Van Gogh created an impressive work, although he suffered deep emotional pain. Some of his paintings reveal a lot about his mood and about his personality in general. An iconic painting that expresses both the agony and the genius of the artist is The Starry Night of 1889.
Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in the Netherlands. More than a century and a half later, the Dutch painter is considered one of the founders of modern painting, and The Starry Night is one of his most famous paintings. While most art lovers know this, it needs to be reiterated that Van Gogh was not a successful artist in his lifetime. It was often even heard that he was only able to sell one work during his lifetime.
Exhausted by his constant misery, the artist suffered a mental breakdown at the end of 1888, as a result of which his left ear was cut off. A few months later he decided to voluntarily enter the Saint Paul de Mausole psychiatric hospital, which was located in a former convent. It was there that he made The Starry Night just a year before his suicide, at a time that is considered the darkest of his life.
The Starry Night was acquired through the estate of Lillie Bliss and has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York since 1941. Over the years, the painting has been interpreted by various scholars and art historians and is still considered one of the most important masterpieces in Western history.
artist story
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in Groot Zunder, a small town in the south of Holland in the family of a Protestant minister. Relatives described the boy as a bored and moody boy with strange mannerisms. Outside the home, however, he often behaved in a thoughtful and serious manner, and at games he displayed good character, courtesy, and compassion.
In 1857 his brother Theodorus was born, who would become his greatest friend and confidant. They will have a long correspondence and Theo will repeatedly provide financial help to his brother. In 1864, Vincent was sent to boarding school, where he studied languages and drawing. However, already in 1868 he abandoned his studies, returning to his father's home.
From 1869, the young man worked as a dealer in the Goupil et Cie art gallery founded by his uncle in The Hague. He will then go through the London branch and then the Paris branch. There, the future artist began to be seriously attracted to art, he frequently visited the Louvre, the Luxembourg Museum, exhibitions and galleries. But due to his love disappointment, he lost the desire to work and instead decided to become a priest like his father.
He will be a preacher in a working-class suburb of London before undertaking studies at the theological faculty in Amsterdam. He abandoned this teaching considered too difficult but remained convinced of his spiritual vocation. He wants to become a lay preacher. In 1879 he obtained an evangelizing mission in Belgium. In 1878, Van Gogh was involved in educational activities in a mining town in southern Belgium, advising parishioners and teaching children.
Go to the Borinage miners and share their extremely harsh living conditions. He translated this discovery of human misery into lugubrious paintings like The Potato Eaters. However, painting has always been Vincent's only true passion.
He argued that creativity is the best way to alleviate human suffering, which not even religion can overcome. But this choice was not easy for the artist: his involvement with the most modest is considered excessive by his superiors and his position is not renewed, he fell into depression and even spent some time in a psychiatric hospital.
Doubting a time between the artistic and religious vocation, he chooses to dedicate himself to painting. Today we can say that he was right. His very colorful style has a particular vitality and tension that have not finished impressing. In fact, after a phase of depression, he returns to the life of an artist.
In 1880, Vincent Van Gogh's departure for Brussels marked the beginning of his artistic career. At the age of 27 he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and began working in the studio of the painter Anton van Rappard. But in 1881, after another argument with his family, he moved to The Hague where his cousin Anton Mauve introduced him to watercolor and then oil painting. From then on, Van Gogh devoted himself to landscapes and peasant scenes and produced his famous painting The Potato Eaters in 1885.
The same year he moved to Antwerp where he discovered the work of Rubens, but also Japanese Art that (1890). It was also during his stay in the Flemish capital that Van Gogh began composing his famous series of self-portraits. In 1886, he joined his brother Theo in Paris. He discovered the young Parisian painters, the Louvre and Japanese prints.
There he quickly became part of the circle of Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painters who were to exert considerable influence on him. He knows, among others, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, Gauguin and Bernard. Upon contact and under the influence of it, Van Gogh's paintings take on a little color. In contact with them, Van Gogh diversified his color palette and gave his paintings a vivid and exalted touch visible in his series of paintings in the Montmartre district or even in his Portrait of Père Tanguy in 1887.
The following year, his mental state deteriorates and Van Gogh leaves Paris for Arles. Fascinated by the light of the landscapes of Provence, the painter produced famous paintings such as Van Gogh's Room in Arles, (1888), The Sower at the Setting Sun, (1888) and especially his famous Sunflowers, (1888). In 1889, Van Gogh's failing health forced him into an insane asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. By painting from his window, he notably produced The Bedroom (1889-1890), as well as his sumptuous Starry Night in 1889.
