- Dalia Ventura
- BBC News World
4 hours
image source, Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
Vincent van Gogh at 19 years of age.
“I always think photographs are abominable, and I don’t like having them around me, particularly if they are of people I know and love,” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his sister Wil.
“The photos wither long before us, while the painted portrait is something that is felt, done with love or respect for the human being who is portrayed.”
His initial disdain for what was at the time a recent technological advance (at the end of his life he changed his mind: “Ah, what works we might do with photography and painting!”), perhaps explains why what you see at beginning of this note is the only known photographed portrait of the great 19th-century Dutch painter.
His face, however, is familiar to us thanks to the fact that he was one of the artists who painted the most self-portraits (35), despite the fact that it was a challenge, as he told his brother Theo: “It is difficult to know oneself, but It’s not easy to paint either.”
“Among Vincent’s great predecessors, only his compatriot Rembrandt painted more self-portraits (40), but it was during a career four times longer,” Martin Bailey, author of Van Gogh Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame.
It is not surprising then that many of us have such a clear image of that man with clear eyes and a red beard whom we would recognize without hesitation in the middle of a crowd.
This is Van Gogh
“What surprised me the most was how different they are,” art doctor Karen Serres told BBC Mundo, who, for the first time in history, brought together 16 self-portraits of the painter at The Courtauld gallery in London.
“It was very interesting because I had seen the works separately and I thought that, by hanging them all, I would find the same person looking at me from all the walls. But they were so different … more like members of the same family.
“It just reassured me because it reminded me that he was an incredibly diverse artist, not one who always did the same thing.”
These two works are a sample of how versatile he was:
image source, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
“Self-Portrait with Felt Hat” (1886-1887), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
image source, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
“Self-Portrait with a Gray Felt Hat”, (Sept-Oct 1887), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Did you notice that hardly a year passed between the first and the second?
Van Gogh only decided to pursue art when he was 27, following working as an art dealer in The Hague and London, a school teacher in England, a bookseller in Dordrecht and a preacher in Belgium.
When he finally found his vocation, although he had some formal training, he developed as a painter through observation, practice and the search for his mode of expression.
It was that search that, in part, produced portraits so dissimilar.
“The first one is so beautiful and I love that he has a little bit of blue in his bandana, because you know that blue once morest his red beard is a really interesting kind of color contrast,” says Serres.
“The second is what his friends called ‘Van Gogh’s fiery face’ and he painted it following experimenting with pointillism. The dots have already become brush strokes, which seem to radiate from the center of his face.”
image source, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
“Self-Portrait as Painter”, Vincent van Gogh (Dec-Feb 1888), Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
“Self-Portrait as a Painter,” probably the last he completed during his two-year stay in Paris, “shows his amazing progress,” notes Bailey.
The artist wrote that he had been searching for “a deeper likeness than that of the photographer”, and his brother Theo’s wife, Jo Bonger, praised it as the self-portrait that was “closest to him”.
Reasons and disclosures
Van Gogh painted all 35 of his known portraits in the last three and a half years of his life.
In them he appears with or without a hat; bearded or shaved; with short, shaved or unkempt hair; with sunken cheeks (he had 10 teeth pulled in Antwerp, making him look older than his 30s) or with his vulcanized rubber false teeth; with painter’s clothes or formal suits…
Do they provide any index of your well-being, self-image, or psychological state?
image source, Detroit Institute of the Arts
“Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat” (Aug-Sept 1887), Vincent van Gogh, Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit City Acquisition; 22.13)
“I think it is almost inevitable to think regarding his suicide and his struggle with his mental illness when you look at his work, because since he died everything has entered into the same mesh: his life, his art,” says Serres.
“But precisely one of the things we wanted to do was show that he used self-portraits for many different reasons.
“Introspection was a small part of them, only appearing at the end.”
Just as at times he painted self-portraits to try out various technical explorations, such as color contrasts or brushstrokes, at others he did so for lack of models, having no money to pay for them and “seeming to have a general aversion to painting close friends and family,” as Bailey points out.
“Without models, the easiest way to develop as a portraitist is to paint yourself, as this only requires the use of a mirror,” emphasizes the leading Van Gogh specialist and writer for The Art Newspaper.
Van Gogh himself wrote to Theo in 1889: “I am working on two portraits of myself at the moment, for lack of another model, because it is more than time I did a little figure work.”
