Doctor Who and Vincent van Gogh
Posted on | June 7, 2010 | 7 Comments
I just don’t get Doctor Who, the much-loved BBC TV series. However, I was curious about this weekend’s episode because it featured as its central character Vincent van Gogh, who regular readers will know is a particular favourite of mine. So I watched it.
I suspected that actor Tony Curran would make a rather good Vincent – which he did – and that the script, by Blackadder writer Richard Curtis, might offer a rip-roaring story of vision and illusion, passion and pathos (in a Blackadder Goes Forth sort of way) and perhaps even tackle some of Vincent’s internal demons. But I was seriously disappointed.
The script was so weak and went nowhere, and as a van Gogh aficionado the shocking errors in the chronology and geography of Vincent’s life were glaring, irritating and lazy. For example, the church in which Vincent, the Doctor and his sidekick end up to defeat the monster is not even in Provence. And where in Vincent’s life was this rustic farmhouse where much of the action took place?
Historical inaccuracy apart, the script went nowhere, which is such a shame, because there is so much fascinating stuff in Vincent’s life which could have made a rich seam for a great storyline. How about a monster which turns colour to monochrome? Or sunflowers which through Vincent’s vision become alive and dangerous on the canvas? Or Vincent’s inner demons which force him to do violent things like ear-mutilating?
There were some nice touches; actor Tony Curran made a cracking job of Vincent’s unstable, explosive fragility; the cackling Arlesienne women outside the café at the beginning wore the correct costume; and the mock up of Vincent’s bedroom was great. And the CG which made the crows flap over the cornfield was wonderful as was the CGd starry night at the end.
But the overblown, syrupy, tear-jerking bit at the end where Vincent is seen in a 21st century gallery overhearing Bill Nighy sing his praises as the greatest artist of all time had me reaching for the sick-bucket.
The review in The Telegraph considered it weak. The review in The Guardian was slightly more generous.
Vincent’s DNA exposed in a letter
Posted on | January 29, 2010 | No Comments
Note: The F and JH numbers in this blog are standard references used by van Gogh scholars to refer to specific works, rather like scientists use Latin names to refer to species.
Today I went to see The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and OH MY GOD, it was absolutely incredible. I got some real surprises and met some old familiar friends.
There are 65 paintings, 40 drawings and 40 letters on show. The letters are so fragile they rarely if ever get exhibited.
Most people are familiar with one or two of Vincent’s works; the sunflowers or the starry nights, perhaps. But for many people, when they see a van Gogh for real for the first time they are knocked out by the vibrant colour. I know I do. How can colour be so bright?! But Vincent gets me with a second punch to the jaw I every time when I consider his drawing. For me, to even attempt to paint without getting the drawing right is a mistake. Vincent knew this – indeed I learned it from him. So to see so many of his acutely observed drawings, some accompanied by the painting that they refer to, was extremely revealing. The spontaneity, the sheer force of line, the accuracy, the expression… what a draftsman! I could bang on for thousands of words about it, but instead have a butcher’s at this:
It’s Road with Pollarded Willows (F1678, JH46) drawn in 1881 in Etten. I spent AGES looking at it. This has everything in it that a good prog rock song should have: contrast, rhythm, tone, narrative, simplicity, skill, all ultimately leading to a wholesome and satisfying beauty. I love the cottages on the far right hand side with their red roofs. Like the ting of a triangle in a Steely Dan tune.
Later, in Arles, Vincent would take to using a reed pen, making marks with it that Japanese printmakers do using woodblock printing techniques. The drawings look like handwriting, and are as spontaneous and ‘legible’ almost in the same way. I’m absolutely BONKERS about Vincent’s reed pen drawings. Here’s one of boats near Les-Stes-Maries-sur-Mer:
There were many paintings hanging that I’d seen before in the Dutch or French collections, but to see them hung together was delightful. Take for example one wall in which featured a series of portraits of the Roulin family that Vincent made friends with in Arles in 1888. Here’s Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin (F432, JH 1522)…
…which was hung alongside portraits Vincent made of his wife Augustine, their young son Camille and baby Marcel. You could really get a sense of just what his friendship with this family meant to him. It was very moving. These were pictures I was familiar with. But there were others on show that I’d never seen before, from private collections.