Although Vincent was able to make several dozen paintings during this time, his mental state was far from stable. In fact, he is increasingly the victim of bouts of dementia. Between 1886 and 1888, for example, Vincent Van Gogh made numerous self-portraits, in the form of paintings or simple drawings. Throughout his artistic career, these self-portraits represent around forty works.
However, the Dutch painter did not realize anything about his stay in Auvers-sur-Oise in an insane asylum. Still, he did not hesitate to depict himself with a bandage around his mutilated ear in 1889. The story of Vincent Van Gogh's severed ear begins in 1888. Dreaming of living in an artists' community, he invites Gauguin to meet with him in Arles. They live and paint together, but after two months their relationship deteriorates.
On December 23, 1888, Vincent threatened Gauguin with a knife. That night Vincent, probably suffering from a bout of dementia, mutilates his left ear. He wraps it up to go offer it to his mistress Rachel, a prostitute. He was hospitalized the next day. After a brief return to the Yellow House, Van Gogh voluntarily entered an asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in May 1889. He continued to paint, making some copies of paintings by Millet and Delacroix, but also works of his own. him as yellow wheats.
The painter is the victim of violent crises that weaken his memory. Van Gogh decides to return to the Paris region, not far from his brother's house, in Auvers sur Oise. He is followed by Dr. Gachet, a friend of the Impressionists. The latter cares for him and appreciates his art. Van Gogh will also paint his portrait. He will create more than eighty paintings in two months. On July 27, 1890, the painter, according to the official version, tried to end his life. He shot himself in the chest and died two days later, then aged 37.
The suicide version was almost never questioned by anyone. After all, it made the Van Gogh legend more dramatic. This only fueled interest in him and the prices of his paintings increased. But this is the strange thing. In the last months of his life, his deeds were one more positive than the other. Also, in Auvers, where he moved, his loneliness vanished. Here he found many friends. People began to be interested in his paintings. Favorable reviews began to appear in the press.
The negligent killing version (proposed in 2011 by writers Naifi and White-Smith) is now being considered. When Van Gogh returned wounded to his room, he was not carrying a gun. His easel and the paintings he worked with that day were also not found. At the same time, one of the neighbors urgently left town, taking two teenage brothers with him. In this family, the gun was found.
Van Gogh was reluctant to answer police questions about what happened. He insisted that he did it himself. It seemed that Van Gogh decided to take all the blame so that the boy would not end up in jail. Such sacrifice was quite in the spirit of him. This is what he did once when he was an assistant pastor. He gave his last shirt to a poor man. He cared for typhus patients without thinking about the risk of infection.
He was buried in the Auvers cemetery in the presence of his brother Théo, doctor Gachet and the painter Bernard. Despite serious internal turmoil, Van Gogh almost never stopped painting. In eight years, he produced nearly nine hundred paintings and a thousand drawings. His post-impressionist work will be taken as a source of inspiration by fauvism and expressionism.
The view from the sanatorium room
During his stay in Arles, Vincent van Gogh created some of his most famous masterpieces, such as the Irises and the Blue Self-Portrait. The exact date of creation of the dazzling starry night was June 18, 1889, which can be verified through correspondence with his brother Theo. Another important aspect contained in the letters of the brothers is a description of how Vincent perceived the night view in isolation:
"Through the iron lattice window I can see a square of wheat in an enclosure, over which I can see the sunrise in all its splendor in the morning."
Van Gogh painted the predawn view from the east-facing window of his sanatorium room, so his fascination with the starry night was an effect of Van Gogh's condition in which he sought a different kind of order. This composition reflects his inner struggle for survival and for his reason. Each element is involved in a tremendous amalgamation of brushstrokes, with the exception of the town in the foreground with its architectural elements.
Although this landscape painting is full of stars, with soft lines that radiate a calm atmosphere, the sky is presented topsy-turvy, as if reflecting a deeper disorder. A few months earlier, Van Gogh's suicidal thoughts and hallucinations had radically intensified.
The starry night is a testimony of his interior and of the turbulent nights during his stay in the clinic. Van Gogh was fascinated by the night sky and was not looking at the stars for the first time. In the autumn of 1888 he had painted the starry night over the Rhône, with all its sweet, dream-like beauty. The main feature of this iconic painting is the precise examination of its surroundings, the details of which are determined by its inner influences.
