Watercolour with Rehann Vazid | Hosted by French Escapade
8 Days in Provence FRANCE
18 - 25 Sep, 2027 | from US $4,390 | 8-13 Students
Van Gogh. Light of Provence.
When Vincent van Gogh travelled south from Paris to Provence in February 1888, he was thirty-five years old. He had devoted himself seriously to painting only eight years earlier, after unsuccessful attempts to become a teacher and a priest. He had little formal artistic training and was still searching for the painter he might become.
Paris had already begun the transformation.
Through his brother Theo, Van Gogh encountered the Impressionists and discovered an entirely different approach to colour. The dark palette of his earlier paintings began to disappear. He became fascinated by complementary oppositions—blue against orange, red against green, yellow against violet—and experimented with spontaneous brushwork, impasto and the clarity and simplicity of Japanese woodblock prints.
But Paris prepared his eyes for something that Provence would complete.
Van Gogh later remembered the excitement of the sixteen-hour train journey south to Arles. Ironically, he arrived to find the town covered by an exceptional fall of snow. Yet almost immediately he sensed that he had found somewhere different. “I believe that life here is just a little more satisfying than in many other spots,” he wrote to his sister.
Then spring arrived.
For a man from northern Europe, the southern light was a revelation. The colours he thought he had discovered in Paris suddenly acquired a new intensity beneath the Provençal sun. The sky, fields, buildings and shadows seemed sharpened and exaggerated by light.
And Van Gogh began to paint.
During his fifteen months in Arles, he produced approximately 200 paintings, 100 drawings and 200 letters, in what is generally considered one of the greatest periods of his career.
“My God, if I had only known this country at the age of twenty-five, instead of coming here when I was thirty-five years old!”
Van Gogh & Impressionism
Excerpt from What are you looking at? by Will Gompertz
Theo, his brother introduced him to the Impressionists’ work and Vincent had an epiphany. The lights had been turned on in his eyes and suddenly he saw colour. And lots of it. He wrote to a friend, saying that he was ‘seeking oppositions of blue with orange, red and green, yellow and violet, seeking the broken and neutral tones to harmonize brutal extremes. Trying to render intense colour and not grey harmony.’ He was up and running. Vincent practised the Impressionist skill of the spontaneous brushstroke, had his first dabblings with impasto painting (a technique where paint is applied so thickly to the canvas that it stands proud, resulting in a three-dimensional effect), and found that his love of Japanese woodblock prints, first developed in Antwerp, was shared by almost all avant-garde artists in Paris. It was all too much. Vincent was having a bit of a wobble. Theo suggested a break in the countryside of southern France and Vincent thought it a terrific idea. He had a vision of a ‘Studio of the South’: an artist’s colony to match the one his friend Gauguin had gone to in Brittany, in the north of the country.
Vincent went to check things out in Arles and had a second epiphany. For a lad from northern Europe, the southern sun was a revelation. He thought he had understood and appreciated colour in Paris, but that was nothing compared to the intensity of hues produced by the light from God’s flaming orb in Provence. Everything was accentuated. Vincent had seen the light.
In his fourteen months in Arles he produced 200 or so paintings, including masterpieces such as The Yellow House (1888), Still-Life with a Plate of Onions (1889), The Sower (1888), The Night Café (1888), Sunflowers in a Vase (1888), Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888) and The Bedroom (1888). He said, ‘I want to get to the point where people say of my work, “That man feels deeply.”’
He could have added ‘and whose works others feel deeply about’. When my eldest son was six we visited an art gallery that sold modern art posters. With the generosity of a dad on a day off I grandly offered to treat him to one poster and one postcard. I can’t remember the chosen postcard, but I can remember the poster: it was of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom (1888).
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘It’s relaxing,’ my son said.
He thought he had understood and appreciated colour in Paris, but that was nothing compared to the intensity of hues… in Provence. Everything was accentuated. Vincent had seen the light.
If Van Gogh had been in the same gallery I expect he would have rushed up and given the boy a hug. Because that is the feeling that Van Gogh was trying to project in the painting. He wanted every aspect of the picture to represent rest: the colours, the composition, the light, the mood and the furniture.