For example, here’s Snowy landscape in Arles (F391, JH1358 ) painted in February 1888 just a few days after Vincent arrived in Provence.
The delicacy of colour, lots of high key whites and pastel tones which he’d been using in Paris, spill out.
Another surprise was White farmhouse among olive trees (F664) which I’d never seen before and sprung out at me like a pouncing leopard.
It hasn’t been exhibited for 109 years and now lives in Japan. The luminous colour in the sky left me gasping ‘how does he do that?’ Having been into the Provencal landscape close to where this was painted I understood every brushstroke, each wiggle of blue that makes the mountains, each slash of brown that makes the trees. For reasons I can’t explain, this one moved me to tears.
And how about this for piece of genius from someone who hardly yet considered himself to be any more than a student of art? It’s Cottage with Peasant Woman Digging (F1669, JH825) painted in Nuenen in 1885.
See what I mean about the drawing? Brilliant. Just bloody brilliant! My feet feel muddy just looking at it. Look at the white bricks around the door – Vincent has even managed to express the detail of the lime leaching out from the mortar.
And so to the letters…
Even if Vincent had never painted a stroke, he would surely be known as a writer. His written observations of the world around him are as fascinating and profound as his pictures. But Im not going to tell you about the content of the letters because you can read them – every single one – online right here. Instead I’m going to tell you about their physical appearance. The first shock is that they are tiny! Really tiny. Vincent often folded a sheet to make four pages from one leaf the size a little smaller than A4. His handwriting changes from mood to mood, from sentence to sentence. Sometimes it’s scrawly, sometimes neat, sometimes he uses too much ink so it blobs. Other times you can see him rushing to the end of sentence as he hurries to get a thought down on paper. Often it’s really tiny writing. You can see the folds, the dog-eared corners, greasy marks, the pencil markings that Vincent’s sister–in-law Jo and others used to number the letters into some kind of comprehensive order.
And then there are the sketches. To better describe what he was thinking Vincent would draw little tiny sketches; of recent paintings he’d made, of ideas he’d had, or in this case (above) to show how he imagined his pictures might one day be hung together. They are so revealing.
It got me thinking about how people today don’t write letters anymore. It’s all email and Facebook. I still have all the letters my mum wrote to me when she lived in Hong Kong and I missed her so much. My dad keeps all the postcards that I have sent him from all over the world. These human documents have a tangible magic that tell a fascinating personal story. It makes me sad to think that perhaps today’s iPod generation won’t ever have such treasure to look back on. I’ve digressed! Sorry.
These were just a few of the fascinating and exquisite things I saw today. I could have mentioned the sensitive portrait of Sien, the woman he lived with in The Hague; or the letter Vincent’s friend Paul Gauguin wrote to him from Pont Aven; or the ‘last’ letter … the unposted one found on Vincent’s body with great dark blobby stains on it. Blood stains perhaps? A gunshot wound to the stomach is likely to bleed. So here you have it. Vincent’s DNA exposed in a letter.
The curators of this exhibition have done an heroic job of getting this lot together in one place at one time. I think Vincent would be very proud.
Comment from David Brooks of Toronto, Canada
Wonderful commentary, Jane. Pen strokes or brush strokes, there’s something so moving about seeing Vincent’s work in person, isn’t there? What an amazing opportunity to see this incredible exhibition–the first major Van Gogh exhibition in England in forty years. And to rave reviews I might add. I’m so glad that you got to see it and that you could share your passionate insights with us.
And I agree about the demise of letter writing. The Helene Hanff “84 Charing Cross Road” days are behind us I’m afraid.
Van Gogh’s Letters: the books
Posted on | January 13, 2010 | No Comments
After 15 years of work, the Van Gogh Museum has published an astonishing six volume set of the complete letters of Vincent van Gogh. 
