All joking aside, Mike went to Groton School, a small boarding school in northern Massachusetts, where he played varsity baseball and football all four years. He has played the piano since the age of five, and he can pluck some mean Tenacious D songs on the guitar. He has been interested in the works of van Gogh since his parents brought home a copy of The Night Cafe when he was young, and has always held the Impressionists dear to his heart.

*stolen from the Gummy Bears tv theme

Callow, Phillip. Van Gogh: A Life. London: Allison & Busby, 1990.

Cristin, Lilli. Vincent van Gogh: Painter, Printmaker, Collector. Pasadena, California: Norton Simon Museum, 1990.

Edwards, Cliff. Van Gogh and God. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1989.

Masheck, Joseph D., ed. Van Gogh 100. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996.

O'Neill, John P., ed. Van Gogh in Saint-Remy and Auvers. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986.

Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to his Brother. London: Constable & Co LTD, and Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1929.

Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Ed. Ronald de Leeuw. New York: The Penguin Press, 1998.

Welsh-Ovcharov, Bogomila. Van Gogh in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974.

Paintings:

Van Gogh, Vincent. Crows in the Wheatfield. Vincent van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 1890.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Landscape with Couple Walking and Crescent Moon. Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo. 1890.

Van Gogh, Vincent. The Potato Eaters. Vincent van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 1885.

Van Gogh, Vincent. The Reaper. Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo. 1889.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Road with Cypress and Star. Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo. 1890.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Self-Portrait. Musee d'Orsay, Paris. 1889.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Starry Night. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1889.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky. Vincent van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 1890.

Additional References:

I would like to acknowledge the work done by my writing partners: Regina Lee, Derik Leung, Raphael Haziot, and Suzzane. All four gave invaluable advice throughout this project. In addition, I would like to thank Professor Chubbuck for her continual advice and encouragement. Without her corrections, this project would have never come together.

Letter 543:
"I have a terrible lucidity at moments, these days when nature is so beautiful, I am not conscious of myself any more, and the picture comes to me as in a dream."

Letter 604:
"For I see in this reaper â€" a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task â€" I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is â€" if you like â€" the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there's nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold….but what I have sought is the 'almost smiling.' It is all yellow, except for a line of violet hills, a pale, fair yellow. I find it queer that I saw it like this from between the iron bars of a cell."

Letter 518:
"Whence comes it that in the present instance of our uncle's death the face of the deceased was calm, peaceful, and grave, whereas it is a fact that he was rarely that way while living, either in youth or age?"

Letter 531:
"I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting."

Letter 133:
"Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the cage."

Vibrancy is everywhere in van Gogh's work, but it is not always accompanied by a beautiful scene. The Potato Eaters, painted in 1885 and now perhaps the most famous of his earlier works, presents a perfect example. Unlike Starry Night , an exuberant shout to the beauty of nature and the sky, The Potato Eaters embraces the ugliness of the lowest worker. It highlights every inch of dirt on the faces of its characters, creating, as Vincent's friend and fellow painter Emile Bernard called it, "a fearful canvas of remarkable ugliness and yet with a disturbing life" (qtd. Callow 201). The vivacity of this "disturbing life" is the central theme at work, and we can look to Vincent's letters for proof:

I have tried to make it clear how those people, eating their potatoes under the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in their dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food. I have wanted to give the impression of quite a different way of living than that of us civilized people. Therefore I am not at all anxious for everyone to like it or to admire it at once. (Letter 404, van Gogh)

As van Gogh tells us, the picture is meant to be flawed and unpleasant. After all, how else should he have portrayed such a scene?

The unpleasantness van Gogh chose to depict was all around him. While in his letter he was careful to separate "us civilized people" from these workers, he clearly identified with them to some degree. At the time of this painting, he was purposely living in squalor, sleeping in a bed in the cold attic, rather than the larger, warmer room downstairs. Even when invited to someone's house for dinner, he ate only bread and cheese. "Anything more," Philip Callow writes, "he regarded as 'coddling'" (Callow 171). It was a simple life, yet like the workers in his painting, he was always vibrant, churning out paintings at a furious rate for the near decade he worked. Imperfect and ugly, like the workers, he saw flaws all around him, and he brought them to light in his paintings. The Potato Eaters is not a pretty picture at all, but for van Gogh, neither was life.

