"Churchyard in Winter"

Not surprisingly, when van Gogh returned to live with his family in Nuenen a few years later, this religious tension between divine longing and disregard for the Church appeared vividly in his church tower-focused works, apparent as early as December of 1883 in his Churchyard in Winter. Set on the grounds of the old church tower, van Gogh pictures two figures huddled together in the snow on the right side of the image, with the actual church and accompanying graveyard featured on the left. The gray, imposing building blocks out the sky in the entire left half of the paper, and coldly looms over the people and landscape. By portraying these images in the bleak of winter, emphasized by the dead tree limbs in the foreground, the artist suggests that the Organized Church – symbolized in the graveyard and grim building – was indeed deadly to real spirituality. While Albert Lubin comments on this symbolism in his analysis of van Gogh’s Churchyard cemetery (Lubin 90-1), he never connects added meaning to the people in the drawing. Yet, Van Gogh purposefully makes clear a difference between these two figures, showing a peasant leaning in towards a black-coated, top-hatted member of the upper class. The higher-class man remains rigid and unwilling to interact with the other figure, perhaps echoing the artist’s longing for a religion that would not accept him. This interpretation is strengthened by van Gogh’s tenuous and cold relationship with his pastor father at this time. As he writes to his brother Theo during this period in early December of 1883, van Gogh equated his father’s “certain hardness […] like iron, an icy coldness,” which he “resented,” (L345.1). Having been banished from his father’s house, van Gogh felt rejected by the Church his father represented as well, considering himself as unwanted as the poor man in Churchyard. By taking into account both of the figures together, the viewer notices how van Gogh has blocked them in with the church and graveyard behind a wall, reminiscent of the barrier in Melancholy. Separated from the viewer, and thus life, these people have been trapped in with the dead, both the spiritual and the physical. The artist’s idea of associating the church tower with deathly entrapment is also echoed in another version of Churchyard in Winter (1883), seen at left, as well as in Funeral in the Snow near the Old Tower (1883), where a crowd of black figures blocks off the left half of the canvas – and the church – as they process in the cold snow. In these works, Van Gogh’s treatment of the separated figures and deadly church grounds, then, clearly illustrates his longing for personal contact with God and his rejection of the cold Church as deadly and impotent in this search.