INSPIRING VAN GOGH’S GREATNESS

from the introduction

Vincent van Gogh was a revolutionary artist. He changed the nature of draftsmanship so thoroughly, he brightened the palette for serious painting so intensely, and he infused his art with so much personal character, it was hard for his contemporaries to see the merits of his work.

In fact, when Van Gogh died at age thirty-seven in 1890, he was not completely unrecognized, as is sometimes thought. But it wasn’t until the end of 1888, when his younger brother Theo entered three of his paintings in an avant-garde exhibition, the Salon des Indépendants, that a few major artists and writers began to give Vincent’s work a serious look. And it was only six months before his death that a Symbolist writer named Albert Aurier published a widely read and overwhelmingly enthusiastic appraisal of his work in the influential French journal Le Mercure de France. Only then did several major artists see Van Gogh’s paintings presented with theirs at the exhibition of Les Vingt (The Twenty) in Brussels and recognize that a daring new artist had emerged on the art-world stage.

But Van Gogh never saw himself as a revolutionary artist. However original his work may have been, it was, in fact, built on a strong foundation of the art that had come before him.

Van Gogh had a voracious eye for art long before he began to make it himself. At age sixteen, he left home to work in a prominent Dutch art gallery founded by his uncle and namesake Vincent “Cent” van Gogh in The Hague. By the time Van Gogh arrived there in 1869, it had been absorbed into the most powerful international art gallery of the era, Goupil & Cie. There, he was able to work closely with a wide array of the day’s most eagerly collected art, including work by the great French academic artists Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier and Jean-Léon Gérôme, and especially the brilliant new landscape painters of France and Holland, members of the Barbizon and Hague schools respectively.

In all the major cities where Van Gogh lived—The Hague, Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, London, and Paris—he applied his keen eye and dervish intellect to all the art he could find. “You must in any case go to the museum often,” Vincent instructed Theo, who followed him into Goupil & Cie in 1873. “It is good to love as much as one can,” Vincent wrote—one must approach all of life, but especially art and literature, with passion. “For therein lies the true strength, and he who loves much does much and is capable of much, and that which is done with love is well done.”

Van Gogh was an inveterate proselytizer—a proselytizer for God when he trained to be a minister, a proselytizer for art when his passion shifted there. He would have been extremely gratified to know that he might one day serve to remind us of the artists he loved so passionately, especially artists who haven’t maintained the universal attention and appeal commanded by his own work.

One such artist was Gustave Doré. Van Gogh, who studied Doré’s work intensely, would have loved a charming study by Doré of the undergrowth in a forest in Alsace-Lorraine, dark and silent, but sparkling with accents of turquoise and red, that anticipates Van Gogh’s own shimmering scenes of forest undergrowth. Doré was so renowned during the late nineteenth century that, in 1896, more than 1.5 million people visited the Doré exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, a renown that has largely diminished since then. Yet Van Gogh admired Doré’s work so much that he was among the artists whose black-and-white prints he translated into brightly colored paintings.

Taste has also shifted away from the Barbizon School, a group of artists named for a village outside Paris near the Fontainebleau Forest, where generations of painters found inspiration. The fin-de-siècle robber barons competed aggressively for their works—just as aggressively as they did for works by the Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. In fact, a painting by Jean-François Millet called The Gleaners sold in 1889 for the astounding sum of 300,000 francs (about $1 million today). Millet—“Father Millet,” as Van Gogh called him tenderly—and Camille Corot still attract the kind of audience they attracted during their own day. Other masters of the movement, however, including Jules Dupré, Narcisse Díaz de la Peña, Charles-Émile Jacque, and even Jules Breton, do not. Yet Van Gogh admired them all, believing that the Barbizon masters had not only reached the pinnacle of art but that no one would ever eclipse them: “There was still progress up to Millet and Jules Breton in my view,” he wrote to Émile Bernard, an artist he had known in Paris, “but as for surpassing these two men, don’t talk to me of that.”

Van Gogh was devoted to the Old Masters, and their influence on his work would always be profound. But like most artists he was especially invested in the art of his own time. For him, this was the art of the entire nineteenth century. The works selected for this book provide an opportunity to see the artists who were the dominant painters of that era—some of them still famous, some of them not—and to see why all of them gave the world Van Gogh inhabited so much pleasure. They provide a platform for viewing this great art but also a prism through which to view it: the prism of Van Gogh’s own appreciation.