1874-1890 · 22 Gogh.art nodes
Reading
Reading reveals the overlooked Van Gogh: he does not paint only with his eyes, but calibrates vision through novels, religion, biography and letters.
- The Ferocious Reader
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Copyist
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Translator
London Heartbreak
In London he learned how to look, and learned how to hit a wall. The first took seven years to ferment into painting; the second — knowing when to stop — he never learned, not to the end of his life.
- The Ferocious Reader
- Synaesthetic Precision
Borinage 1879
In the Borinage he lost his post, his direction and his language. About a year later he began, in earnest, to take painting as a road. What happened in between, he never fully explained.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Ferocious Reader
Miners in the Snow at Dawn
White snow, black figures. He lets shape speak before language does.
- The Ferocious Reader
- Synaesthetic Precision
Worn Out
He is not describing suffering. He wants to know what to call that thing.
- The Ferocious Reader
- Synaesthetic Precision
The Hague and Sien
He said he went to help her; he could not. This is not a tragedy that has been covered over, but something he never quite worked out himself.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Ferocious Reader
The Weavers
He painted the same proportion over and over, and in the end took no side.
- The Ferocious Reader
- Synaesthetic Precision
The Potato Eaters
The picture brought him no success, but he finally knew what he was painting for.
- The Ferocious Reader
- The Colour Experimenter
Still Life with Bible
He did not explain what it meant to set those two books side by side. Sometimes a painting is a position, and needs no footnote.
- The Ferocious Reader
- The Colour Experimenter
Antwerp Academy
He lived hard up in Antwerp, yet he still put his money and attention into materials, prints, and things worth looking at.
- The Translator
- The Colour Experimenter
Pere Tanguy
Those who helped the painters usually vanish, afterward, into the backgrounds of the pictures.
- The Translator
- The Colour Experimenter
Japanese Print Translations
He went to Arles because he believed it was the place he had seen in the prints.
- The Translator
- The Copyist
The Sower Motif
He painted the sower many times in his life, but each time was not repetition — it was using one figure to test who he was at that moment.
- The Copyist
- The Colour Experimenter
The Sunflower Decoration
He painted the welcome ahead of time, and then waited for it to be seen.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Ferocious Reader
The Roulin Family
He was not painting himself an imagined family — he was painting, for the few who really stayed, a portrait that might make a person stay.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Copyist
Starry Night over the Rhône
At night, by gaslight, before the night sky, he painted the night. That alone should not be left out.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Ferocious Reader
The Night Café
"It is one of the ugliest pictures I have done." Those are his own words, from the letter.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
Gauguin Arrives
Two painters look at the same scene and paint two completely different worlds. This matters more than what came after — but what came after covered it over.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Ferocious Reader
La Berceuse
He kept designing what others would feel on seeing his pictures — only the "others" grew harder and harder to have present.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Copyist
Gauguin Leaves
After that night, Arles was, in a sense, over. Soon after leaving the hospital he picked up the brush again.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
The Olive Groves
He had to get the tree right first. So he painted, among the olive trees, over and over.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
The Saint-Rémy Copies
Within his confinement, by copying others, he discovered who he now was.
- The Copyist
- The Translator
Doctor Gachet
His doctor appears in his painting, wearing the same expression as himself.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter