The Van Gogh Gallery Blog

During the August and September, when sunflowers are a hearty flower common in many areas, it is hard not to be reminded of Van Gogh.  Sunflowers have become an iconic symbol of the artist and his work.   Sunflowers were a popular subject in Van Gogh’s paintings when he moved to Arles, France; many of them he created to decorate Paul Gauguin’s room in the Yellow House in Arles. 

When writing to his brother Theo about Arles and the flowers in a letter from August 8, 1888, Van Gogh wrote

“Under the blue sky the orange, yellow, red splashes of the flowers take on an amazing brilliance, and in the limpid air there is a something or other happier, more lovely than in the North.”

It is not surprising that Van Gogh captured that happiness in some of his most famous Sunflower paintings which he created during his stay in Arles.  His most commonly known Sunflower paintings are the Sunflowers and the Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, but he created several other lesser known Sunflower paintings.  His earlier paintings containing sunflowers were done in Paris from 1886-1887.  These paintings do not have the same vibrant yellows as the Arles series has, but show his early development of this subject.   View a few of them here:

Letter Source:
http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/18/519.htm

In October of 1888, while living in The Yellow House in Arles, Van Gogh completed one of his most famous works The Bedroom.   Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles has a striking combination of colors that Van Gogh was proud of.  In a letter to his brother Theo from 1888, Van Gogh wrote:

“The walls are pale violet. The floor is of red tiles.  The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheets and pillows very light greenish-citron.  The coverlet scarlet. The window green.  The toilet table orange, the basin blue.  The doors lilac.”

Today the original version of The Bedroom is at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam although it is currently undergoing restoration.  While it is being restored; however, you can follow the entire restoration process on the Van Gogh Museum’s Bedroom Secrets blog. 

There are also two other versions of The Bedroom which Van Gogh painted.  One now hangs in The Art Institute of Chicago.  This one Van Gogh created in September of 1889 as a back-up copy of the first Bedroom painting.   The third version is located in Paris at the Musee d’Orsay and was created as a smaller version Van Gogh painted for his mother and sister.

Letter Source
Letter to Theo Van Gogh, October 1888

Van Gogh completed Irises in May of 1889 when he was at the asylum in Saint-Rémy. Here he eased back into painting capturing flowers and foliage in the surrounding garden and the star filled nights from his window. In a letter to his brother Theo from May of 1889, Van Gogh wrote:

“The idea of my duty to get back to work occurs to me a lot and I believe that all my faculties for work will soon come back to me. It’s just that the work often absorbs me so much that I think that for the rest of my life I will always be a bit absent-minded and awkward when shifting for myself.”

Irises was shown with Starry Night over the Rhone at the the Société des Artistes Indépendants Exhibition in Paris in September of 1889. Following the exhibition, Theo wrote to Van Gogh in October of 1889 proclaiming that he thought Irises was one of Vincent’s “good things.”

“The exhibition of the Independents is over and I’ve got your irises back; it is one of your good things. It seems to me that you are stronger when you paint true things like that, or like the stagecoach at Tarascon, or the head of a child, or the underbrush with the ivy in vertical format. The form is so well defined, and the whole is full of colour.”

Today, Irises can be seen at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and is still considered one of Van Gogh’s finest works.

Letters Source:
Letter from Vincent to Theo, May 1889
Letter from Theo to Vincent, October 1889

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers is one of his most famous series of works.  He completed two separate series of still life paintings of Sunflowers the first in Paris in 1887 and the second adorned Gauguin’s room in Arles when he came to stay with Van Gogh at the yellow house.    In a letter to his brother Theo from August of 1888 Van Gogh writes about how quickly he had to work to complete his Sunflower paintings to decorate the Studio of the South,

“Now that I hope to live with Gauguin in a studio of our own, I want to make decorations for the studio. Nothing but big flowers. Next door to your shop, in the restaurant, you know there is a lovely decoration of flowers; I always remember the big sunflowers in the window there.

If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels. So the whole thing will be a symphony in blue and yellow. I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.”

Often synonymous with happiness and light, for Van Gogh Sunflowers also brought meaning of new hope for building his artist community in the Studio of the South.   The National Gallery website has an interesting section on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers which details Sunflowers as symbols of happiness and covers this period in Van Gogh’s life:
 
Van Gogh’s Sunflowers served as an inspiration for many other artists.  View other artists’ Sunflowers.

While Monet is known for his series paintings including his Water Lilies and Haystacks series, Van Gogh was not really known for a painting series although he created 30 paintings containing wheat fields.   Many of Van Gogh’s wheat field paintings were created during 1889 in Saint-Remy de Provence where Van Gogh was staying in the Saint Paul Hospital.  From his room in the asylum there, Van Gogh captured the view of wheat fields in the sun, in the rain and under swirling clouds.  Van Gogh constantly reinvented the French summer landscape capturing light on the stalks of wheat in different ways.  Below are some of Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields.

One of Van Gogh’s most beautiful paintings and one that today is renowned among the most popular selling prints is Van Gogh’s “Almond Blossom.”   Painted in Saint-Rémy, France in February of 1890, this painting was created by Van Gogh in the last year of his life.  Originally painted as a gift for his brother Theo’s newborn son, Almond Blossom, shown here, is an oil on canvas painting inspired by Japanese prints with a blue background and almond branches covered in blossoms in the foreground. 

