Vincent Van Gogh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NATIONAL GALLERY VISIT:

 

Two Crabs (1889)

 

The two crabs in Van Gogh's painting are a still life of crabs that appear to be dead.

This could be interpreted like a Vanitas still life, depicting the transience of the

crabs earthly lives and our the symbolism of this for humanities own mortality.

 

 

Van Gogh's Chair (1888)

 

The object of the chair is like the contemporary found object. This draws attention

to the lack of human presence and references the transience and changing motion

of life. The extinguished pipe lying on Van Gogh’s chair is reminiscent of a Vanitas,

reminding the viewer of the fleeting nature of life.

 

 

 

 

Van Gogh 

The Master Draughtsman

by Sjraar van Heugten

 

 

“As a newcomer to the art academy Van Gogh was not permitted to draw after living models, so he joined

two drawing clubs, where he could draw after nude and clothed models in the evenings. There was no

teachers present during these sessions, and the studies he made there are characterized by his own,

easily recognizable, solid, angular style (ill. 64). As so often in the past, he preferred realistic expression

to anatomical accuracy, as the some-what awkwardly drawn right leg indicates.”

Pg 79-80

 

 

 

 

"Working on the assumption that the colourful Paris townscapes were done no later

than September 1887, it wouldhave been six months since Van Gogh had made any

serious attempt at drawing, so he could hardly have effected any significant changes

to his drawing style or technique in the meantime. This makes the Arles drawings all the

more surprising. It was here that Van Gogh discovered the reed pen, and the drawings

he made with it seem at first sight to mark an abrupt change of course in his oeuvre.

However, a comparison with his Paris paintings and with Japanese prints offers surprising

insights. Paintings as different as the still life with two sunflowers, the still life with

cabbages and onions and self-portrait show an analogous need for strong and controlled

variation in his brush stoke, which finds an echo in the lines, coils and dots of the

pen-and-ink drawings done in Arles.

Van Gogh had already worked with a reed pen in Etten, but he recalls 'I hadn't such good

reeds there as here.' Indeed, in all the work he did in the Netherlands there is nothing that

resembles the fluid style of drawing that characterized his work done in Arles. For all that,

it is doubtful whether the quality of French reeds was in fact so much better than the type

of reed to be found in the Netherlands, or whether it was not simply that Van Gogh as a

mature artist had developed a skill that, at this point, enabled him to take full advantage

of the characteristic qualities of this pen."

Pg 94-96

 

 

 

 

 

TECHNIQUE

"Using smaller-sized paper, Van Gogh also experimented in a few of his pictures of the fishermen's cottages with the 'more spontaneous, more exaggerated' style of drawing he had already heralded in his letter to Theo: a fluent, spontaneous style in which he also used a brush, applying the ink thickly and ignoring proportions in favour of effective expression."

Pg 107

 

 

 

"The other three drawings are more carefully worked out and more balanced, though with no loss in their

expressive spontaneity. The two panoramic landscapes - in which Van Gogh recalled Dutch

seventeenth-century landscape paintings - display a particularly wide variety of pen strokes. The artist

used smaller and finer strokes towards the horizon - one of the techniques he employed to give

these landscapes their surprising depth.The compositions show a wealth of detail, such as groups of

trees, walkers and a train, but these features are included so casually and unobtrusively that one notices

them almost by accident. For Van Gogh it was this subtlety that lay at the heart of the Japanese character

of the works, as he wrote to Bernard: 'a microscope figure of a ploughman, a little train running across the

wheatfield - this is all the animation there is in it.'"

Pg 120

 

 

"From the point of view of technique, it is worth noting that pencil plays a much lesser role than in the first Montmajour series, particularly in the two drawings with the trees and boulders, which points to the fact that he was searching for greater clarity of line. "

Pg 126

 

 

COMPOSITION

"The view between the trees and the large open sky create a feeling of space, but, in contast, the two

other pen-and-ink drawings are filled in with pen right up to the edges, and in the case of the one with

the fountain, also with the brush; there are hardl y open spaces. When a drawing is worked in this way

the composition can easily become too dense, but Van Gogh was able to avoid this danger. The

compositions are overloaded but nevertheless pure and transparent."

Pg 155

 

 

 

(VAN HEUGHTEN, S. (2005). Van Gogh The Master Draughtsman. Thames and Hudson Ltd: London.)