In preparation, the artist studied different times of day and different weather conditions from his vision of the institution. Van Gogh's most common ink drawings were made on paper in his room, as the hospital staff forbade him to paint in the common rooms. The unifying pictorial element of all this preparatory work is the diagonal line that runs from right to left, delineating the magnificent hills of the sierras.
Van Gogh wrote several letters but barely mentioned The Starry Night. He casually mentioned the painting in a letter to Theo on September 20, 1889, referring to it as a nocturnal study, which he included in a list of pictures he sent to his brother in Paris. In this context, it is also important to mention that Van Gogh was in constant debate with Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin about whether to paint from nature or from one's own imagination. In a letter to Bernard in 1888, Van Gogh recalled a period of time living with Gauguin:
“When Gauguin was at Arles, I was tricked once or twice, as you know…But that was a trick, dear friend, and soon you meet a brick wall…Yet once again I was tricked into looking for stars that are too big, another flop, and I'm sick of it."
Regardless of this impression of the expressionist vortexes that dominate the top of the starry night, the artist declared a year later in a letter to the painter Émile Bernard that the painting had been a failure.
Interpretation of The Starry Night
Many interpret the symbolic meaning of The Starry Night in different ways. Some are inclined to see in the image a direct quote from the Old Testament or the Apocalypse. Someone considers the excessive expressiveness of the painting to be the result of the master's illness. Everyone agrees on one thing: at the end of his life, the teacher only increases the internal tension of his work.
The world is distorted in the artist's perception, it ceases to be the same, in it new forms, lines and new emotions are discovered, stronger and more precise. The master draws the viewer's attention to those fantasies that make the world around them brighter and less ordinary.
Several art historians have examined The Starry Night in depth and some of them interpreted the painting as a hallucinatory vision. For example, art historian Meyer Schapiro emphasizes that the painting was created as a visionary image inspired by spiritual sentiment while alluding to the hidden content of the work and referring to the New Testament Book of Revelation. The swirling shapes in the sky match published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae.
Sven Lovgren states that the painting was done in a state of great emotion. He characterizes The Starry Night as an infinitely expressive image symbolizing the artist's ultimate union with the cosmos. Art historian Albert Boime emphasizes that the painting shows not only the topographical elements of Van Gogh's window view, but also the celestial elements, as not only Venus is shown but also the entire constellation of Aries.
Balanced and expressive at once, the composition is structured by its orderly placement of the cypress, bell tower, and central nebulae, while its myriad short brushstrokes and densely applied paint set its surface in turbulent motion. Such a combination of visual contrasts was generated by an artist who found beauty and interest in the night, which, for him, was "much more alive and rich in colors than the day"
There are countless interpretations of The Starry Night, beginning with the number of stars depicted. There are eleven of them, in terms of brightness and saturation, they resemble the Star of Bethlehem. But here is the discrepancy: in 1889 Van Gogh no longer liked theology and he did not feel the need for religion, but the story of the birth of Jesus greatly influenced his worldview.
The starry sky
The moon is blindingly bright like the sun. But this light is limited to a fairly small room. There is no projection of the night moonlight, the painted sky seems to absorb it. The sky comes to life in shades of blue, equally impressive and terrifying. This forms a stark contrast to the golden yellows of the stars and the moon. In total, there are eleven stars that make up this night sky over Saint Rémy de Provence. Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his sister in the fall of 1888,
“That certain stars are lemon yellow, others are pink, green, blue, forget-me-not. I don't want to go into more detail, but it's obvious that putting white dots on a blue black is by no means enough if you want to paint a starry sky."
The author managed to separate the sky from the Earth. One gets the impression that active movement in the sky does not in any way affect what is happening on earth. Below is a sleepy city, ready to drift off into peaceful sleep. Above there are powerful currents, huge stars and ceaseless movement. The light in the work comes precisely from the stars and the moon, but its direction is indirect. The glow that lights up the city at night seems random, separate from the general powerful vortex that reigns over the world.
The sky undulates and flows like a river, mesmerizing the viewer with its human energy. There is certainly a spiritual aspect to The Starry Night, reflected in Van Gogh's letters to his brother at the time, where he speaks of a “terrible need for religion. So at night [he] goes out to paint the stars.”