After by the birth of his nephew, Van Gogh wrote the following in a letter to his mother from February 20, 1890,

“I imagine that, like me, your thoughts are much with Jo and Theo: how glad I was when the news came that it had ended well: it was a good thing that Wil stayed on. I should have greatly preferred him to call the boy after Father, of whom I have been thinking so much these days, instead of after me; but seeing it has now been done, I started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky.”

Theo named the newborn Vincent after his brother, and Vincent seemed quite proud to share this painting with him as it was a symbol of new life and the coming of spring.  In a letter to his brother Theo from March 15 of 1890 Van Gogh wrote,

“My work was going well, the last canvas of branches in blossom – you will see that it was perhaps the best, the most patiently worked thing I had done, painted with calm and with a greater firmness of touch.”

Today Almond Blossom, or Blossoming Almond Tree as it is often called, can be seen at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

From the years 1886 through 1889 Van Gogh completed over 30 self-portrait paintings. This is not only an incredible number of self-portraits in general, but to have completed so many in such a short time frame is impressive as well. Despite the fact that these were all painted within the span of just a few years, Van Gogh’s appearance changes dramatically from one to the next. His early self-portraits, much like his earlier paintings, are dark and often in shadows, while his later ones are full of the color and light. While each resembles what we know Van Gogh to look like, his paintings and perception of himself changes. His impressions of himself are honest, not idealized, often conveying looks of pain in his eyes. View some of Van Gogh’s self-portraits below, or view this video compilation of his self-portraits to see them change over the years.

Although Gauguin and other contemporaries had a profound impact on Van Gogh’s work, Van Gogh was also greatly influenced by some of his predecessors.  The work of French artist Jean Francois Millet, in particular, resonated with Van Gogh.  In many ways Millet’s experiences and the subjects he chose to paint mirrored Van Gogh’s life and work.   Van Gogh could relate to Millet’s paintings of peasant life and the depiction of the plight of laborers.  It was this realistic approach that Van Gogh often emulated in many of his paintings as shown.

Today we are still comparing the works of Van Gogh and Millet.  In fact, this month a special exhibition will open at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where Van Gogh’s The Sower, 1888 will be seen along with Millet’s The Sower, 1850 for the first time ever.

A “new” Van Gogh painting was announced in The Netherlands today.  Despite the huge body of work that Van Gogh produced and the number of claims to Van Gogh discoveries that have been made, it is extremely rare that a new Van Gogh is actually authenticated.  This and the fact that the late Dirk Hannema, art collector and curator, had been trying to prove the painting’s authenticity since 1975, makes the painting, Le Blute-Fin Mill, an extraordinary discovery.  As the first Van Gogh to be authenticated since 1995, Le Blute-Fin Mill has the art world buzzing. 

The painting, which went on display today at the Museum de Fundatie in the town of Zwolle, The Netherlands, features a large windmill, a popular subject for Van Gogh’s Parisian paintings from 1886.  In fact, Van Gogh’s Le Moulin de Blute-Fin shows the same mill from a different angle. 

The exhibition “The Discovery – Vincent van Gogh’s De Mole ‘Le blute-fin’ in the collection of Museum de Fundatie containing the work will be on display until July 4, 2010.   To view the newly authenticated painting click the Museum de Fundatie link below.

Related Sites:

Museum de Fundatie

With the autumn in full swing, this time of year brings to mind harvest time and preparing for next year.  Van Gogh must have thought the same thing as he was capturing The Reaper and The Sower on canvas.  Inspired by Jean-François Millet, Van Gogh created several “Reaper” and “Sower” paintings between the years 1888 and 1889.

The Sower, shown above left, was painted by Van Gogh in November of 1888.  In this painting, Van Gogh was experimenting with the use of vibrant complimentary colors – something he would continue to do and something he would become known for in some of his most famous paintings like Starry Night.  In a letter to his brother Theo from November of 1888, Van Gogh described the colors he was using in the Sower as “Immense citron-yellow disk for the sun. Sky green-yellow with pink clouds. The field violet, the sower and the tree Prussian blue.”  Although the sun is a large and beaming yellow in this painting, there is still a sense of darkness that is present in the midst of fall.     

In Wheat Fields with Reaper at Sunrise, shown above right, again the subject is simple and again the use of color intense.  With the brilliant yellows and golds of the wheat fields in this painting there is more of a feeling of life and light contrary to the subject matter.  Van Gogh described this contrast in another letter to Theo from September of 1889 when he wrote, “For I see in this reaper – a vague figure toiling away for all he’s worth in the midst of the heat to finish his task – I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is, if you like, the opposite of the sower which I tried to do before. But there’s no sadness in this death, this one takes place in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with light of pure gold.” Contributing to the effect of the opposites is also the fact that The Sower takes place at sunset while the Reaper at sunrise.     

Van Gogh completed several different Sower and Reaper paintings; to see them or to find out where they are located today, view our catalog.

Letters Source:

Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Arles, c. 25 November 1888
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Saint-Rémy, 5 or 6 September 1889

Related Articles:

Van Gogh: Brush with Genius Brings Artist to Life
Artchive – Sower with Setting Sun
Van Gogh Museum – The Sower