Vincent Van Gogh
...with these conditions any longer, he left for his parents' new home in Nuenen in December 1883. Van Gogh had a phase in which he loved to paint birds and bird's nests. This phase did not last long. It only lasted until his father's death six months later. The Family Bible which he painted just before leaving his house for good, six months after his father's death in 1885, must have meant a great deal to him. Van Gogh had broken with Christianity when he was fired from the missionary which proved to be the most painful experience of his life, and one from which he never quite recovered. At Nuenen, van Gogh gave active physical toil a remarkable reality. It's impact went far beyond what the realist Gustave Corbet had achieved and beyond even the quasi-religious images of Jean-Francois Millet. He made a number of studies of peasant hands and heads before embarking on what would be his most important work at Nuenen. The pinnacle of his work in Holland was The Potato Eaters, a scene painted in April 1885 that shows the working day to be over. It was the last and most ambitious painting of his pre-Impressionist period, 1880-1885. When van Gogh painted the The Potato Eaters, he had not yet discovered the importance of color. Van Gogh went to Antwerp in November 1885, partly to escape local gossip. He vainly attempted to make money from painting portraits, townscapes, and trades men's signs. Then he enrolled at the Antwerp Academy to make use of the live models. Shortage of money led to van Gogh's undernourishment and acute physical distress. When van Gogh enrolled at the Academy in January 1886, he had just finished drawings that one day would be compared to the masters. Although willing to learn, he astonished fellow students by refusing to abandon the rapidity and boldness of his own methods. Possibly because of this, he was downgraded to the beginner class and consequently he left for Paris to live with his brother. It was through his brother Theo and an art gallery devoted to living artists that he discovered the Impressionists, and became familiar with the new art movements developing at the time. Before Paris, van Gogh had not even known who the Impressionists were. He admired pictures by Degas and Monet and through Toulouse-Lautrec he was in touch with the local members of the art world. He was also influenced by Japanese print makers. The Impressionists discovered Japanese prints long before van Gogh's arrival. These prints influenced him in his use of harmonized color. Van Gogh pinned them on his walls, and they appear in the background of some of his paintings. While refining his technique as painter in Paris, the home of the Impressionist school, he soon found that his real affinity was not for this school but for three men who had left their company to carry the torch of revolt a step further: for Cezanne, usually considered the most monstrous painter among the outcasts, for Gauguin, under the combined influence of Cezanne and of the Orient; and for Seraut, obsessed with experimental vision of art. Until 1886, he had only known the Dutch painters and a handful of French landscape painters including Millet and the Barbizon group. Now, for the first time, he saw work by Delacroix (whom he later said had more influence on him than the Impressionists) and by Pissaro, Cézanne, Renoir and Sisley. Light, color and brilliance burst upon him. He went about the streets with a palette of bright colors, as delighted by the cosmopolitan bustle of the city as Manet, Monet, Renoir, and the others had been twenty years before him. Van Gogh's Impressionist phase lasted two years. Although it was vitally important for his development, he had to integrate it with the style of his earlier years before his genius could fully unfold. Paris opened his eyes to the senses and beauty of the visible world and taught him the pictorial language of the color patch, but painting continued to be a vessel for his personal emotions. To investigate this spiritual reality with the ne! w means at this command, he went to Arles in the south of France. It was there, between 1888 and 1889, that he produced his greatest pictures. While Cézanne and Seurat were making a more severe, classical art out of the impressionists style, van Gogh felt Impressionist art was pretty decorations and did nothing to evoke the sorrow of the human soul. He led the way in a different direction. He believed that impressionism did not allow the artist enough freedom to express his inner feelings. Since this was his main concern, he is sometimes called an expressionist. Expressionism is the idea of emotional spontaneity in painting. The portrait of Dr. Gachet is a perfect example of his melancholy, proto-Expressionist late work. By setting certain colors side by side he achieved effects of unearthly splendor. To color he brought dignity and form, the opposite of the abstractions into which Monet was heading and which seemed the inevitable limit of Impressionist techniques. Van Gogh thought it was the color, not the form, that determined the expressive content of his pictures. Three painters of genius emerged, overlapping the Impressionists in time and manner, whose names have become synonymous with the post-Impressionists movement: Cezanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Between them they set European painting on a path which turned Impressionism into something solid and durable, like the art of the museums, a return in effect, to the main stream, but with minds alight with discovery and purpose. These three, as well as Mile Bernard who wa...