Building on the groundbreaking work done by the late Jan Hulsker, the authors have set a standard in art publishing that it’s hard to see will be bettered. A more thorough piece of work is hard to imagine: every letter, in chronological order, illustrated with the pictures he is writing about (his own and other peoples) and annotated with scientific precision. Nearly a million words!
In other artist’s monographs we get someone else’s point of view about an artist. But in these new volumes we meet Vincent expressing himself, unabridged, as if under an electron-microscope.
For me, the greatest joy about these books is that when Vincent mentions a painting or drawing he has been working on, it is illustrated alongside the text. As are the many sketches he included in his correspondence. So we can see immediately what he’s talking about, the better to understand his thinking.
The volumes are not cheap; but what price such time-consuming, painstaking scholarship? What price a lifetime of fascinating insight? We can learn as much about what it is to be human from Van Gogh’s letters as we can from Shakespeare or Dickens, two writers Vincent himself admired.
The letters show Vincent to be far from the ear-slicing loony of popular imagination. They show a sincere, eloquent and troubled soul seeking with grim determination to teach himself to be an artist of some worth. They show a human being struggling with desperate loneliness and a debt of gratitude to his brother Theo that he knew he could never repay. Neither Dickens nor Shakespeare could have written a greater tragedy.
The letters are also online here complete with annotations and illustrations. The way the website works is itself a work of art.
Vincent’s harvest landscape
Posted on | February 4, 2008 | Comments Off
I’ve been working on this painting Vincent’s harvest landscape since October and I’ve finally completed it:
It’s based on Vincent’s own painting Harvest landscape which he painted in July 1888:
His painting is such a joyous celebration of the landscape to the east of Arles and I find it deeply moving. I could dissect it for you and tell you about how it demonstrates his colour theories, how he has flattened the ‘picture plane’ in the manner of a 19th century Japanese printmaker and how this landscape has such a massive impact on Vincent’s life. I could easily write a thesis on it! Instead, I chose to pay homage to it by making my own version of it, based on my thoughts and feelings when I was confronted with the reality of it.
This is the view today, from roughly where Vincent stood:
My starting point were the four main elements that can be found in Vincent’s composition that remain unchanged today; the line of the Alpilles mountains on the horizon, the Monte de Cordes, the Abbaye de Montmajour and the patchwork of fields. But I also wanted to include elements that I found fascinating – the fields of bulls and creamy-white Camargue horses, the egrets, the orange-roofed Provencal farmhouses, the lines of cypresses, vines and olive trees and the banks of reeds lining the canals.
As is my habit when creating composite landscapes, I also like to put in things with a symbolic meaning or which somehow say more than what they are.
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The huge emperor moth, for example. When Vincent was staying at the asylum at St Remy, just on the other side of the Alpilles mountains, he found such a moth in the asylum garden. After Vincent lost his religious faith he found all the joy, mystery and meaning he needed in nature. His careful studies of the plants and animals he found, like his beautiful moth, are an expression of this. |
In my picture I put a couple of bee-eaters, a commonly-sighted bird in that landscape. I noticed that their bright plumage is made up of the same colours as the landscape. I like the idea of seeing the landscape from a bee-eaters point-of-view flitting through the air, checking it all out like Vincent did.
But as I painted, it became more and more difficult to know how to finish the composition. Eventually after weeks of thinking about it, I took my cue from His Vincentness. I looked again at his works and then I put him in it.
I show Vincent on the road walking in on the far right – just like in his drawing on the road to Tarascon the road he used to get to this landscape.
The reaper, busy at work in the centre of my pic, is symbolic of Vincent harvesting visual material from this landscape. And it’s a direct copy of his figure in this painting:
Vincent was obsessed with the reaper, grim or otherwise. For him a reaper meant bounty and harvest, but also the romantic toil of honest peasant labourers, as well as its biblical connotations of death. Vincent was never fully able to shrug off the baggage of his religious upbringing. But he was aware of the power of christian iconography and used its symbolism to add meaning to his work. In his letters Vincent often said that he went to work in the fields, just like the labourers did. He also predicted his work would save him or kill him. He was right. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear it did both.
