A Tortured Mind: van Gogh's Grapple with Death
Landscape with Couple Walking and Crescent Moon
Along the same lines, if we examine Landscape with Couple Walking and Crescent Moon, a work also painted at the asylum anywhere from October of 1889 to his departure for Auvers in May of 1890, we can see a progression from the simpler images of comfort in Vincent’s previous art to a more personal depiction of religious hope. Instead of a sky that simply lends a sense of reassurance to its viewer, as the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art might tell us, we find a larger, more imposing moon that actively protects the two individuals in the painting from behind, serving as their defender and guide, and taking an altogether more involved role. A couple is walking through a hectic scene of moving bushes while the calm crescent moon watches over their journey. Van Gogh explained his thoughts on this journey in a letter to Theo, likening our daily lives to the perceived flatness of the earth. Just as the world is round, he wrote, so is life, extending far beyond birth and death to areas beyond our senses (Letter B8, van Gogh). Here he adds himself into the voyage, painting a man dressed in blue with red hair and a red beard, similar to his depiction of himself in pictures like the Self-Portrait painted in 1889. His back is to the sky in this landscape as he marches along in one of those fields of humanity, while in the meantime the heavens are watching over his back. There are small cypress trees extending to the sky in the back of the scene, poignant images, as Jan Bialostocki points out in her essay “Van Gogh’s Symbolism,” commonly “related to the cemetery and death” (Welsh-Ovcharov 124), but it is not yet their time here to rear their faces into the journey. They haunt the background, but no matter what happens, the heavens are with the travelers all the way through their trip.