Art historians view Vincent van Gogh as a man with a tormented personality. Throughout his life he was something of a misfit. Early on he seemed determined to make his mark on the social scene around him, but there was something about his persona that made people uncomfortable. His enthusiasm seemed linked to some sort of insensitivity which others found disagreeable.
His younger brother Theo took it on himself to try to sort Vincent out with a job alongside himself as an employee in an art dealership but in this, as in several other jobs, Vincent failed to fit in and deliver, so he was dismissed.
He began his own drawing, then oil painting, and in his relatively short period as an artist it became an obsessive passion. He experimented with colour, with techniques like ‘pointillism’, and went on to find his own distinctive ways to bring his subjects alive with colour and texture. We now look upon his work as highly expressive and a glorious defining landmark in the history of painting. But in his own time no one ever wanted to buy his work in spite of his continued connection with his ever-supportive brother who was still working for art dealers.
In reality it was his brother who kept him alive with a regular supply of funds, enabling him to survive independently.
Vincent seems to have oscillated between periods of despondency and then times of manic enthusiasm – he expressed to Theo his anxiety about his weird mood swings to the extent that he doubted his own sanity during his darkest moments.
At times he joined with other artists in the impressionist scene and Gaugin joined van Gogh at his house in Arles in the south of France in 1890. But before long they fell out, Gaugin saying Van Gogh attacked him. Gaugin left immediately, not trusting van Gogh. Shortly after, Vincent cut off his ear and tried to present it to a local young woman. The town was very worried by his general behaviour and insisted the mayor have him locked up in the local sanatorium.
Meantime Theo, in Paris, was fearful for Vincent and he had his brother brought up from the south to a sanatorium near Paris at Auvers sur Oise, the better to keep a supportive eye on him.
Vincent continued to paint prolifically over his one month stay and went out into the landscape of the July countryside at Auvers, returning with sketches and ideas to his room at the sanatorium. It was here he painted his last landscape – ‘Crows Over the Cornfields’. Within days of painting it he found a gun belonging to someone he’d befriended in the town. He went out to the fields and shot himself in his side. He was brought back and taken to his room. His brother came the next day, but Vincent died a day later.
Crows Over the Cornfields is a dramatic painting with strong contrasting colours – the wheat defined by heavy slashing strokes of yellows and burnt oranges and browns which jumps out against a clouded deep blue thundery sky. Over the fields a flock of black crows heads away into the distance. The painting suggests both summer brightness but also a distant ominous sky now filled with black crows that have just flown overhead – the heaviness of the brushwork and severity of the colour contrast suggest disturbance – maybe violence. It’s maybe an omen of what was to unfold only a few days later.
He showed a keen intelligence and passion in the way he experimented with techniques and combinations of colours which grew bolder and more sophisticated over time. But his relationships with other people, and with the art world, never seemed to thrive and he cut a lonely figure amid all his artistic strivings.
In reading about his life, and looking at the composition of Crows Over the Cornfields, I fell to imagining Vincent wandering along the central path on his way back to the sanatorium and his room in Auvers. So I took that as a starting point for a painting and included a solitary figure walking the central track, with a distant view of the church at Auvers based on Vincent’s close-up portrait of the same village church.