Starry Night over the Rhone revisited
Posted on | October 28, 2007 | Comments Off
Last month, as you know, Moth and I went to Arles in southern France for a van Gogh hunting trip. One of the great thrills for me was to find that the night time view of the Rhône that Vincent painted…
…was virtually unchanged from Vincent’s time. Here’s a photo of it that Moth took:
As is so often the case, the camera simply can’t take in the whole scene and squash the space in the same way the human eye can, let alone translate it into two dimensions and a pleasing composition. So while I was there, I made my own quick sketch of it with Vincent’s own composition high in my mind as I worked:
Seeing what Vincent saw more or less unchanged made a great impression on me and I wanted to have a go at the scene myself. Readers will know that only rarely do I make pictures of things I haven’t seen or experienced personally, so my final version (below) isn’t merely a copy or reworking of Vincent’s painting, it’s a response to what I saw, and how I felt about the scene which Vincent immortalised in 1888. Here it is:
Yesterday I completed an edition of six drypoints* (a kind of engraving) each washed with watercolour. They measure 400mm x 300mm, the same size as my previous drypoint* of ‘Vincent’s café terrace’ and cost £95 unframed/ £125 unframed.
As a pair, Vincent’s café terrace and Vincent’s starry night over the Rhône look absolutely wonderful:
A 10% discount from the unframed price is available for collectors who’d like to buy a pair.
*Wondering what drypoint is?
Another postcard from Auvers-sur-Oise
Posted on | October 5, 2007 | No Comments
I’ve been to Auvers-sur-Oise a number of times before and blogged about it briefly here. It’s a village of real charm and character just north of Paris, and where Vincent van Gogh spent the final 70 days of his life. There is plenty here to interest both casual van Gogh tourists and aficionados alike as many of the places he painted still exist.
When I first came to Auvers in 1982 for my 19th birthday it was a very different village indeed. In 25 years, van Gogh tourism has taken off in a big way! In 1982, for example you could go to the café called La Maison de Van Gogh…
… and sit outside, have a beer, smoke a fag, and watch the world go by. And then, when you’d had enough beer, (here I am as a 19-year-old, having enough beer)…
… you could pluck up the courage to ask the barman if you could see the room where van Gogh died. No entrance fee, no tickets, no fancy audiovisual presentation.
Today, the café has been restored to how it was in Vincent’s day in 1890, when it was the ‘Auberge Ravoux’:
The front has been repainted:
And the café now a hopelessly overpriced restaurant from which we were barred as there was nothing for vegetarians!
Nevertheless, I wanted to see again the grim little attic room where Vincent lived for 70 days, and then – on 29 July 1890 – died. So I paid my money and virtually had to plead with the staff not to see the audiovisual presentation and be let upstairs to view the room. “No photos†I was told. “Oh, OK. May I draw?†I asked. “Of course†came the delighted reply. So I went up the dingy, poorly lit staircase, turned on my camera, took a sneaky photo…
… and started to draw.
Vincent’s room is tiny and very poorly lit by a single tiny skylight. Yeah, suicide would feel like a welcome option if you lived here! The printed literature you get when you buy your ticket has a great phrase on it about the room. “There is nothing to see, but everything to feel.†So true!
After seeing the cheerless room where he lived and died I thought it would be a good idea to go out into the village and spot some of the places he painted, places full of light and life. Just round the corner (literally) from the Auberge is this scene:
…which Vincent painted.
I could tell you about many, many more of the scenes he painted in Auvers, but we’d be here all day and this blog would be ridiculous long, so I’m going to limit myself to just a few which may interest the general reader and not just Vincent aficionados. The church, for example:
Much has been written about the symbolism in this painting, the fact that it’s the back of the church, a church (in the wider sense) which he felt alienated from, increasingly putting his ‘faith’ in the natural world. I’m not so sure about any of those suppositions, but what I do know is that this the priest of this church, which Vincent immortalisd on canvas one sunny spring day in 1890, would later that summer refuse to host his funeral because he committed suicide. So much for christian charity and compassion, eh? Bastards.
