately of literature, of medicine, of all the things he would like to learn. He might still become Vincent van Gogh the novelist — or even Doctor van Gogh.

What does the flame know of its future phoenix? Nothing but a burning, shapeless passion.

There are no letters for the next two months. It is the time of ashes.

The next letter is a matter-of-fact request for engravings to copy. Vincent is becoming an artist.

What happened in between? Theo had certainly played a role in Vincent’s decision to pursue painting. He reproaches his brother for forgetting the love of paintings he had cultivated as an art dealer and instead spending his time reading novels. Vincent tries to explain that he finds a spark of the same thing in Shakespeare as he finds in Rembrandt — but Theo doesn’t seem convinced.

It’s hard to overestimate the role van Gogh’s relationship with his brother played in his life. When he says “let’s paint a very great deal. That’s the message if we want to succeed,” he’s saying it right. The brothers are a team. There simply would have been no Vincent without Theo. (To an extent, this cuts both ways: while Vincent was nominally unemployed for the last ten years of his life, he was continually involved in the decisions his brother made in his art-dealing business. The brothers often use the first-person plural when speaking of art-dealing.) Vincent was touchingly aware of his debt to his brother:

I regard myself as privileged above a thousand others in that you remove so many barriers in my way. I have to try twice as hard to make up for lost time because I began later than others, and with the best will in the world I would have to give up if I didn’t have you.

This is true on a financial level — for most of his artistic career, van Gogh was entirely dependent on the allowance his brother sent him. It’s also true on a psychological level: Vincent has a deep need to recount his projects, dreams, successes and failures to his brother. And, especially, he has a deep need for his brother’s faith in his artistic ability — which is miraculously strong for the many years during which van Gogh’s artworks are almost entirely unremarkable. And it’s true on an artistic level: Theo is the first to suggest that Vincent start using the more colorful palette for which he now seems to have been predestined.²

However exactly it came about — whether the initial idea was Theo’s or his brother’s — by the end of August 1880, Vincent is determined to become a painter. He makes the decision not because of innate talent, not even through a love of painting above all else — but through sheer grit… and because he was too unlucky and idealistic to remain an art dealer.

Following tradition and frugality, Vincent spent the next two years creating sketches and watercolors and abstaining from the more expensive medium of oil paint. But when he finally invested in a set of oil paints — well, it was pure magic.

My dear Theo, You must excuse me for writing again — it’s to tell you that I take so much pleasure in painting. Last Saturday evening I tackled something I’ve already dreamed of often. I literally couldn’t hold myself back — I couldn’t leave it alone or take a break from it.

What if we remembered Vincent like this? Not with a razor to his ear, but simply overcome by the joy of painting?

At 27, van Gogh made a leap of faith towards hard work. At 29, he found boundless delight waiting for him on the other side. This delight — the joy, the love of painting — is manifested throughout his letters and his paintings. It never left him for long.

Creation is never just one leap. The next chasm Vincent was to cross lay between dark and colorful paintings.

From Darkness to Light

Van Gogh’s peasant portraits in the Kröller-Müller Museum.

Van Gogh would have liked the Kröller-Müller Museum. Located in the middle of the Netherlands’ Hoge Veluwe National Park — a paradise of windswept heather and dappled forests — the gallery forms a temple to art in the middle of nature. Glass walls let natural light. On the day of my visit, the glow rivaled that of Arles. In the middle of all this — van Gogh.

The Four Sunflowers are the first thing you see as you enter the collection, which takes up three rooms. You enter through the middle, into a small area with works spanning the whole decade of van Gogh’s painterly activity. To your right as you face the sunflowers is the past; the future — to the left.

Stepping inside the right-hand room is like walking to the other side of the mirror. The paintings are everything that the mature van Gogh isn’t. By which I mean — they’re not colorful.

One wall is lined with small, dark portraits — studies for his famous Potato Eaters. There’s more Rothko in them than van Gogh — Rothko shrunk down and stripped of soul. The portraits are clumsy, grotesque, and relentlessly, unflinchngly dark — literally and metaphorically.

(An important caveat: I don’t know for sure how dark the paintings were when van Gogh created them. He often used cheap, short-lived pigments,³ and it’s possible that this has darkened the portraits over time. Even so, they were certainly much, much darker than the work he would soon be producing.)

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the early portraits are less than 100% worthless. There is, it turns out, plenty of van Gogh in them — though at the time they were made, not even van Gogh himself knew what that meant. The brushstrokes are heavy and prominent. There is a keen interest in human suffering, psychology, the life of the poor. (I don’t know whether to call this “compassion” or “brutality.”)

Paradoxically, even the dark palette springs from the very same sources as the brightest hues of van Gogh’s late works. He was fascinated with light — not the light of the academic painters, carefully filtered through a north-facing studio window. Not the light you control and conquer for the sake of subtle form — but the light you learn and love for its own sake. (As this fascinating article on the relationship between art and the development of electric lighting points out, evening interiors in van Gogh’s time really were as dark as he represents them.) A painting of a dark room by lamplight is about light in a way in which a painting set at noon in a studio can’t be. Indeed, van Gogh said as much in an 1885 letter to Theo, complaining about his Dutch contemporaries:

In many cases, what they call brightness is an ugly studio tone in a cheerless city studio. It seems people don’t look at the half-light in the early morning or in the evening, it seems nothing exists other than midday from 11–3 — truly a very respectable hour! — but — often as characterless as Jan Salie.

Three years later, van Gogh had moved to Arles to pursue bright sunlight. He no longer saw midday as characterless. Speaking of his portrait of the peasant Patience Escalier, he remarks that

the colour suggests the scorched air of harvest time at midday in the blistering heat, and without that it’s a different painting. (…) Oh, the beautiful sun down here in high summer; it beats down on your head and I have no doubt at all that it drives you crazy. Now being that way already, all I do is enjoy it. (Letter to the painter Emile Bernard, August 1888).

Van Gogh changed his mind about the midday sun — but what didn’t change was precisely his commitment to the pursuit of character, of striking effects of the light. The impulse which pushed him to place his Potato Eaters in a dark room is the same impulse which pushed him into the direct sunlight of Arles. Indeed, van Gogh explicitly said that the portrait of Patience Escalier

is absolutely a continuation of certain studies of heads done in Holland.

Absolutely. Van Gogh’s technical dexterity may have increased between 1885 and 1888, his attitude towards noontime may have changed — but he was still depicting exactly the same long-suffering soul.