Chronicles of Vincent van Gogh, 1

1. Van Gogh Love

The woman Van Gogh falls in love with turns the house upside down. Van Gogh fell in love with his cousin’s widowed sister.
She was seven years older than Van Gogh and had an eight-year-old son, Jan. Naturally, everyone in the family, relatives, and friends, were staunchly against his love for her. She rejected him and went back to her hometown, but Van Gogh couldn’t give up on her and followed her to her hometown, where he did something shocking. He sticks his hand into a lantern and blackmails his cousin, demanding to see her as long as his hand is in the fire.

This frightens her, and when her family tries to talk him out of it, he is forced to give up, which causes her father to kick him out. In December 1881, just a year after returning home, Van Gogh left his family and settled in the Dutch coastal city of The Hague.

2. Within weeks of his arrival in The Hague, Van Gogh fell out with his family again.

In The Hague, Van Gogh’s family was furious when they heard that he had fallen in love again, this time with a “prostitute” named Sien.
Sien was four years older than Van Gogh at the time and was raising a five-year-old daughter on her own, and to make matters worse, she had gotten pregnant through prostitution. But Van Gogh wasn’t going to be deterred this time, and he decided to take care of her and her child. The painting remains a reminder of what it was about Sien that so captivated Van Gogh.

3. For Van Gogh, love was more about sadness than beauty or splendor.

The woman in the painting is neither beautiful nor young, her stomach is protruding, her breasts are sagging from a pregnancy that resulted from prostitution, and her head is buried in her arms, hiding her face. Perhaps Van Gogh felt compassion for Sien, who, like him, had lived a lonely and uneven life. The inscription at the bottom of the painting suggests that he felt a responsibility to ‘take care of her’, and that he was pleased with this responsibility because ‘only he could save her’.

This is called a ‘rescue fantasy’ in psychiatry, and it refers to the desire to not just help someone in trouble, but to be the sole savior of their life. His family would never have approved of him falling in love in an unconventional way, and this pressure from his family put enormous psychological pressure on him. There was another problem: Van Gogh didn’t make any money.

He had to take care of Sien, their children, and even her mother with the money Theo sent him, and their situation got worse and worse.Eventually, Sien started prostituting again to make ends meet, and an angry Van Gogh ended his love affair with Sien.

4. At 30, Van Gogh begins to feel a sense of authenticity by painting laborers

In 1883, at the age of 30, Van Gogh was entering his third year of painting, and after three years of accomplishment, he was left alone and unappreciated by his family.

It was at this point that he became obsessed with painting. It was during this time in Nuenen that he created his masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, which is the culmination of his efforts.

It’s a far cry from the famous paintings we know him for, and it’s a painting he loved so much that he called it ‘my first work’.
A letter from Van Gogh explains why he painted it.

‘I wanted to paint how they got their food through labor… I wanted to show a feeling for the way of life of these people, who were clearly different from civilized people’

It seems that Van Gogh saw the truth of life in the image of a man digging potatoes after a long day of hard labor and then coming back to eat the steamed potatoes with his hands. Furthermore, by depicting a man eating potatoes with his crude hands after working all day, we can see that Van Gogh valued hard work.

The painting is considered to be an excellent representation of the hard work of laborers who worked all day.It was during this time that Van Gogh began to paint laborers and peasants in earnest.

During the winter of 1884–1885, Van Gogh painted over 40 portraits of laborers, of which he once said.
‘I lived and breathed potato eaters,’ he would say, and poor laborers would become an important part of his artistic life.
However, when Van Gogh recreated The Potato Eaters as a print and gave it to a friend, he was reportedly criticized for painting such a dark and depressing picture, contrary to the popular style of the time. Van Gogh was passionate about his art, but despite his own satisfaction, his paintings were not appreciated by others.

5. Van Gogh, 33, sees ‘color’ in Paris, France

His destination of choice was Paris, France, where he hoped to see and learn from a wide variety of colorful works. Determined, Van Gogh contacted his brother Theo and together they settled in Montmartre, Paris.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Paris, France, was in the midst of the “Belle Époque” – French for “beautiful age” – a time of affluence and a flourishing artistic and cultural scene. Paris was a leading European city alongside London and Berlin during this period, and the city was emerging from its medieval past by hosting three Paris Expositions in 1855, 1867, and 1878.

Then, in 1887, the Eiffel Tower was built, further transforming the face of Paris. Before and after the Eiffel Tower’s completion in 1887–1889, Paris became a hotbed for the world’s hottest trends, and the city was overrun with people who wanted to enjoy the modern city. Artists were especially drawn to the city’s Montmartre neighborhood.
Montmartre is the only elevated neighborhood in Paris, and it was, and still is, an artistic and nightlife hotspot. Montmartre’s location on a hill, the only hill in a flat city, made housing affordable and attracted many of the city’s blue-collar workers and impoverished artists like Van Gogh. It was also relatively cheap to drink in Montmartre, whereas alcohol was expensive in the center of Paris. Absinthe, a distilled spirit popular in Europe during the Belle Époque and nicknamed the “green fairy,” was cheap and strong.

It had an alcohol content of up to 70 proof, and at the time, it contained a hallucinogenic ingredient called “terebene,” which was said to cause people to feel dazed and hallucinate. Artists often drank Absinthe and found artistic inspiration while feeling this way, and Van Gogh was no exception.
Naturally, bars and red-light districts developed in Montmartre, and the Moulin Rouge, the world’s first theatrical cabaret, became a place where artists could drink and enjoy themselves. The Moulin Rouge was also the birthplace of the cancan, a dance where women danced with their legs bared, which was unconventional in an era when modesty was still a virtue. The dancers of the cancan were tolerant of nudity, and they often modeled nude for artists, making it the perfect place to paint for poor painters who couldn’t afford models and needed to paint self-portraits.

6 Impressionism, a new style of painting that shakes up Paris

As word of Montmartre’s unique qualities spreads, it attracts more and more artists. Edouard Manet was one of the first artists to visit Montmartre. As photography replaced the realistic paintings that were popular at the time, Manet needed a more sophisticated style of painting that went beyond realistic depictions. He and other Impressionist painters sought to capture their impressions of the world on canvas, and a new style of painting was born that shook Paris.

Enter Impressionism, a revolution in painting that arose in France in the late 19th century that rejected realistic painting techniques in favor of the artist’s own interpretation of light and color. Manet’s Lunch in the Grass is one of the most important paintings when talking about Impressionism. In a time when modesty was a virtue, the sight of a naked woman looking straight ahead was unconventional, and if Lunch in the Grass was unconventional in the 1860s, there was another artist who made waves in the 1870s: Claude Monet. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise is a work that stands out for its free and fast brushstrokes, and Monet wanted to “leave a light that can only be felt in the moment” through this work. However, Monet’s paintings that “seem to be painted out of nowhere” puzzled people at the time.

It was at this time that a group of Impressionist painters came together in sympathy with Monet’s move. However, the newspapers of the time were quite harsh, and one critic who saw the painting said, “Manet’s painting is flat, like colored paper pasted on. Monet’s paintings are no better than wallpaper underdrawings, crude scribbles. Soon, however, the Impressionists were recognized for their paintings and established themselves as the leading painters in Paris.

To be continue…