On our last evening in Auvers we sat at the roadside, at the exact spot where Vincent set up his easel, and set up our camera on the tripod to take this shot – we were aiming to get the blue of the sky as deep as Vincent’s:
A short walk north up the sunken lane takes you into the great rolling fields above the Oise valley, where Vincent painted this, Wheatfield with crows, supposedly his last ever painting:
This is the ‘supposed’ spot today, a crossroads of farmtracks, though how this could have been accurately identified, I really don’t know:
Note the Japanese tourist, just one of many hundreds we saw on our van Gogh travels. Van Gogh sites have clearly made it onto most Japanese tourist itineraries! I decided that as it was a beautiful hot day, and Moth had retired to our B&B to watch the Belgian F1Grand Prix, I would sit and make a sketch.
As I sat quietly today with my paints out, many parties of tourists, from all over the world came to this spot. When I was here only 10 years ago, I sat on this path to paint and only a couple of locals walking their dogs passed by.
From here, the site of the supposed last painting, perhaps even the field where our boy shot himself, the walls of the cemetery rise up above the field line:
And so to the cemetery, to pay respects once again at Vincent and Theo’s graves:
On previous trips, I’ve sat at the simple gravesides for some time and seen no-one. But today it was heaving:
Vincent, if only you could know how loved and admired your extraordinary, visionary views of the world are.
Finally, here’s a lovely touch. Auvers, the place where Vincent ended his life, is twinned with Zundert in the Netherlands where Vincent was born. I spotted this road sign and smiled:
What a fabulous journey Vincent has taken me on through my life!
If you want to see more of Vincent’s works, make sure you check out this website created and run by my friend David Brooks in Toronto. It displays 100% of Vincent’s works and letters. Extraordinary!
Postcard from Dr Gachet’s house
Posted on | October 3, 2007 | Comments Off
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Dr Paul Gachet lived in Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris, and combined his private medical practice with a love of art and mixing with artists of his day. In 1890, when Vincent van Gogh moved to Auvers, Gachet was a widower with two teenage children: Marguerite and Paul. Vincent moved to Auvers specifically because of its artistic history and because he could be kept an eye on by Gachet (even though he was away at his practice in Paris for much of the week…work that one out! ) |
Gachet was probably a bit of a quack. He was interested in alternative medicines and mental health but did little to help Vincent who needed time, reassurance, a proper diagnosis and drugs which had yet to be developed, rather than useless homeopathic witchcraft. Vincent was possibly beyond help by this stage anyway, but his comments about Gachet are telling. He says he thought that “Gachet is sicker then me.â€
For me, the name Gachet is synonymous with something dodgy: there is plenty of evidence that Gachet and his son traded off his van Gogh connection for the rest of his life. Indeed, it is likely that his good-for-nothing leech of a son faked a load of paintings and palmed them off as Vincent’s. But that’s another story!
In my previous trips to Auvers, I had managed to find Gachet’s house but as it was always privately owned, I had never seen inside. Since I was last here, the local authority has bought the house and turned it into a museum.
The whole property is perched high up on a steep terrace of the Oise valley, with the garden terraced into small areas for flowers and vegetables. Cezanne made a painting with Gachet’s house in it – it’s the tall one in the middle left:
Now we were here, we had to go in and check it out.
In the garden, beneath a perspex cover, stands the red table:
This was in daily use at chez Gachet being the table which Gachet leans on in the portrait Vincent painted of the doc in June 1890:
Another interesting exhibit is the piano in the drawing room.
This piano is – apparently – the one Vincent painted 17-year-old Marguerite Gachet playing:
It looked pretty similar to me. I spotted this nice photo of Marguerite Gachet as an old woman in 1947 playing the same piano.
Upstairs is Gachet’s etching press, or one very like it…
…on which Vincent made his one and only etching, a portrait of Dr Gachet:
There are 61 known impressions of the copper plate – read more about it
here – but many were made after Vincent’s death, by Gachet’s parasitic son, profiting on his tenuous van Gogh connection.
I was delighted to have seen Gachet’s house and pace out how far Vincent had to walk to get to it from his end of the village. But I felt uncomfortable at perhaps being part of the over-aggrandisement of the Gachet family and their connection with Vincent. They hardly really knew him, after all.