Arles was Van Gogh’s kind of town. He thought it evoked the simplicity and beauty of the world presented in his much-loved Japanese woodcuts (To Theo, 1888: ‘I envy the Japanese the extreme clearness which everything has in their work. It is never tedious and never seems to be done too hurriedly. Their work is as simple as breathing, and they do a figure in a few sure strokes with the same ease as if it were buttoning your coat.’). The sun, together with his optimistic notion of creating an artist’s commune, meant Vincent was on top form. But rather like the oddball at school whom everybody admires but tries to avoid, few would actually accept Vincent’s invitation to join him in Arles. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) did. The two self-taught artists were friends from Paris and shared an ambition to move on from the strictures of Impressionism.
For six weeks they competed and cajoled, each pushing the other to greater and greater artistic heights. By the time of their infamous row and the ear mutilation episode (it is believed that Vincent fled to a brothel after a particularly heated argument and sliced off part of his own ear), both men had succeeded in their missions: Van Gogh had laid the ground for a new, more expressive movement, while Gauguin was heading for somewhere rather more exotic.
Van Gogh’s art is as familiar to us as his life story, although it was largely unknown when he was alive. But familiarity does not prepare you for your first encounter with one of his paintings. It’s like the first time you hear the Berlin Philharmonic play or visit Rio during the Carnival: another dimension is added by being in the presence of a great life force. Such entities can only be truly experienced unmediated: you have to be there. With the Berlin Philharmonic, it’s the depth of sound that hits you, while Rio’s energy is its irreproducible factor; and with Van Gogh it is the object. Because many of Van Gogh’s great paintings are not simply pictures, they’re more like sculptures.
From a few metres away some of his later paintings start to take on a three-dimensional quality. Move a bit closer and you can see that Van Gogh has shovelled great lumps of brightly coloured oils on to his canvas. He’s caked on the paint like a drag queen on a Saturday night, and then shaped it, not using a brush, but with his palette knife and fingers. The technique wasn’t new. Rembrandt and Velázquez had both used impasto.
His expressionistic response to these everyday subjects, set firmly within his own experience, was the visionary formula for taking art into the future.
But in Van Gogh’s hands its effects became more pronounced and dramatic. He didn’t want the paint simply to depict part of the picture, but to be part of the picture. Where the Impressionists had sought to expose the truth by painting what they saw with rigorous objectivity, Van Gogh wanted to go further and expose deeper truths about the human condition. So he took a subjective approach, painting not just what he saw, but how he felt about what he saw. He started to distort his images to convey his emotions, exaggerating for effect like a caricaturing cartoonist. He would paint a mature olive tree and emphasise its age by remorselessly twisting the trunk and disfiguring the branches until it looked like a gnarled old lady; wise but cruelly misshapen by time. He would then add those large clumps of oil paint to accentuate the effect, turning a two-dimensional picture into a 3-D epic: a painting into a sculpture. Van Gogh wrote to Theo, referring to a mutual friend who was questioning his move away from accurate representation: ‘Tell Serret that I should be desperate if my figures were right … tell him that I have a longing to make such incorrectness, such deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, that they may become, well – lies, if you want – but truer than the literal truth.’ And in so doing he inspired one of the most significant and enduring art movements of the twentieth century: Expressionism.
Of course, nothing comes out of nothing, even from Van Gogh’s hyper-sensitive soul. Keith Christiansen of the Department of European Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had this to say: ‘He made elongated, twisting forms, radical foreshortening, and unreal colors the very basis of his art. The difference was that he made these effects deeply expressive and not merely emblems of virtuosity.’ He’s talking about Van Gogh, right? Nope. He’s talking about El Greco (1541–1614), who was distorting his images to communicate emotion 300 years before Van Gogh was born. The Spanish-domiciled, Cretan-born (hence El Greco, the Greek) Renaissance artist’s fingerprints can be found throughout the story of modern art.
El Greco and Van Gogh shared several passions beyond art. Both were religious and disliked the materialism of their respective ages. Neither artist found launching his career very easy, and both had to move away from the country of their birth to find the inspiration and support they needed. But when it came to expressionistic painting there was a difference that sets them apart. El Greco’s subjects tended to be mystical, aristocratic or religious, whereas Van Gogh was concerned with the more mundane aspects of modern life: cafés, trees, bedrooms and peasants. His expressionistic response to these everyday subjects, set firmly within his own experience, was the visionary formula for taking art into the future.