For evidence of the fantastic successes of van Gogh's artwork, we need look no further than Starry Night. Painted in June of 1889, during his stay at the asylum in Saint-Remy, it has become perhaps Vincent's signature work. Swirling strokes of blue dominate the scene, leaving just enough space for the perfect, blurred circles of the night stars to leave their mark. As in Wheatfield Under Clouded Sky , the eye is drawn immediately to the sky in wonderment. However, as much as the deep swirls of the blue atmosphere dominate the picture, the sky and the land lie in perfect harmony. A tall cypress tree reaches its way up into the blue, reminding us of Road with Cypress and Star , and the blaze of the moon above shines from the other side of the painting, providing a perfect balance to the scene. Further adding to this inherent structural balance are the swirls at the center of the picture, as Eric Saxon, in his article "Overall Space: Comparing van Gogh, Mondrian and Pollock," points out, highlighting the "yinyang-like form that can be seen to represent the union of two opposing forces" (Mashek 351). The two opposing forces Saxon mentions here are the land and the sky; it is life as we know it, posed against the heavens above. It is a familiar contrast in van Gogh's artwork. Indeed, if we now consider the most poignant image in this sky, the deeply circular moon, we are brought back to Vincent's thoughts on the round nature of life. "Is the whole of life visible to us," he wrote to Theo, "or isn't it rather that this side of death we see only one hemisphere?" (Letter 506, van Gogh) Bringing these thoughts to light in Starry Night, Vincent tries to portray both hemispheres as best he can, picturing not a sky that we can see at night, but one that is visible only through the eyes of an artist. We see here that even in his darkest, loneliest hour, Vincent's mind was at its best, abandoning realism to create one of his most vibrant scenes.

Though Vincent did not make friends particularly well, there was one bright spot. His relationship with his brother Theo, four years his junior, proved to be a source of comfort and support throughout the years, and the friendship between the two served as the one constant in Vincent's rocky life. They were close from childhood, with Vincent taking his younger brother with him on treks through nature, and Theo eventually developing as the go-between for Vincent and his parents. The two kept their relationship strong, writing hundreds of letters to each other in their adulthood. Today, almost all of what we know about Vincent's life and his thoughts comes directly from these letters. Over 650 remain today, giving us precious insight into the mind of a tortured artist, and illuminating the relationship between Vincent and his closest friend.

However, in a turbulent life like Vincent's, even his brightest relationship is not without controversy. Theo was extremely important to his older brother, so does it not make sense that he may have contributed at least in part to Vincent's decision to commit suicide? We know that Theo was clearly in his brother's thoughts, as Vincent repeatedly asked for his younger brother in the hours after the fatal shot. Indeed, artist Marcel Marois, among other scholars, argues that perhaps Theo was even too important to Vincent. "The first," Marois claims, "in the series [of Vincent's fits of madness] coincided with the news of Theo's engagement, the second with the announcement of his wife's pregnancy and the third with the birth of her child" (qtd. Cogniat 81). As his brother drifted further away and developed more of a life of his own, Marois hints, perhaps Vincent struggled to cope with the perceived separation between the two. As Raymond Cogniat writes in his book Van Gogh, "For several years Theo had been the only firm support on which he could wholly rely. Suddenly he realized that he might be going to lose that too" (Cogniat 81). Such a perception would have affected him deeply, and we cannot discount its importance in our exploration of the motives behind Vincent's suicide. ]]> 2006-11-30T16:06:59Z 2005-01-09T09:56:18Z tag:blogs.princeton.edu,2005:/writingart4//25.540 2005-01-09T09:56:18Z

Conclusion: Back to Wheatfield with Crows

So van Gogh killed himself at the age of thirty seven, ending a deeply introspective career as a painter. He borrowed a gun from a friend, went out into the fields he painted so often, and fired at his chest. Today, we see mystique. We see the tragedy of a crazed young man who cut off his own ear in a fit of rage and soon took his own life. But to better mold our perceptions, we can now go back to Crows in the Wheatfield, van Gogh's last painting, and see a different image. Rather than focusing on how the three roads in the painting all end, leaving us with nowhere to go, as Callow is quick to point out, it is better to look to a common theme in Vincent's artwork: the comfort of the sky. There, instead of seeing Cristin's "menace-filled images," (Cristin 10) we can view those "black zigzag crows, the figures of death that come from the far horizon," (Welsh-Ovcharov 161) as a familiar bridge to the sky. They might present a way out, and it is not the miserable, crazed death normally associated with suicide as a simple end to a wretched existence, and to a life of pain. "I shot myself," van Gogh told those who came to help him as he stumbled back from the fields. "I only hope I haven't botched it" (qtd. Callow 271). Troubled though he was, these are not words of a madman; he knew exactly what he was doing. He left his room and set out for the fields that he painted so often, the very same ones we see in Crows in the Wheatfield, searching for a better spot on his journey through life. In so doing, van Gogh proved that he did not seek to end his troubles through an easy submission to death, but rather to hasten his passage into the next stage of life. Perhaps, therefore, we must reexamine our conception of van Gogh as a tormented artist who could not bear the hardships of life. His paintings, then, are no longer mere representations of a tortured mind; they become passionate attempts at a personal catharsis. In search of this comfort, van Gogh ventured into the same wheat fields that have always been seen as chaotic depictions of his madness, and he finally completed his journey to the sky in peace, a passenger on an express train to salvation.

Wheatfield Under Clouded Sky

After having seen the pieces of van Gogh's idea of the journey through life at work in his individual paintings, we now put them together and examine the larger picture. This is exactly what Vincent did himself in Wheatfield Under Clouded Sky, one of his very last paintings. Completed in Auvers in July, 1890, just days before his death, it presents a complete overview of life's entire journey, a combination of life and death, coexisting in nature. Here, the commotion of the daily world is in front, as the boundless field then stretches off into the distance until it finally meets the sky at the horizon. The painting highlights the infinite, giving us a limitless view of the fields and sky, with no tree or building to invade our vision. The sun, that Christian symbol for God, is placed far off to the left and covered by clouds, bowing to the higher authority that we see in van Gogh's religious vision of the infinite. We find the same touches of comfort that appear throughout his works, only here on a larger scale. His emotion is all in his artwork, as Meyer Schapiro describes in his essay "On a Painting of van Gogh: Crows in the Wheatfield":

When van Gogh paints something exciting or melancholy, a picture of high emotion, he feels relieved. He experiences in the end peace, calmness, health. The [act of] painting is a genuine catharsis. The final effect upon him is one of order and serenity after the whirlwind of feeling. (Welsh-Ovcharov 163)

As Schapiro explains, scenes of deep comfort give van Gogh more than just what we see in the final picture. Rather, the real product lies in the "genuine catharsis" of the experience, a feel van Gogh seeks to convey to his viewer. In Wheatfield Under Clouded Sky, dark brushstrokes of a cloudy day are curiously mixed with the sunlight and brightness of the clouds, giving us harmony and balance, and some intrigue, in the sky. Death and life, then, are able to coexist, and the comfort shines through.

Road with Cypress and Star

Nowhere is this connection to the heavens more evident than in Road with Cypress and Star, another country scene, but one that finally provides the key link to explain van Gogh's path through life. Painted in May of 1890 as his last painting in the asylum, it presents a balanced focus, a steady combination of land and sky, allowing neither to gain dominance. We see at the bottom two people heading toward us, and behind them a horse and carriage coming in the same direction. Their backs are to the sky, ignorant to the gleaming crescent moon and solitary star behind them. They are oblivious to it, living out their daily lives while this amazing sight occurs over the mountains in the background. The moon and star are self-contained and vibrant, each one seeming to encompass a swirling new world, an unexplored portion of the journey. In the middle stands a long cypress tree, the common symbol, according to Bialostocki, of "the cemetery and death" (Welsh-Ovcharov 124), cutting the sky in two, and we recall Vincent's comments about death as a means of travel. The tree zigzags to the top, but it somehow does not seem like it is any sort of divider. Rather, it feels more like a bridge to the sky and the heavens than anything else. In this way, we are not oblivious as the people in the painting are: we can see a link between our world and the sky. If the cypress trees, those images of death, are the bridge, then that link is obvious.

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.

The Reaper

Vincent incorporated the issue of hope in his landscapes most clearly in the last few years of his life, during his stays in Saint-Remy and in Auvers. For instance, his work The Reaper, painted during his time at an asylum in Saint-Remy in September of 1889, presents an oddly comforting view of a difficult subject. It is a bright picture of a worker trudging through a golden yellow field in his attempts to clear the wheat, but it portrays more than just a worker. Rather, as van Gogh wrote to Theo, "I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping…but there's nothing sad in this death" (Letter 604, van Gogh). This reaping is not a sad occurrence, as he wrote, because there is nothing to fear. For van Gogh, death did not represent the horrific end with which we often associate it, as his correspondence with his brother shows:

Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star…So to me it seems possible that cholera, gravel, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, buses, railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot. (Letter 506, van Gogh)

In essence, as he expresses in this passage, for Vincent death was simply the means of transportation to the heavens, and a quick end was simply a quicker means of transportation. As such, in The Reaper, the field is bright, the sky is clear, and the sun is shining above. The reaper of death is cutting down humanity as he passes through, but it is nothing to fear. And indeed, in the center of the sky lies the sun, a common Christian symbol for God, Sund tells us, (Mashek 241) and here a beacon of comfort. It is the source of the calm, golden colors, and its dominant presence puts the land at ease and watches over the events below. In painting it over what might otherwise be a frightening scene, van Gogh brings a deep sense of comfort to the sky and shows us that we do not have to fear death. His connection lets him see death in a different light, a light provided by the sun in the sky in The Reaper.

Before discussing how Vincent's landscapes present themes of comfort above all else, let us first look at the basis for these works: his religion. As Cliff Edwards tells us in his Van Gogh and God, when in 1874 van Gogh first read Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus, a controversial rejection of the divinity of Christ, he was not offended like most other Christians (Edwards 64). Though as a young man he was soon to apply for ordination at the Dutch Reformed Church, Vincent never dismissed Renan's characterization of Christ as just a charismatic and pious man, later asking his brother Theo, "Isn't Renan's Christ a thousand times more comforting than so many papier maché Christs they serve up to you in the…Protestant, Roman Catholic or something or other churches?" (Letter 587, van Gogh) We can see here that he was not able to find this "comfort" in common organized religions, instead looking for a more personalized version of spirituality. In the words of Tsukasa Kodera in his article "Christianity Versus Nature: A Study of van Gogh's Thematics," "After all these bitter experiences with the Church, Vincent came to detest the, in his own words, 'theologians' God'" (Mashek 228). Instead of glorifying the might of the Church and its place in history, he chose to focus on the true essence of its teachings, as seen through his eyes. As a result, Van Gogh turned to the barest basics of Christianity, adopting the religion to fit his personal spirituality, and eventually developing a unique connection with God that stayed with him throughout his life.

So how does this attitude toward spirituality affect his painting? In his own words, Vincent said his disillusionment "does not keep me from having a terrible need of â€" shall I say the word â€" religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars" (Letter 543,
van Gogh). He tells us here of his personal connection with religion, a link that stayed with him throughout his life: nature and religion were so closely intertwined for him that they became almost interchangeable. When he felt some sort of primal thirst for God, he looked to the stars, craving the natural exuberance of a scene like Starry Night. According to Judy Sund in her article "Van Gogh's Berceuse and the Sanctity of the Secular," "Most religious art struck Vincent as artificial and pretentious, and he was convinced that Christ himself would scorn much of the verbal and visual imagery He inspired" (Mashek 205). And so, instead of following in this tradition of "visual imagery," van Gogh opened a new route, focusing on his natural surroundings, the purest and most sincere topic he knew. Whatever the scene, vast or enclosed, he told Theo, "I want to say something comforting," (Letter 531, van Gogh) expressing the overarching purpose of many of his paintings. Later in that same letter, this "comfort" comes up again when he mentions the issue of the stars, wanting "to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is no delusive realism in that, but isn't it something that actually exists?" (Letter 531, van Gogh) We can see that he found his desires "to express hope," as well as his need for heaven, resting above him in the stars in the sky, and while his images, as many scholars are quick to point out, certainly do express the fervor and emotion of his life, they do not show the "menace-filled torment" (Cristin 10) commonly associated with his art. Instead of finding this "menace" in his landscapes, we should instead see van Gogh's personal connection with religion shine through in his portrayals of the skies, beacons of an intriguing hope and precise depictions of the heavens.