Vincent’s cafe terrace and now mine
Posted on | October 1, 2007 | Comments Off
I’ve already shown you this superb painting of Vincent van Gogh’s café terrace at night and what it looks like today:
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It was high on my list of places to go when we were in Arles last month:
On our last day in Arles we returned there again as I wanted to make a sketch:
Since we returned to Oxfordshire, I have had a composition of it brewing in my mind, based on my sketch, which I finally managed to execute over the past few days:
It’s a drypoint washed with watercolour and I’m absolutely delighted with it. Even my children (who are my harshest critics) said “Ooooh! Mum!” when I showed it to them. As it is a drypoint, I have made a limited edition of six impressions. They measure 400mm x 300mm and cost £95 unframed (plus £5 for postage). Get ‘em while they’re wet!
Postcard from Arles: La Crau and Montmajour
Posted on | September 30, 2007 | Comments Off
I wanted to go to the old ruined abbey at Montmajour, just 3kms from Arles…
…not for any pious reasons, obviously, and not because it’s a nice building, because as you can see it’s a hideous, bullying lump with few redeeming features. I wanted to go there because it was a favourite haunt of Vincent van Gogh when he lived here in 1888. I wanted to find a way to get up to the rocky outcrop on which it is built from where Vincent sketched this lovely drawing:
…but despite asking the staff, there was no way I could get beyond a giant, ancient wooden gate, which Vincent puts in the drawing if you look carefully. I even rang the directeur of antiquities to try to get special permission to go beyond the gate, but she was away and my poor French prevented me from pressing my request harder with more junior staff. Gah! It was so frustrating, knowing that view is still there, unchanged. Next time, perhaps, next time…
I love this drawing for lots of reasons, but I like to think that Vincent relegated the abbey to its rightful place behind the rocks, and put nature – which here in Provence intoxicated him more than ever before – in front. Way to go, lad!
From down on the plain of La Crau, I did manage to make a very quick sketch of the abbey:
Instead I would have to make do with big views of the plain of La Crau, from up here by the abbey, which Vincent loved to draw and paint, looking over the farmland and canals, towards the little ridge of land near Pont de Crau where we were staying, and back towards Arles:
No wonder he loved it up here so much! The views are fabulous.
I hastily got my pencils out to make a rough sketch; painting was out of the question as the mistral up here was so strong I could hardly hold my sketchbook open.
Harvest landscape
It was somewhere round here he painted the simply wonderful ‘Harvest landscape’.
We drove out onto some tiny dead-end farmtracks into the plain of La Crau to try to find a viewpoint with both the abbey and the Mont de Cordes in, like Vincent shows us, but I couldn’t find it, couldn’t get the angle right.
Then after almost two weeks of looking, the penny finally dropped: his viewpoint for ‘Harvest landscape’ was almost certainly from somewhere by the canal which runs parallel to Arles’ eastern ring road. Here’s a shot of it taken from our car as we drove past. It wasn’t possible to stop:
Only from there, on the raised banks of the canal would he have got the height he needed. Then having found his view, he placed the elements he wanted to show into a satisfying composition based on the reality in front of him, rather than a slavish, topographically accurate representation of what he saw in front of his eyes. Now I understand. Now I really see.
Postcard from Arles: artist’s bedroom
Posted on | September 28, 2007 | Comments Off
14 September 2007
The ‘Yellow House’, where Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles in 1888 was hit in an Allied bombing raid 1944 and subsequently pulled down:
So the artist’s bedroom, which he painted in October 1888…
… no longer exists. Vincent loved this painting and considered it one of his favourites. My friend David Brooks, who runs the most complete online van Gogh website, has written about it extensively here.
As we were walking through Arles I was surprised to see that some entrepreneurial Arlesians had decided to cash in on the rise in van Gogh tourism and recreate the bedroom in a little house just by the arena. We had to see it. It was superb!
The attention to detail was superb, correct down to individual brushstrokes, so actually it is a reconstruction of the painting, not the bedroom itself. Worth a punt, in any case. It made me smile.
shopping basket
