While in Arles, the artist depicted fields, orchards, and meadows, portraying the seasonal rhythms of rural life with a reverence modeled after that of Jean-François Millet, an artist he deeply admired. One real-world subject Van Gogh painted repeatedly was the landscape, terrestrial and celestial. “I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but still I don’t invent the whole of the painting on the contrary, I find it ready-made-but to be untangled-in the real world.” 5 “I’m still living off the real world,” he wrote to their mutual friend, the artist Émile Bernard. Gauguin advocated working from memories, dreams, and imagination, while Van Gogh was committed to drawing and painting from life. Though both artists shared an interest in subjective approaches to line, form, and color, their time together at the Yellow House was marked by stormy debates about the origins and aims of art. There, his hopes of establishing a community of artists were briefly fulfilled when Paul Gauguin joined him in October at a rented residence called the Yellow House. But the metropolis eventually exhausted Van Gogh, prompting him to move to Arles, in southern France, in February, 1888. In the French capital he adopted the brilliant palette and broken brushwork of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, whose works he encountered in galleries and studios. Several months after completing the Potato Eaters series, Van Gogh left the Netherlands for Antwerp, then Paris, with the goal of advancing his art. Similarly, the lithograph adapted from his studies emphasizes the artist’s hand, with dramatic contrasts between light and dark achieved over the course of hours spent drawing on a stone in the workshop of a local printer.
#Van gogh exposition manual#
“And so it speaks of MANUAL LABOR and-that they have thus honestly earned their food.” 4 Van Gogh likened the coarse finish of the painted Potato Eaters to the homespun fabrics worn by his sitters, both the product of manual labor. “I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo. These studies culminated in a large-scale oil painting of five farmworkers gathered around a humble meal, a painting intended to convey the considerable hardships of life in the countryside.
For the lithograph The Potato Eaters (1885), he began by drawing and painting over a hundred studies of impoverished workers in the rural village of Nuenen (located in the region of the Netherlands where he was born). When Van Gogh had resolved to become an artist nearly a decade earlier-following stints as an art dealer, teacher, and missionary-his first works centered on the human figure. This unconventional use of color was vital to Van Gogh’s ongoing effort to create what he described as “portraits which would look like apparitions to people a century later.” 2 He believed that he could make his paintings endure only by abandoning “photographic resemblance” and striving for “passionate expression.” 3
Roulin-a postal worker whose close-knit family and progressive political views appealed to Van Gogh-is painted in colors that depart from those seen in nature: his forehead, cheeks, and nose are streaked with green and his beard is flecked with blue and purple. I seek it by way of color.” 1 With its vivid palette, spirited handling, and exuberant background, Portrait of Joseph Roulin (1889) gives form to Van Gogh’s conception of the modern portrait.
“What I’m most passionate about, much much more than all the rest in my profession,” he enthused to his sister, Willemien, “is the portrait, the modern portrait. What makes a portrait modern? And what makes a modern portrait continue to appear modern, even decades after it was created? For Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), the answer was clear: color. “I sometimes make changes to the subject, but still I don’t invent the whole of the painting.I find it ready-made-but to be untangled-in the real world.”
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