Vincent van Gogh
1853–1890Dutch · Post-Impressionism 1886–1910
He painted for ten years, sold very little in his lifetime, wrote about eight hundred letters that constitute the most detailed account we have of a painter's intentions, and is now the most reproduced artist on earth.
Formation
He worked as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher among Belgian coal miners before deciding at twenty-seven to become a painter. Largely self-taught, with brief periods of instruction, he began with dark Dutch peasant subjects — The Potato Eaters is brown and heavy — and everything changed when he arrived in Paris in 1886 and encountered Impressionism, Japanese prints and Neo-Impressionist colour theory. He moved to Arles in 1888 for the light, and the two remaining years produced the work he is known for.
Technique
Thick, fast and physically directional. Van Gogh loaded the brush and left the stroke intact, so that the direction of the mark describes the form and the movement — a sky is a field of curved parallel strokes, a wheatfield is vertical. He painted alla prima, frequently completing a canvas in a day, often outdoors and sometimes in wind that blew sand into the paint, which conservators still find. He worked on absorbent grounds and used a perspective frame in the early years. The letters record him ordering pigments by name from his brother Theo and worrying about the cost.
The palette
Chrome yellow above all, in several grades, plus cadmium, emerald green, cobalt and synthetic ultramarine, vermilion, red lake, viridian and the new cobalt violet. He worked deliberately with complementary pairs — yellow against violet, blue against orange, red against green — and described the intention explicitly in letters: colour was to carry emotion directly, not to describe appearance. There is a serious conservation problem attached: the chrome yellows are darkening to brown-green under light, and the red lakes in several works have faded, so the Bedroom's walls were violet and are now blue, and some sunflowers are visibly duller than painted.
Legacy
Expressionism in every subsequent form owes him the premise that colour and mark can carry feeling independently of subject. The biographical legend — the ear, the asylum, the death at thirty-seven — has been so thoroughly commercialised that it obscures how deliberate and technically informed the work is; the letters show a painter reasoning carefully about complementaries, not a man painting in a frenzy.
Further reading: Van Gogh (Taschen) — Ingo F. Walther, Rainer MetzgerPalette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Prussian blue · Cobalt blue · Chrome yellow · Viridian · Chrome green · Vermilion · Red lead · Cadmium yellow · Ochre · Emerald green