VAN GOGH AND THE COLOURS OF THE NIGHT

SJRAAR VAN HEUGTEN & OTHERS

Van Gogh Museum/Museum of Modern Art/Mercatorfonds 2008 £23

160 pp. 115 col illus

ISBN 978-90-6153-825-7 (P)

This attractively produced and well illustrated catalogue accompanied an exhibition held in

two versions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (September 2008 -January 2009)

and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (February-June 2009). The Amsterdam show

was relatively concise - 32 paintings, 19 works on paper and five sketches from letters - and

included art works by a variety of painters and printmakers besides van Gogh.

Although some reviewers considered the pretext for the exhibition - Vincent’s fascination

with twilight and night scenes, which incidentally preceded his decision to become an artist

- to be ‘contrived’, it did enable a fresh look at some familiar images and to establish

connections between the dark interiors of the early peasant pictures such as ‘The Potato

Eaters’ (1885) and the later exterior views of the night sky such as the famous ‘Starry

Night’ (1889). It also facilitated a historical contextualisation of van Gogh’s work in

relation to the popular genre of nocturnal imagery as evidenced in the work of such artists

as Rembrandt, Cuyp, Corot, Daubigny, Dupré, Millet, Breton and so forth. (Like Millet,

Vincent found the moment of twilight in the countryside particularly peaceful and

poignant.) There was also the opportunity for comparisons between Vincent’s nocturnal

scenes and those of contemporaries such as Anquetin and Seurat.

After an introduction written by Joachim Pissarro and Sjraar van Heugten, the catalogue

consists of seven short essays: 1) Chris Stolwijk on the pictorial genre of evening and night

scenes; 2) Pissarro on the formation of nocturnal themes in Vincent’s early writings; 3) van

Heugten on the stylistic and technical aspects of van Gogh’s night scenes; 4) Geeta Bruin

on landscapes at twilight; 5) Jennifer Field on scenes of peasant life; 6) Maite van Dijk on

the theme of wheat; and 7) Field and van Dijk on the poetry of the night. This sequence of

essays means that van Gogh’s paintings are not discussed in chronological order and their

overlapping subject matter means there is much repetition. The catalogue also contains

notes, a bibliography, a list of illustrations, and indexes.

Van Gogh, born in 1853, spent his childhood in the Dutch countryside before the advent of

electric light; therefore, he experienced the world before today’s age of light pollution from

the cities and highways. (After 1810, gas lighting was introduced in European towns and

cities throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and electric light began to be

introduced in the 1880s.) He enjoyed taking long walks in the countryside and had strong

emotional responses to nature, the sun, moon and stars, skies, the fading light of evening

and the artificial light emanating from house windows after dark. Later, his intense

engagement with Christianity and the Bible encouraged him to interpret nature and light

religiously, symbolically. This meant that the empiricism of his observation and the realism

of his art was overlaid with symbolic meanings. A reaper of ripe wheat, for instance, was

not simply an agricultural labourer hard at work but also a symbol of death and with the

sower scattering seed, the cycle of life. The stars in the night sky were not simply

astrological phenomena but emblems of eternity. The extraordinary popularity of his art is

partly due to the ability of the audience to intuit such meanings.

Again, van Gogh lived before the evening distractions of radio, television and the cinema;

therefore, the hours of darkness were for him periods of repose, reflection, imagination,

reading, writing and creative thinking. Joachim Pissarro reminds us that Vincent was a

prodigious reader and argues that his visual art was informed by a deep knowledge of

literary descriptions of nocturnal scenes. It seems that during the 1870s Vincent compiled

albums of poetry, one of which was devoted to night and evening subjects.

Furthermore, Vincent enjoyed working at night, even drawing and painting at night with

the aid of oil lamps or firelight and later, in Arles, gas light. (In 1888, van Gogh added gas

lighting to his Yellow House studio in Arles. A new gas wall light appears in his portrayal

of Gauguin’s chair.) Some evenings he spent in cafes, dancehalls and brothels illuminated

by large lamps and lanterns, hence such paintings as ‘Terrace of a Café at Night’ (1888)

and ‘The Night Café’ (1888).

Van Heugten, in his essay, analyses the stylistic and technical characteristics of four

important canvases including the major figure composition of peasants eating their evening

meal at a table illuminated by a single oil lamp - ‘The Potato Eaters’ - a work in which

van Gogh set out to master chiaroscuro with the aid of theory (Charles Blanc) and

numerous preliminary studies of light effects, colours and shadows. It seems this painting

was executed in a cottage with the aid of oil lamps. The three other canvases van Heugten

discusses are the later works ‘The Sower’ (1888), ‘The Night Café’ (1888) and ‘Starry

Night’ (1889). In ‘The Night Café’ the interior is lit by four garish lamps, three of which

seem to be oil lamps and one of which is gas. This painting also enabled Vincent to explore
the more sinister aspects of night life. The Arles canvases employ strong colour contrasts

more than dark/light contrasts but even so some contre-jour effects are to be found. While

most painters work with their backs to the sun, Vincent was unusual in confronting it head

on especially at sunset - witness his wheat fields with huge golden orbs setting on the

horizon or placed behind a sower’s head like a halo in a religious fresco. He was also

brave in deciding to paint outside at night in order to depict the clear night sky above the

River Rhône or the village of Saint-Rémy ablaze with stars. (Vincent’s 1889 popular

masterpiece ‘Starry Night’ with its spiral structures perhaps influenced by the

astronomical drawing of the whirlpool galaxy made by William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse

in 1845, surely merited a far more extended analysis that it receives in the catalogue.) Even

a portrait might be given a background of dark blue punctuated by stars - witness the 1888

portrait of his friend the painter-poet Eugène Boch.

Any admirer of van Gogh’s paintings will find this catalogue a worthy addition to the

literature about him. However, given that the curators write for the general public rather

than an academic audience, van Gogh experts may find the essays’ scholarship lacking in

depth. For example, there is very little discussion of the astronomical influences in the

pictures of stars and moons that have been identified by such art historians and

astronomers as Albert Boime, Charles A. Whitney and Donald W. Olson.

John A. Walker is a painter and art historian.