“In fact, he only painted when he felt good,” Serres notes, “or when he’s trying to use paint to make himself feel better. In his letters he says: ‘if I recover it will be thanks to my art‘.
“It seems so brave and ambitious to me that he just goes ahead and doesn’t wallow in his pain.”
image source, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Self Portraits, 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
In addition, adds Bailey, “most of his self-portraits were painted before his illness manifested itself.”
Aside from a handful, “the other self-portraits don’t represent her and I think it’s very risky to draw any conclusions regarding her state of mind from them.”
“It is true that he looks very serious in his self-portraits, but that is something that usually happens because you have to be looking at yourself in a mirror and, unless you force yourself to put on a cheesy smile like we sometimes do nowadays, you are concentrating. and trying to capture your features.”
Also remember that painting yourself takes a lot of time… “You can’t smile for 3 hours!”emphasizes the expert.
So if he looks sad in a self-portrait, we’ll never know if he was sad when he started painting it or that’s how it turned out at the end, and it’s wonderful not because he lets us see his sadness, but because he painted something full of expression.
If van Gogh’s faces reveal anything, it’s his stylistic development, but it’s hard to conclude anything else regarding his personality or even his appearance, “other than the color of his beard,” says Bailey.
However…
Despite the fact that “with the exhibition we wanted to challenge a bit that instinct we have to look for in his works what we know regarding his life, of course, you cannot avoid the matter completely”, confesses Serres.
Van Gogh’s first major mental health crisis occurred on December 23, 1888, when he cut off much of his left ear, following a dispute with his friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin.
image source, The Courtauld
“Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear” (1889), The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
“The ‘Self-portrait with the bandaged ear’ is very interesting because he deliberately represented himself three weeks following mutilating himself, so it is clearly a reflection of his mental state,” Bailey tells BBC Mundo.
Despite Vincent’s frail health, the “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear” is a very carefully composed image, certainly not the impulsive work of a “madman”highlights the expert.
And it’s full of unknownshe adds.
“Why did you paint it? What is the message?
“One can read it as an optimistic determination to repaint and challenge his problems or as a call for help, or both. We’ll never know what was on his mind, but like all great art it raises interesting questions.”
After a series of relapses, on May 8, 1889, Van Gogh voluntarily entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, located in a former monastery near Saint-Rémy, France. He remained there for a year, during which his mental health fluctuated significantly.
Towards the end of his stay, he painted two self-portraits barely a week apart: the first, while he was still in the midst of the severe mental health crisis he had suffered in mid-July; the second, while he was recovering.
Until The Courtauld exhibition, they were never hung side by side.
“Seeing these works together is an incredibly moving experience, the embodiment of Van Gogh’s resilience and courage in the face of personal adversity,” says Serres.
“They show what painting meant to him and his recovery, and how he was able to create, under the most difficult of circumstances, works that are still incredibly powerful more than a century later”
image source, The National Gallery
Self-portrait (late August 1889), Vincent van Gogh, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo.
image source, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Self Portrait (September 1889), Vincent van Gogh, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
The first “is a very disturbing self-portrait and it does seem to show someone with mental health problems,” Bailey explains to BBC Mundo.
“In just over a week, he managed to go from that work that is so heartbreaking and so different from what he usually does -because he uses the palette knife to scratch the paint-, to the optimistic one a few days later,” says Serres.
“For me, the fact that in the second one he had portrayed himself with the palette – something he only did in three of his 35 self-portraits – it’s like he’s regaining his sense of identity. It’s a kind of reaffirmation: he even shows up with his wonderful blue painter’s smock”.
Bailey agrees: “That self-portrait was a message – to his doctor, to his fellow asylum seekers, to his brother Theo, and most importantly to himself – that having come out of yet another crisis, he was absolutely determined to follow his calling. as an artist”.
And he did it with great effort.
But his recovery was short-lived.
Less than a year later, he shot himself in the chest in the middle of a wheat field, staggered back to his room at the Auberge Ravoux, and died on July 29, 1890.
His legacy was only widely recognized posthumously.
image source, Getty Images
“Van Gogh’s Chair” was the 16th self-portrait in The Courtland exhibition because it is him, only he came out for a moment, leaving his pipe and tobacco bag on the seat. (Vincent van Gogh, 1888. National Gallery, London)
image source, Getty Images
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC World. Download the new version of our app and activate it so you don’t miss out on our best content.