Living with Vincent van Gogh: The Homes & Landscapes That Shaped the Artist

By Martin Bailey

“Bailey goes through the most emblematic places that the artist went through in life. Which, served as inspiration to translate into his paintings.” —Fahrenheit Magazine

Vincent van Gogh was a restless soul. He spent his twenties searching for a vocation and once he had determined to become an artist, he remained a traveler, always seeking fresh places for the inspiration and opportunities he needed to create his work.



Living with Vincent van Gogh tells the story of the great artist’s life through the lens of the places where he lived and worked, including Amsterdam, London, Paris and Provence, and examines the impact of these cityscapes and landscapes on his creative output. Featuring artworks, unpublished archival documents and contemporary landscape photography, this book provides unique insight into one of the most important artists in history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780711240193

Book preview

Living with Vincent van Gogh: The homes & landscapes that shaped the artist

Detail of fig. 85 Van Gogh’s Chair, November 1888–January 1889, oil on jute, 92 x 73 cm, National Gallery, London (F498)

Living with

Vincent van Gogh

The homes & landscapes that shaped the artist

Martin Bailey

Detail of fig. 32 Girl kneeling by a Cradle, March 1883, pencil, chalk and watercolour on paper, 48 x 32 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation) (F1024)

Contents

Introduction

Childhood: Zundert

Art Dealer: The Hague, London and Paris

Searching: Ramsgate, Isleworth, Dordrecht and Amsterdam

Evangelist with the Miners: Borinage and Brussels

Back with the Family: Etten

Life with Sien: The Hague

The Remote North: Drenthe

Potato Eaters: Nuenen

City Life: Antwerp

Bohemian Montmartre: Paris

The Yellow House: Arles

Retreat to the Asylum: Saint-Paul-de-Mausole

Rest at Last: Auvers-sur-Oise

Map

Chronology

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Picture Credits

Index

Acknowledgements

Detail of fig. 76 The Bedroom, October 1888, oil on canvas, 72 x 91 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation) (F482)

Introduction

Vincent van Gogh was a restless soul, always on the move. He spent his twenties searching for a vocation – starting out as an art dealer and later serving as an evangelist among downtrodden coal miners. Once he had determined to become an artist, he remained a traveller, always seeking fresh places for the motifs and opportunities he needed to create and sell his work.

‘It always seems to me that I’m a traveller who’s going somewhere and to a destination’

¹

This unsettled lifestyle meant that Van Gogh stayed in a succession of temporary homes that spanned over a dozen places – from villages in Brabant with a few hundred inhabitants to London, then the world’s most populous city. His accommodation was equally varied, ranging from a room in the grand quarters of one of his uncles, a rear admiral, to a cell in an insane asylum.

This book sets out to examine the impact on Van Gogh’s art of the places where he lived. Where did he stay during his journey through life? How did the different landscapes and cityscapes affect his drawings and paintings? This book tells the story of Van Gogh’s development as an artist as he moved through constantly changing environments.

Van Gogh only had two places that he could call a real home, and even then for only fairly short periods. The first was a modest apartment in an unprepossessing area of The Hague which he shared with his lover, the former prostitute Sien Hoornik, and her young daughter and infant son. The second was the Yellow House in Arles, where he hosted fellow artist Paul Gauguin.

While living in The Hague in 1882, when he was setting out to become an artist, Van Gogh fell in love with Sien and then considered marriage. She was pregnant at the time (by another man), and when baby Willem arrived they moved to a slightly larger apartment to allow them more space. It proved to be a difficult birth, so Sien remained in hospital for two weeks. Vincent lovingly told his brother Theo that she deserved ‘a warm nest on her return after so much pain.’²

The apartment was in what was then the outskirts of The Hague, near the main railway line. There were three rooms on the upper floor, with – most importantly – a large one that served as his studio, with ‘grey-brown wallpaper, scrubbed floorboards… everything bright.’³ Van Gogh pinned some of his drawings on the walls and set up two easels beside a large pine worktable.

Detail of fig. 100 Self-portrait with Swirling Background, 1889, oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (F627)

Next to the small kitchen was the living room with a stove, a wicker armchair for Sien and a small iron cradle with a green coverlet for Willem. Vincent welcomed the new arrival as if he was his own. He wrote to Theo about the crib which he carried back on his shoulders from a junk shop: ‘I can’t look at the last piece of furniture without emotion, for it’s a strong and powerful emotion that grips a person when one has sat beside the woman one loves with a child in the cradle near her.’⁴ Above the cradle he pinned up one of his favourite prints, a Rembrandt image of Mary reading a holy book by the crib late in the evening. Some months later he would draw Willem asleep in his cradle, cared for by Sien’s five-year-old daughter Maria (fig. 32).

Van Gogh had suddenly acquired a new family. Although Sien provided companionship and posed as his model, it was a difficult situation for them all. Vincent was not earning and he remained dependent on the largesse of his brother, who was providing him with an allowance. Sien may have done some work as a seamstress and it is even possible that when desperate she may have occasionally made money on the streets.

The presence of two children in the cramped and noisy apartment must have made it difficult for Van Gogh to concentrate on his art. In the months to come, tensions developed between Vincent and Sien, and the following year the couple separated. Until now, very little has been known about Sien’s life after she split up with Van Gogh. But with archival research, linked with newspaper accounts about the death of an unnamed woman, we can now reveal more about her eventual marriage and her tragic end. Her arduous life would finish just as Van Gogh had predicted.

