1883-1890 · 23 Gogh.art nodes
Translation
Translation is a key to this site’s Van Gogh: text to image, print to oil, black-and-white to colour, ethics to composition are translated through his hand.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Ferocious Reader
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Translator
- The Copyist
The Back of Beyond
He was not short of inspiration. He was short of four or five colours.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Ferocious Reader
Still Life with Bible
No surviving letter explains why the two books are set side by side.
- 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 dark period could no longer continue unchanged.
- The Translator
- The Colour Experimenter
The Paris Flower Studies
In Paris he used flowers to learn colour. The letters became sparse during those two years, but the paintings left a record in place of the silence.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Translator
Pere Tanguy
Those who helped the painters usually vanish, afterward, into the backgrounds of the pictures.
- The Translator
- The Colour Experimenter
Asnières landscape series
Here he learned to let light scatter — and then he set out to find a stronger light.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Translator
The Self-Portraits
He was not searching for who he was; he was using his own face to do something technical.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Translator
Japanese Print Translations
He went to Arles not to arrive in Japan, but to look for a place where he could paint out the method of Japanese prints.
- The Translator
- The Copyist
Orchards in Bloom
At the best of his time in Arles he felt it himself — but he did not know what to call it.
- The Translator
- The Colour Experimenter
The Sower Motif
The sower returned across the years, but never as a single unchanged image.
- 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
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 Yellow House
The imagination he spent on the Yellow House lasted far longer than the house itself.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
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
The Bedroom
He painted the same room three times: once living inside it, twice already gone.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
Irises
In his first letter from Saint-Rémy, two garden paintings were already under way.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Translator
Cypresses
He did not find the tree first in his letters; he caught up to it, in the letters, as he painted.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
The Starry Night
About his most famous picture, he himself said little. Both of these things are true at once.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
The Saint-Rémy Copies
The source could be black and white; the colour answer had to be his own.
- The Copyist
- The Translator
The Hospital Garden
After his range became smaller, he looked at that small place more thoroughly.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
Almond Blossom
It was a gift for a child, and one of the works he later described most carefully in his own hand.
- The Translator
- The Copyist
The Wheat Fields
He put sadness, extreme loneliness, and the countryside's strengthening force in the same letter.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter