When Vincent William van Gogh died, no more than 10 people really liked his paintings.
It was July 1890, and there were fewer than 10 people mourning him in the small town of Orville on the outskirts of Paris. There was no priest, only the doctor who treated him cried: Vincent will never die, he is a giant, he is a great painter ...
Six months after Van Gogh's death, his younger brother, who had been trying to help him sell paintings, Theo van Gogh, also died in extreme grief. For a long time afterwards, Van Gogh's paintings were still not favored by the public.
It was not until nearly half a century later that people discovered with hindsight that this crazy painter named Van Gogh had created a world that was more brilliant, purer, and more comforting than the existing world, and in his paintings, the light of life burning was so warm and dazzling.
Opening the new book "Van Gogh's Painting Biography", the Dutch painter's crazy and troublesome life began.
A "genius" who has achieved nothing
Van Gogh was born in 1853 in a village in the south of the Netherlands. As a child, Van Gogh liked to be alone, had an eccentric personality, and would lose his temper when he was unhappy.
When he was 8 years old, he made a handmade baby elephant, and his parents praised him a few times, but they annoyed him. Only because he felt that his parents were too perfunctory and not sincere enough, he smashed the baby elephant in one breath.
Van Gogh's mother learned to draw and occasionally taught several of her children. However, she did not find that Van Gogh had a talent for art, and often threw away Van Gogh's paintings as waste paper when cleaning up the room.
Van Gogh Mother (left) vs Van Gogh Mother Portrait (right)
Van Gogh's parents were not wealthy, but he had an uncle who was the largest dealer in Europe. The uncle had no children, and he regarded Van Gogh as his heir. He had a series of important galleries in Europe, waiting for the nephew to inherit.
With this in mind, Van Gogh's adolescence was called quite "waste firewood", what not to do, what not to learn.
At the age of 15, the rebellious Van Gogh dropped out of private school to work in his uncle's gallery.
At first, he was full of hope and determined to become a great dealer like his uncle. But as the years passed, his apprenticeship ended, and his performance did not improve at all.
At the age of 21, he fell in love with the landlord's daughter. After the courtship was rejected, he began to have masochistic tendencies, and his original paranoid personality was even more bizarre. When the guest asked him what he thought of a painting, he not only didn't say yes, but he also said that the painting was useless.
In the end, the guest ran away, and the gallery manager was also annoyed, whether he was the big nephew of the "chairman" or not, and directly fired the matter.
Van Gogh, an unemployed young man, returned home and wanted to be a cleric like his father. His family, of course, was very supportive of this decision and sent him to seminary.
At first, Van Gogh enjoyed his academic career, devoting himself to 16 hours a day, studying Latin and Greek. He also read a lot of literature and art, practiced French and English to the level of native language, and was quite proficient in German.
But the heat of learning only lasted a year. A year later, Van Gogh entered the Evangelical School in Brussels, where he trained for only three months, and without becoming a priest, went to the Borinari mining area in southern Belgium to work as an unpaid missionary assistant.
This was Van Gogh's first contact with real low-level laborers, whose miserable living conditions smashed Van Gogh's previous 20-odd years of middle-class worldview to pieces.
At the time, Borinari was one of the oldest mines in europe with the worst conditions. Pollution, gas explosions, mine collapses, accidents are frequent, the lives of miners are not guaranteed, and there may be no return from going down the well without fear.
Van Gogh was so shocked by this that he gave up a better living treatment, moved into the shack where the miners lived, gave all his money and supplies to the miners, negotiated with the mine owners, and fought for the safety interests of the miners.
Miners in the Snow, painted in 1880
However, what he did, far from bringing about a change in the survival of the miners, caused the dissatisfaction of the Evangelical Committee.
They believed that Van Gogh's sloppy image was an insult to the church, and that priests should be models of the middle class, not tramps who mingled with miners. Not only did Van Gogh not get the rightful conversion, but he didn't even become the lowest priest.
He became a true mining wanderer.
It was also at that time that his desire to become a painter was stimulated. He wrote to his brother Theo, who worked in Paris, to mail him the paints, tools, and living expenses he needed for painting. He began to paint miners and made it his mission.
That year, Van Gogh was 26 years old.
Misshapen love and crazy ears
In order to learn to paint, Van Gogh later returned to his hometown in the Netherlands and met his cousin Kate. Kate was two years taller than Van, widowed for two years, and took her son from Amsterdam to Van Gogh's parents' house as a guest.
Van Gogh suddenly fell in love with Kate and boldly showed love. But Kate adamantly refused: "No! Never!" Then he angrily took his son and left.
The persistent Van Gogh borrowed money from his brother Theo for a train ticket, chased him to Amsterdam, put his hand on the flame of a kerosene lamp, and used self-harm to beg his cousin to see him. But this only made the cousin more disgusted.
Love was fruitless, and Van Gogh decided to leave this sad place. The following year, he followed the painter Mao Wei to The Hague.
In The Hague, Van Gogh fell in love with a local prostitute, Sean.
Sean was pregnant, and Van Gogh probably thought she was very similar to himself, poor and depressed, and had pity for the disease, so he took Sean in.
Not only did he arrange for Sean to give birth in the hospital and help her raise several illegitimate children (there was no contraceptive result when working as a prostitute), but even Sean's mother took her in.
At one point, he wanted to marry her, thinking that it would prevent her from returning to her old business. Sean had long been accustomed to drinking, smoking, having fun, and selling his flesh for money. Van Gogh's tightness could not satisfy her at all.
Eventually she left Van Gogh and left nothing but the STD that had infected him.
The distraught Van Gogh returned to his parents' house, when he was 32 years old, and next door lived an old girl of nearly 40 years old, Margot.
