Europe’s Sunflowers: In Search of Van Gogh

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

Vincent van Gogh, in his short brilliant career, never put down roots. Searching impatiently as if for his destiny he moved restlessly from his place of birth in the Netherlands to Paris, to Provence and at last to the village of Auvers where, in 1890, he finally took his own life.

His story is recent enough that his wanderings are well-documented, helped by the prolific correspondence he had with his brother Theo. It’s thus easy for the tourist to travel in van Gogh’s footsteps and come to understand this gifted and tormented man. And it’s easier than Americans might imagine—distances are not great and all the areas are joined by Europe’s superb rail system, accepted as the best in the world.

How easy becomes obvious when tourists step out of their KLM flight at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport for the few moments’ walk to the railway station there. It’s only thirty minutes’ ride to downtown Amsterdam and the Vincent van Gogh Museum, showcase for the world’s largest collection of his works: 200 paintings and 500 drawings. It opened in 1973 when Theo’s private collection was donated to the Netherlands by his son Dr. Vincent W. van Gogh. 

The canvases ranging from his first masterpiece The Potato Eaters, painted in 1885 in the subdued light of Nuenen to Crows in the Wheatfields done the month he died, show vividly how Vincent’s style changed in the bright sunshine of France. He went to France, he once said, “to see a different light.”

“Color sent him into ecstasies,” says Frank Elgar, one of his many biographers. “When nature did not provide enough of it, he invented his own.”

The National Museum Vincent van Gogh contains the works that stayed in the family on Theo’s walls at a time when fellow artists, critics, collectors and museums were making Vincent van Gogh famous.

“So you might say we are a museum of left-overs, “says the curator, Louis van Tilborgh, tongue-in-cheek, to a small group of American visitors as he waves his hand over the magnificent collection.

Vincent wrote about 1000 letters in his life, often several a day, most to Theo, who fortunately kept 661 on them. Van Tilborgh is pleased to have about 900 of those letters in his museum. He feels that though Vincent made his reputation with his art, the letters complete the complicated legend.  

Like most museum curators, van Tilborgh acknowledges that not all Vincent’s work is monumental. His early portraits were awkward. “He could paint good hats,” van Tilborgh says “but he wasn’t too good at what was below at that time.”

Yet van Gogh had only ten years as an artist with the first four spent only in drawing. And he taught himself.

Eight hundred paintings and 900 drawings survive. Between February 1888 and May 1889, at Arles, he produced 200 paintings. Those fifteen months in Arles, says biographer Robert Wallace, were “one of the most prolific and inspired burst of artistic creativity ever recorded.”

Many of those paintings hang in a museum in Otterlo built by Mrs. Hélène Kröller-Müller, the German born wife of a wealthy industrialist. Mrs. Kröller purchased her first van Gogh, Sunflowers in 1909, one of about six Vincent had ultimately done on the same theme. She bought art treasures the way some buy shoes: In two days in 1912, for instance, she bought eight van Gogh paintings and drawings, two Seurats and a Signac. She often bought direct from artists in their studios yet she didn’t buy at random. Instead she built her collection which included 200 van Goghs to demonstrate her interest in the two forms of art: realism and idealism.

The publicist for the museum, Ralph Keuning, agrees with the popular view that Vincent used art as treatment to get peace of mind. “His paintings were more for self therapy than destined to touch the viewer,” he says. “Even though it happens just once a century that a genius arrives who can use color so well in one stroke, still he could have achieved more if he’d been less self-conscious.” He leads a small group of visitors past Road with Cypress and Star and The Garden of St. Paul’s Hospital at Saint-Remy and stops at the Sidewalk Cafe at Night. The latter, painted in Arles in September 1888 projects Vincent’s theme: “The night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.”

There was little color however in the two years Vincent spent in the Brabant Countryside near Eindhoven from Dec 1883. It was his somber period. His father was the Protestant minister in a village, Nuenen, with 2560 Catholics and 40 Protestants. Nuenen is little changed today. It still has the mill he painted and the house of the weaver Pieter Dekkers. But Nuenen now has more. A local weaver’s home built in 1738 has been turned into a dedicated documentation center of Vincent’s work by an enthusiast, Ton de Brouwer. All the exhibits are reproductions but the displays are impressive enough for a visit and again, as to Otterlo, trains are readily available.