Five years after leaving Sien, following a series of moves, Van Gogh arrived in Arles and rented what he would lovingly call his ‘little yellow house’.⁵ During his first few months in Provence he stayed in a modest hotel, but after securing the house he finally felt that he had ‘a home of my own’.⁶ On the ground floor there were two generous spaces – a living room at the front, which served as his studio, and a kitchen behind. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, a larger one for himself and another for a guest.

Once the Yellow House was furnished he wrote with delight to his sister Wil: ‘I can live and breathe, and think and paint.’⁷ He proudly did a painting of his bedroom, pointedly including a pair of pillows on the bed (fig. 76). This highly personal work achieved his aim of depicting a restful atmosphere, but in reality the room would have been chaotic. Van Gogh was a notoriously poor housekeeper, and one can imagine that clothing and detritus would have been strewn across the bedroom.

Van Gogh had high hopes of sharing the Yellow House with a fellow painter from Paris, both to split costs and provide artistic companionship. Gauguin eventually took up the invitation and arrived in October 1888. Initially things went well, despite Gauguin declaring Van Gogh to be a terrible cook and equally inept at dealing with money. The Frenchman quickly imposed order, taking charge of the kitchen and the finances.

‘I’m gradually beginning to turn into a true cosmopolitan, meaning not a Dutchman, Englishman or Frenchman, but simply a man.’

⁹

The two artists worked hard during the day, and then talked late into the evenings. But tensions soon developed, exacerbated by their very different personalities. They began to argue, both about their views on art and, at a more mundane level, on arrangements in the Yellow House. Just before Christmas came the horrific incident when Van Gogh picked up his razor and mutilated his ear. He was taken to hospital, Gauguin fled to Paris and the dream of a ‘studio in the South’ came to an abrupt end.⁸

With the exceptions of a year or so with Sien in The Hague and some months in the Yellow House, Van Gogh was an artist without a fixed home. Even as a child, he had been restless and awkward – and so it would continue. As an adult, before setting out to become an artist, Van Gogh was always on the go – moving to The Hague, London, Paris, Ramsgate, Isleworth, Dordrecht, Amsterdam and villages in the Belgian coal-mining area of the Borinage (Pâturages, Wasmes and Cuesmes). After having decided on his vocation, he was equally peripatetic, honing his skills in Brussels, Etten, The Hague, Drenthe, Nuenen, Antwerp, Paris, Arles, the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and, finally, Auvers-sur-Oise.

In an era when many people rarely left the area of their birth or perhaps just moved from the countryside to the city, Van Gogh’s lifestyle was all the more remarkable, with constantly changing nations and cultures. As an adult, he spent a total of roughly seven years in the Netherlands, five in France, three in Belgium and two in England.

Fig. 103 Van Gogh’s former bedroom, Café de la Mairie (Auberge Ravoux), Auvers-sur-Oise, c.1950s, postcard

Initially, as a trainee dealer in The Hague, London and Paris, he discovered the world of art, absorbing the work of both the old masters and contemporary painters. Later on, as an evangelist in Belgium’s Borinage, the arduous and dangerous lives of the miners inspired his early drawings. In The Hague, he tackled motifs of city life, manifesting a deep sympathy for the sufferings of the poor and elderly. After moving to the Brabant village of Nuenen, its farmers and weavers fuelled his development as a portraitist.

Paris, the art capital of the world, would open his eyes to Impressionism, encouraging him to explore the use of colour. The powerful sunlight of Provence, falling on its picturesque olive groves and cypresses, led to the creation of his finest landscapes. And the open countryside around Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north of Paris, proved to be his final inspiration. There he produced a remarkable 70 paintings, at the rate of one a day. But it was also at Auvers that in the afternoon of 27 July 1890, the artist walked up into the wheatfields and turned a revolver on himself.

Van Gogh staggered back to the small inn where he was lodging, and in agony, climbed the stairs to the tiny bedroom that was to be his last resting place. The room had no window overlooking the street, just a small skylight. It is telling that the artist’s final hours were spent in such a confined space (fig. 103). Two days later he died in Theo’s arms, his travels finally over.

The word ‘home’ features in no fewer than 322 of Vincent’s 820 surviving letters, which represents an astonishingly high proportion of his correspondence. When he uses the word he usually refers to his parents’ houses – to the places where they lived and from where he had come. But from his early twenties his relations with his family deteriorated, with the notable exception of Theo. At the age of 30 he wrote that ‘in character I’m quite different from the various members of the family, and I’m not actually a Van Gogh’.¹⁰

By this time Vincent had moved on; art had become all-consuming. Writing to Theo in 1885, he said: ‘Painting and, to my mind, particularly painting peasant life, gives peace of mind, even though one has a lot of scraping along and wretchedness.’ The problem was that ‘if one doesn’t sell one’s paintings one still has to have money for paints and models to make progress’. Nevertheless, he concluded, painting ‘is a home’.¹¹

1 Childhood

Zundert

March 1853–July 1869

A lifeless infant named Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in Zundert on 30 March 1852. One year later, on exactly the same day, his mother gave birth to a healthy, second son who would be baptized with the identical name (fig. 1). The future artist’s father, Theodorus, was the local pastor and every time the young boy attended church, he would pass the funeral slab of his stillborn brother, inscribed with his own name. The stone, which still survives, reads: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of God’.²

‘We may have to thank our childhood in Brabant and a background that helped, much more than is usually the case, to teach us to think’

¹

Zundert, a farming village in Brabant, lies in the south of the Netherlands, very close to the Belgian border. Theodorus (fig. 2)