Family Affairs

You have to go and see this exhibition – it’s on until 18th April 2010. It is a fascinating insight into the life of Van Gogh. You get to see many of his early sketches and drawings and letters – I was amazed to see how technically correct and powerful these were. It made me realise that when he suddenly leapt into a blaze of colour a few years later he wasn’t the impressionist I thought he was, he was just using the brush strokes that he saw as clearly rooted in nature.

He died at 37 after starting his career as an artist only 10 years before. He was clever, lucid and passionate. He read Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. He spoke and wrote in three different languages. “Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me” he wrote. It was hardly surprising he suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. Imagine trying to get everything he wanted to say and feel down on paper in so many different mediums in so short a period of time.

The exhibition takes you through the various stages of his development, from the sketches, to some paintings of the Dutch landscape and the focus on the peasants working in the fields moving from the rather bleak landscape to Paris where he suddenly became a daring colourist. Then there are the portraits which were the most important part of his work where he tried to capture the “je ne sais quoi of the eternal”.

There are many of the paintings we know already, but the story it tells is completely different when you see all of his artwork together like this.

He shot himself in a field, through the chest and then took two days to die. How hideous. He died in Auvers on 29 July 1890.

Paul Gauguin, with whom he lived for a while clearly unhinged him even more. They clashed really badly apparently. It was during this time he chopped off part of his left ear lobe. He sums up the difference between them by painting portraits of them each represented by chairs:-

“Portrait of the Artist as a Chair”:-

Van Gogh’s chair is all rustic and basic, sitting on a tiled floor. Simple with a pipe and a bit of old tissue on the chair itself and painted in the yellow light of day. Whereas Gauguin’s chair is depicted in night light, all dark red and green and lush with a candle on the chair. Completely the opposite in fact:-