Margot liked Van Gogh and offered to show love. This time, Van Gogh experienced what it was like to be loved.
However, the relationship did not last long. Margault's family tried to obstruct, although she did not hesitate to fight by suicide, but because of personality reasons, Margaut always liked to ask some unnecessary questions, Van Gogh was annoyed and took the initiative to break up.
Three years later, he met the prostitute Raschel. When Raschel flirted with him, he said, "I like your ears." Van Gogh took it to heart, and once quarreled with a friend, Van Gogh lost control of his emotions, cut off his right ear, wrapped it in paper and gave it to Raschel.
Self-portrait after cutting off the ear
This is another love that is doomed to end.
These unfortunate love experiences made Van Gogh miserable, desperate, and he threw himself into painting, when he found that love was not as important as he thought.
In his words: "Falling in love with art is tantamount to losing true love." ”
The troubles of money and the affection of shoes
Van Gogh's biggest problem in life was the lack of money.
He longed for his paintings to sell, but this wish did not come true until death.
In a letter to his sister, Van Gogh said, "Right now, we live in an extremely bad, paralyzed world. Everything in exhibitions and galleries is controlled by rich people, and it is only after the painter's death that people are willing to pay a lot of money to buy his works. They always despise living painters, favor the works of those who have passed away, and only foolishly defend their tastes. ”
Although there were rich people in the art industry in the family, Van Gogh chose the path of painting, but he was regarded by his family as not doing his job, and only his younger brother Theo supported him.
Theo was 4 years younger than Van Gogh, and he was enthusiastic and had a high level of art appreciation. When Van Gogh's life was stretched, it was Theo who constantly sponsored him, sending Van Gogh 150 francs a month for him to live and paint.
In return, Van Gogh sent his paintings to Theo every month, and once the paintings were worth money, he could pay his brother back.
Theo carefully kept the paintings and letters sent by Van Gogh in his Parisian apartment. In the last year of Van Gogh's life, Theo also bore the cost of Van Gogh's mental hospital.
Van Gogh has several paintings dedicated to leather shoes, some of which are one pair, some of which are two pairs, and some of which are large and one small, all of which convey Van Gogh's feelings for his brother.
He understood that he was causing his brother a lot of trouble, and he once said to Theo, "The first thing is to lighten your burden... I want to progress to the point where you can boldly exhibit my work without damaging your reputation. ”
Theo silently supports his brother and has been working hard to sell his brother's works. It wasn't until a year before Van Gogh's death that he finally sold a painting.
The sister of a Dutch painter bought a Painting of the Red Vineyard for 400 francs. This is also the only painting sold by Van Gogh during his lifetime.
He fired a shot at himself
The restlessness in Van Gogh's bones led to his life being displaced.
The Hague, Al, Antwerp, Paris, Drenthe, he always thought that the next stop was the place where he could redeem himself.
During his wandering career, he met Gauguin, a painter in debt and a health crisis, invited Gauguin to paint and live with him, and wrote several letters asking Theo to support Gauguin financially.
Compassion is not only reflected in Van Gogh's life in the world, but also in his paintings, where he likes to depict the lives of those at the bottom.
The Sower, painted in 1888, Al
In the heyday of his creation, the last two and a half years of his life, he could walk more than two hundred kilometers a day, or he could go for a few days without eating any food, without caring about his health.
After a long period of starvation and poor food, he suffered from stomach problems, and all his teeth turned black and fell out, but all this made Van Gogh happy.
He was unable to paint in warm and comfortable conditions and was accustomed to constantly struggling with poverty and suffering. Only in this way can he maintain his fighting spirit when painting.
In 1888, he came to the southern French town of Arles, where the sun and sea breeze made his paintings almost crazy, the use of colors was bolder, the flow of lines was more mysterious, and the number of paintings reached the peak of his life.
Fields with iris blossoms, painted in Al
However, Van Gogh's mental state was worse, hallucinating, out of control, and even unconscious when severe, until he had to be admitted to a mental hospital.
His madness once led the locals to mistakenly think that painting would make people crazy.
Van Gogh's life, like his work, was filled with excitement and desperate passion. Golden sunflowers, burning cypresses, wind-blown wheat fields, cafés in the night, brilliant stars...
A café at night, painted in Al
Every detail exudes warmth and turbulent passion, and the wild pictures are the cry of Van Gogh's lonely heart.
Finally, one day, he shot himself in a state of extreme madness, and with all his talent and misfortune, he died.
Living in the lows, the soul in the highs
"Van Gogh's Painting Biography" presents a martyred life of a son of artistic genius.
Van Gogh's rebellion against the world, his obsession with art, and his passion for challenging the limits of life touched everyone.
In his life full of tribulations, creation is a strong light in the darkness, the most primitive light in life, there is enthusiasm, there is madness, there is persistence, each of which brings a strong shock to people.
Van Gogh's life was unfortunate, and wherever he went, the shadow of fate followed.
His talent has been buried, and his family has not discovered his innate talent; he has given his whole body and mind for his ideals, but only sold a painting before his death; he has never been loved by a single person in his life, even his best friend Gauguin has left him.
There is no doubt that Van Gogh was a lonely man, and it is for this reason that he vented all his passion in art. The dazzling lemon yellow, the blood-red rose red, the striking olive color, the intense violet, the rich cobalt blue, bloomed out of the repression with such bright colors, pointing directly to the depths of our souls.
In the words of "Van Gogh's Painting Biography": "Painting is only a trace left by the artist's struggle in life, painting is important, but the life inspiration left to us through painting is even more important, how can each of us not be the Van Gogh struggling in life?" ”
Like Van Gogh, even if you live in a low place, you must have your soul in a high place.