Van Goghs Sunflowers Essay Example

significance and symbolism. Gauguin: friend or foe?

In February 1888 Van Gogh moved to Arles in the South of France, but suffered terribly from isolation and loneliness. His dream was to set up an artists' colony based in the yellow house he had rented. That spring he invited Paul Gauguin to join him. He embarked on a prolific summer of painting, intending to show Gauguin what he could achieve.

Gauguin, Harvest: Le Pouldu, 1890

Gauguin finally arrived in October, but instead of the inspiring, artistic partnership that Van Gogh had envisaged, the two agreed on very little, and as Gauguin said 'certainly not on painting'. Van Gogh found Gauguin's criticisms agonising, and they made him increasingly mentally unstable, but he found Gauguin's decision to leave in December even more unbearable. Vincent Van Gogh is almost as famous for cutting off his own ear as he is for his paintings. Throughout his life he had attacks of depression, periods of normality, and bouts of intense elation: all symptoms that are now recognised as characteristic of bipolar disorder.

Vincent Van Gogh, 'Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear', 1889. London, Courtauld Institute Gallery

On 23 December 1888, Vincent rushed at Gauguin with an open razor but then stopped and turned away. That night, he cut off his ear and went with it to the local brothel where he tried to give it to one of the prostitutes. Luckily for him she reported the incident to the police who went to Van Gogh's house and prevented him bleeding to death. In February 1889, the people of Arles petitioned the authorities to have him put into

an asylum on the grounds that he was a public menace. Van Gogh was locked up without books or painting materials and was not even allowed his pipe.

Van Gogh, 'An Old Woman from Arles', 1888 In May, Van Gogh voluntarily entered the mental asylum at Saint-Rémy where he spent the next year. Here, he was allowed to paint, and found that it helped to control the paranoid hallucinations that he suffered. Most of the paintings for which Van Gogh is famous were painted during the three years when his depression was at its most acute. Then in 1890, at the age of 37 and having sold just one painting, Van Gogh shot himself. Van Gogh's Sunflowers uses an impressive range of techniques, from tiny pointillist dots to thick sculptural strokes. He also breaks some of the cardinal rules of painting from the time.

Detail from Van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888 The colour theories followed by the Impressionists dictated that to intensify colours, one should place opposing colours next to each other – yellow next to purple for example. Van Gogh experimented with putting the sunflowers against a blue background but his later versions have yellow flowers in a yellow vase on a yellow table, against a yellow wall and yet the picture seems to radiate light. Van Gogh was not trying to make an exact copy of reality in his paintings. He did not use colour merely to imitate nature, but to express emotion. The painting of Van Gogh's chair, like the Sunflowers, is a sort of self portrait. (He also painted Gauguin's chair as an illustration of his contrasting temperament.) The yellow

chair is outlined with a blue-green line which both reflects the wall colour and contrasts with the dull orange-red of the floor tiles.

Van Gogh, Van Gogh's Chair, 1888

Van Gogh freely admitted the artificiality of his art but maintained that since it was impossible to match paint colours to what one actually perceived, 'a painter had better start from the colours on his palette than from the colours in nature'.