Therefore, the sky becomes a means for Van Gogh to understand and explore one of the beliefs that most concerns him; Life after death. This concern is highlighted in Van Gogh's choice of color, where dusty mauve and blue-black hues fill the sky, a choice that corresponds with his other works such as Café Terrace at Night and Starry Night Over the Rhône.
Astrophysicists have established that the moon and stars depicted in Van Gogh's sky match astronomical observations published in Saint Rémy de Provence on May 25, 1889. Capella was particularly bright when Van Gogh painted the sky in 1889, which is why which we can see a much bigger and brighter star in his work.
The moon like the star also produces an enormous amount of light, which is accentuated in the painting due to the use of concentric circles. However, the light remains in the sky, it does not spread to the edges of the painting as the ground remains dark.
The spiral
Amidst all the arabesques that make up his night sky, Van Gogh concentrated all circularity in the center of the canvas. The most important of the spirals can be interpreted as the escalation of his illness. The artist made the large expressive stars and the moon the main elements of the landscape. When painting the night sky, he used a special technique, thanks to which this painting later became one of the most famous works of Van Gogh.
The long strokes representing stars carefully draw spirals in which the light of the moon and the stars spin, so to speak. Thanks to this, they seem to move through the sky, carrying their amazing light through it. Van Gogh was inspired by Japanese art, especially prints, in which not only flat areas of color are found, but also spirals that close in on themselves regularly appear.
The moon and stars are simply amazing, they are remembered for a long time: surrounded by huge halos in the form of spheres of various shades: golden, blue and mysterious white. Celestial bodies appear to emit cosmic light, illuminating the sky in spiral blue.
Interestingly, the undulating rhythm of the sky captures both the crescent moon and the brightest stars; everything is like in the soul of Van Gogh himself. The spontaneity of The Starry Night is really ostentatious. The painting is very carefully thought out and composed: it seems balanced thanks to the cypress trees and the harmonious selection of the palette.
This is undoubtedly the first aspect of the painting that captures our attention. The huge spinning spiral wraps around the painting like a wave. It draws the viewer's gaze dizzy and dazed, offering a glimpse into the depths of Van Gogh's delicate mind. However, could it be that this spiral was simply inspired by the increasingly popular study of astronomy in the XNUMXth century?
Van Gogh was in love with astronomy and regularly read the magazine "L'Astronomie" (The Astronomy), which was edited by his friend Camille Flammarion. To represent his troubled psyche, he imitated scientific reproductions of nebulae. Thus, the spiral was not a creation induced by madness, but rather a study of one of Van Gogh's main interests.
the unleashed cypress
Dizziness has taken over this typical tree from the south of France. Its branches move like waves, out of the stillness of the nocturnal place they seem to function as an echo of the tortuous environment. These cypresses, rising into the sky like flames, are a personal addition by Van Gogh.
The tree is important for the author, it is the only one capable of transmitting all the heavenly energy to those who live on earth. The cypress aspires to the sky, its aspiration is so strong that it seems in a second that the tree will separate from the earth to join the sky. As if tongues of green flame were secular branches directed upwards.
Symbolically considered, the cypress could be seen as a bridge between life, represented by the earth, and death, represented by the sky, commonly associated with the sky. Cypresses were also considered cemetery and mourning trees.
"But the sight of the stars always makes me dream," van Gogh once wrote. “Why, I say to myself, should the points of light in the sky be less accessible to us than the black points on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rúen, we take death to go to a star.
The cypress is an important feature of the work and possibly one of the most significant. Thick, tormented and rising like a flame, it unites the two halves of the painting: the sky and the earth. Van Gogh's decision to place it in the foreground was significant. The cypress is traditionally a tree associated with death and, according to Van Gogh, it was the only way to access a life beyond earth.
the little town
To the right, at the foot of the hill, Van Gogh depicted a small town. The roofs of the houses reflect the deep blue sky and yellow lights are visible in the windows here and there. Despite the alleged late hour, light sources can be seen from the houses.
Behind the houses there is a church whose bell tower has to endure the same battles as other elements of the canvas. The bell tower of the church resembles those common in his native Holland, not in France. The needle seems to be sucked into the heavenly spirals. The bell tower and the church allow Van Gogh to accentuate the mystical and cosmic power of the sky. Beyond the village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, painted by van Gogh, rises the Alpilles, a mountain range that Van Gogh saw from the window of his clinic.
