Van Gogh in Paris in 1886-88
Paris 86-88
In Paris, you are first attracted by Montmartre and its windmills…
From your window, you look over Paris’s rooftops.
To enlighten your palette, you will spend all summer copying…
Monticelli’s bunches of flowers…
You achieve some portraits…
And more than twenty autoportraits…
At the Cormon workshop, you made plasterwork studies…
And nudes…
Your works are exhibited at Tanguy’s, the merchant of colours, of whom
you will make the portrait…
With Signac, in the Summer 1887, you paint the Seine banks…
And guinguettes…
You will also make copies of Japanese engravings.
Just before you leave for Arles, you paint those first sunflowers…
Anvers 86
You decided to go to Anvers for the Museums…You needed to see paintings…and
to develop in the workshops…
You discovered Japanese engravings and they astound you,
You like painting portraits of common people,
Figures…
83-85
In La Haye, you work like hell and improve a lot…
You master perspective thanks to a frame (made after a drawing by Dürer).
You make all kinds of technical attempts, with chalk, lithograph ink…
When you leave La Haye to seek shelter in the Drenthe, you have really improved
your method…
“ I draw as I write, fluently…”
But life in Drenthe is too hard…Once more, you have to…seek shelter
at your parents’ home, in Nuenen…
You paint a peasants’ graveyard, the family house and bird’s nests
that you collect.
Then the weavers will attract you…
Before leaving Nuenen, you set to realize a great composition
“The Potato Eaters” for which you made dozens of studies about hands,
faces, position… Your first masterpiece...
You left the Borinage for Brussels where
you wanted to take drawing and perspective lessons…
Just like Millet again, your favourite painter…
And you draw peasants, Brabant types…
In Etten, you try drawing landscapes, characters, fields sceneries…
It was in La Haye that your cousin Mauve, a well-known painter, gave you your
first palette, He helped you to achieve your first watercolours…
But Mauve would turn you down a few weeks later…
You resumed drawing, and tried great compositions…
You draw Sien a lot, your new girlfriend…
You would be proud of “Sorrow”, of which you would draw your first
lithography…
It was actually in the Borinage, in the
depths of that black country, where misery was at the highest…and at
the peak of your distress…that you decided to give up religion to devote
yourself to drawing, and painting…
To become a painter at last…
77-78
/ Back to England, Vincent works in a Dordrecht bookstore, he draws mills.
Dordrecht – April 1877 / Then he draws this scene from the Bible when
Abraham begs for a sepulchre to bury Sarah.
Amsterdam – May 1877 / Laecken – November 1878 / Concerned about
his coming departure for the Borinage, he draws that warehouse of coals. When
he arrives in the Borinage, he draws miners’ huts...
Cuesmes – July 1879 / He is fascinated by the mining country... He draws
night and day... And won’t ever stop drawing...