Indeed by rail is how Vincent traveled the country and it’s nostalgic and somewhat romantic to recapture his mode of transportation.

In Nuenen he was a strange sight. Preoccupied, unattractive and unkempt, and laden with his artist gear, he became a figure of derision to the local population.

“There were conflicts,” says de Brouwer. “The son did not live the way the Protestant father preached and soon the Catholic priest was telling his congregation that he forbade them to be painted by van Gogh.

Vincent moved on as ever.

First to Paris then a long tiring 450 mile train journey to Arles in the South of France.

Now the TGV—the tres grand vitesse trains that travel at 180 miles an hour—make short work of the trip.

In Arles, Van Gogh found peace for a time. “Nothing stops me working,” he wrote Theo. “I can’t resist such beauty . . .. Heavens, if I had only known this country at 25 instead of 35.”

Though his greatest work was done in Arles, the same pattern of instability and rejection by the community gradually developed. The town today has almost no evidence of his existence save a statue in the public garden that chooses to portray him in anguish, with—of course—his left ear missing.

Says, Jacqueline Neujean, a guide leading some tourists around her city, “I’m sure there’s no van Gogh paintings left in Arles though everyone in town has gone looking in his attic.”

“What a shame Picasso had four wives but Vincent couldn’t get one,” a Californian physician remarks.

“Ah, but Picasso had money,” she replies.

She walks her guests into the Hôtel-Dieu where Dr. Felix Rey treated Vincent for the madness that made him cut off his own ear.

She holds up a copy of the portrait the artist made and gave to this doctor in 1889, a priceless work now in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

The young doctor, not wishing to offend his patient accepted the gift then offered it gratis to other physicians who refused it.

Dr. Rey took it home.

He used it first as a scarecrow in his garden then as a replacement for a broken window in his home. He finally got a dealer to buy it in 1901 by adding, for the same price of $70, five other van Gogh’s he’d somehow collected.

“The doctors never sensed its value,” says Madame Neujean with a smile, looking directly at the physician who had been teasing her. “You see,” she says, “he was not a painter for the bourgeois!”

In nearby St. Remy, 15 miles away, the van Gogh clinic still stands in the former 12C St. Paul monastery that was transformed into a convalescent home in the mid 18th century. Here van Gogh spent a year producing two canvases a week of intricate brooding art, all coiled and convoluted as gyration became his most obsessive symbol. “Life is probably round,” he once enigmatically said a few months before he moved to Auvers, near Paris and ended his life with a revolver shot to the abdomen.

Van Gogh is gone but what he saw and painted still entrances the visitor: the fields of Holland, the quays on the River Rhone, the boats at Saintes-Maries, the cypress trees in Provence.

And, of course, in Provence Vincent’s hot yellow sun still burns the summer plains of Montmajour and Trebon at harvest time. And his September night sky laden with stars still blazes Prussian Blue over the sidewalk cafe in Arles, scenes he painted, he said, “With the lucid and exclusive concentration of a lover.”

Van Gogh’s Illness? What was his madness?

Today’s arguments lie between bipolar depression and paranoid schizophrenia.

Melvin G. Goldzband, M.D., clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine, San Diego, feels Van Gogh was schizophrenic.

“The bursts of energy of manic patients characteristically send them into all directions at one time, “he says.

“They’re all over the map. They rush with marked distractibility into the environment and into people and are stimulated by this. They are gloriously unfocussed.

“In contrast,” he says, “schizophrenics characteristically get their great energy from within. “They tend to cut themselves off from the realistic environment, and in a solitary way, operate on fantasy.”

Vincent had the last word.

Of his final physician, Dr Paul-Ferdinand Gachet in Auvers who promised him a cure, he said, “He is more sick than I am, or just about in the same condition.”

And what condition was that?

Vincent van Gogh poignantly wrote:

“One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever comes to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney and continue on their way.”