According to the design of the asylum in Saint Rémy de Provence, Van Gogh could only see a small plot of land from his room. Unlike the stars, the bell tower and the town were not directly observed by the artist, but were recreated from his imagination. These two elements are at the end of the work, occupying only a third of the space. They have been manipulated to the point that they appear to be moving, while the houses surrounded by darkness give the painting a stained glass quality.
Cooperation
In this oil painting Van Gogh painted with thick, highly visible and somewhat choppy strokes. We can assume that the painter built his painting on several layers of paint before the final result. With this work he wanted, as in many of these paintings, to express a feeling through the colors and the movement of his brushes.
We can see that this painting is dominated by shades of blue, which represent the night. Dark greens are used to draw the trees and houses. The only warm and rather yellow colors in the work were painted with small touches for the lights in the windows, the stars, the moon, and the voluptuousness of the sky.
The main light comes from the moon, which is in the upper right of the painting. There are really no shadows as the sky itself is illuminated by various stars and the town still has some lighted houses, despite the apparently late hour
The technique of performing the night sky, the transfer of all the necessary shades at the same time, was not yet mastered in this period. Vincent Van Gogh was practically a pioneer in this field of art. The Dutch artist uses a combination of dark blue, different shades of yellow, while adding dark green, light blue and brown tones. The color combination impresses with its uniqueness. All the colors come together and complement each other, while emphasizing the subtlety and depth of the image.
Its color scheme cannot fail to amaze with a unique mix of deep dark blue (even the Moroccan night hue), deep blue and light blue, with the black of green, chocolate brown and aqua. There are various shades of yellow, which the artist touches as best he can, representing the trails of the stars. It has the color of sunflowers, butter, egg yolk, pale yellow. And the composition of the image itself - trees, a crescent moon, stars and a city in the mountains - is filled with truly cosmic energy.
The stars seem truly bottomless, the crescent moon gives the impression of the sun, the cypress trees are more like tongues of flame, and the spiraling curls seem to hint at the Fibonacci sequence. Whatever Van Gogh's mood was at the time, The Starry Night leaves no one indifferent who has seen at least its reproduction.
Starry night madness?
While every element of the painting suggests that its ceaseless movement expresses Van Gogh's suffering, we might view the work differently. With blue as a symbol of the power of the spirit and tranquility, yellow as the color of joy and warmth, could not this work also be characteristic of the painter's liberation?
Shortly before the painting was created, Van Gogh wrote in a letter to the painter Émile Bernard: "When will I finally make this starry sky that I always have to think about?" Beyond the madness, the mastery and control of the work is evident, it emanates from him. Everything is calculated down to the smallest detail.
Other emblematic works of Van Gogh
The Dutch painter, a pioneer of expressionism, is today considered one of the most important figures in the history of art. The largest collection of his works can be found in his native Holland, notably in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but many of his paintings are on display in major museums in Paris, London and New York.
Sunflowers, 1888
This oil painting is one of Van Gogh's most representative paintings, but also one of the most reproduced in all its forms: plates, posters, office supplies and more. Sunflowers belongs to a series of paintings on the same theme, they were painted after the artist collected these flowers in a field in Arles and drew them as they withered. Van Gogh is said to have obtained the characteristic yellow tones of the petals as a result of visual hallucinations caused by coffee. He was addicted to caffeine.
Van Gogh's Room in Arles, 1888
During the period that Van Gogh spends in the city of Arles, he is in the room depicted in this painting. The artist wanted to represent the simplicity and tranquility of his room through a palette of light colors, which are a tribute to the sobriety of Japan. There are three versions of this painting, which are described in Van Gogh's letters. We can differentiate the three versions by looking at the small pictures on the bed.
It is said that because of his epilepsy he saw distorted colors, which would explain the abundance of yellow and green tones in this work. It also appears that the artist painted Van Gogh's Room in Arles under the influence of a plant called digitalis purpurea which helped him maintain momentum.
Café terrace at night, 1888
Here is another oil painting painted during his stay in Arles. The café depicted in the painting, La Terrasse, Place du Forum, took the name Café Van Gogh. The work is dominated by warm colors (a symbol of the painter's optimism, happy to have come to the south of France in search of calm and inspiration) in contrast to the shady houses and the starry sky in the background.
Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, 1887
Van Gogh painted more than thirty self-portraits, including Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, in which the tones are distinctly yellow. The painting is also characterized by the light typical of Impressionism. This self-portrait was created at a time when Van Gogh was feeling overwhelmed in Paris.
Often confused after drinking liters of alcohol in a frenetic city like the French capital, he needed to escape to a quiet place (and he chose Arles, thanks to the influence of Gauguin) for which he made his portrait with a straw hat and a look communicating the oppression he wanted to end.
The Potato Eaters, 1885
The Potato Eaters is considered Van Gogh's first major work. A largely self-taught artist, Van Gogh wanted to create a masterpiece to show that he had become a good character painter. Therefore, he deliberately chose a complex composition.
As the painter himself explained in a letter to his brother Theo, in this painting painted in the Dutch town of Nuenen, he wanted to represent real peasants eating the potatoes they grew with their own hands to honestly convey the harsh life in the countryside. So in the painting we can see a group of five modest peasants in the dark, about to eat dinner.
Van Gogh's chair, 1888
Van Gogh's chair goes hand in hand with Paul Gauguin's Chair. Both paintings were made by Van Gogh during his stay at the Maison Jaune in Arles, where he met his friend Paul Gauguin. It was after an argument with him that Van Gogh cut off his earlobe and Gauguin returned to Paris. The artist later decided to capture the differences between the two men by painting the two chairs. His, a simple straw chair with a pipe and a little tobacco, made through harsh brushstrokes and ocher and blue tones, evokes the sorrow he felt at that moment.
Rest at noon, 1890
Inspired by Millet's Siesta, Van Gogh painted this painting at the Saint-Rémy sanatorium at a time when he had no subjects of his own. He reinterprets Millet's work by reinventing a country rest scene with his characteristic colors and brushstrokes, while remaining faithful to the original composition.
The Galette Mill, 1886-1887
The landscape and windmills of Montmartre are the subject and inspiration for a number of Van Gogh's paintings. The Moulin de la Galette was the scene of an open-air dance that was located between two mills on the Butte Montmartre and near the apartment he shared with his little brother, Theo, between 1886 and 1888. The Moulin de la Galette welcomed and inspired many artists of the time, such as Corot, Toulouse Lautrec and Renoir.
Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, 1888
One of Van Gogh's paintings of sunflowers painted in Arles in August 1888. Using a wide spectrum of yellows made possible by the invention of new dyes, Van Gogh presents sunflowers at every stage of their life (from flowering to wilting) . Van Gogh wanted to decorate the bedroom of his friend, Paul Gauguin, in the yellow house, a house he rented in Arles. Van Gogh and Gauguin worked together on the yellow house between October and December 1888.
Rose Bush in Bloom, 1889
Van Gogh saw these roses in the garden of the Saint Rémy de Provence asylum, where he was admitted in May 1889, after passing through Arles. The different and intense brushstrokes of this painting will be present in the works that he will carry out until the end of his life.
The Red Vineyard near Arles, 1888
Made in Arles in November 1888, this painting represents the harvest in the Arles countryside. The Red Vineyard near Arles is said to be the only painting publicly sold by Van Gogh during his lifetime, but this is currently in dispute.
The Irises, 1889
The Irises is one of the many floral studies that Van Gogh made during his stay in the Saint Rémy de Provence asylum. Although Van Gogh considered this painting a study, his brother Theo understood that it was an important painting. He therefore presented it to the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in September 1889.
Portrait of Camille Roulin, 1888
The portrait of the young Camille Roulin is one of a series of modern portraits Van Gogh produced during his period in Arles between 1888 and 1890. Camille was the youngest daughter of Joseph Roulin, a postman in the city and a friend of Van Gogh. Instead of creating realistic or photographic portraits, Van Gogh used vivid colors and expressive lines to provoke the viewer's emotions.
Branches of Almond Trees in Blossom, 1890
The painting was painted by Van Gogh as a gift to his brother, who had a son. It was named after his uncle Vincent. Van Gogh wanted young parents to hang the painting above their beds. Blooming almonds signify the beginning of a new life. The image is very unusual. It's like being under a tree and looking at the branches. That stretch against the sky.
The painting is decorative. But this is what Van Gogh strived for in many of his works. He created them to decorate the houses of ordinary people with modest means. He hardly imagined that his paintings would be available only to the very rich. Six months after making Almond Blossom Branches, Van Gogh will die. According to the official version, it was a suicide.
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