Welcome to Great Art. For the past few years,
we've been filming the biggest exhibitions in the world
about some of the greatest artists and art in history.
Not only do we record these landmark shows,
but we also secure privileged access
behind the scenes of the galleries and museums concerned.
We then use the exhibition as a springboard,
to take a broader look at these artists.
A short while ago, the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam
decided to re-hang its entire and unparalleled collection.
They felt it was time to re-visit the biography of Vincent van Gogh,
which was somewhat in danger of being over-mythologised.
And his passion for learning from both his artistic predecessors
and his contemporaries, somewhat overlooked.
We were given extensive access to the museum
and its archives, a treat in itself.
But also giving us a chance to take a fresh look
at one of history's most iconoclastic,
revolutionary, passionate, and popular artists.
(THEME MUSIC PLAYING)
VINCENT: "My dear brother.
The painter's household with its great and petty fixations,
with its calamities,
with its sorrows and griefs,
it has a certain goodwill in its faith, a certain sincerity,
a certain genuinely human quality.
And I ask, "What most makes me a human being?"
Zola says, "I, an artist,
I want to live life to the full,
want to live without ulterior motive.
Naive as a child, no, not as a child,
as an artist, with goodwill,
just as life unfolds, so I will find something in it.
So I'll do my best in it.""
There were a number of reasons why we felt that a re-hang,
a new presentation of the permanent collection was necessary.
We felt that the previous presentation had some shortcomings,
particularly with regards to the person of the artist.
When we first started out,
we asked ourselves the question, "What is the importance of van Gogh?
Why is he still appealing to so many people?
What is it in his art
that appeals to our emotions so much?
What did he want to say with his art?"
Van Gogh is a phenomenon,
um, so I think people, when they enter the museum,
will already have an idea about van Gogh.
and they probably will have his most important paintings in their heads,
or they know about his troubled life.
So it's really a challenge for us
to have them look beyond the Sunflowers,
to have them look beyond the suicide.
I think the re-hanging makes it clear that he was not an isolated genius
who just fell from Heaven, and, you know, just was.
He was an artist who developed,
who took lots of cues from the artistic world around him.
He lived and worked in a context, within a network of other artists.
Um, he exchanged ideas with them,
he was inspired greatly, by also earlier generations of artists.
And, of course, then subsequent generations were also inspired by him.
and we also want to show van Gogh in that sort of continuum.
The man and the artist are one.
It's not two separate identities.
It's the art of one of the greatest artists of all time,
and to put the focus back on the art
by giving more attention to the miss, as well.
Um, that sounds contradictory,
but I think it really helps in understanding,
um, what makes van Gogh so important and special.
Vincent's brother, Theo, was an art dealer in Paris,
and he supported Vincent all his life.
and so when Vincent died,
Theo owned over 450 paintings,
and many hundreds of drawings by Vincent.
And after the death of Vincent and Theo,
and his mother, as well,
my grandfather inherited the entire collection.
And in the '30s,
he decided to bring half of his collection
to the Municipal Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
And the other half, he had in his home,
hanging on the walls,
and in, as we say, nowadays, a walk-in closet.
200 paintings by Vincent van Gogh,
500 drawings, and Vincent's letters to Theo,
and also many hundreds of contemporaries,
like Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard,
and he had the idea together with his mother,
to keep the collection together.
and to get the collection accessible for...well, for everybody.
And the museum, the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, opened in 1973.
(CHATTERING)
After Theo's death,
his widow, Jo, started to read the letters
Vincent wrote to his brother, Theo.
And while reading them, she noticed
they were of huge importance to art history.
Because Vincent and Theo had a very close relationship, very intimate,
and Vincent, uh, already wrote letters to his brother,
before he became an artist.
The letters are, of course, an enormous treasure for us,
because, in the letters, van Gogh talks so much
about, um, his becoming an artist,
what moved him, what inspired him.
He refers to hundreds and hundreds of works of art,
to literature, to music, to religion,
um, all the sort of sources of inspiration that he used.
The letters are also extremely well-written,
so it's really a joy to read them.
And you really get a very comprehensive
picture of who he was, as a personality,
his trials and tribulations, his joys and fears.
Um, so, in that sense, the letters are an essential aspect
of our understanding of van Gogh, the person,
and also of van Gogh, as an artist.
It is important, of course,
being the van Gogh Museum, that's what it says on the can,
so you expect when you enter to encounter van Gogh.
And we did that in a rather drastic way,
by presenting him,
just with a sort of series of self-portraits.
12 self-portraits in one room,
so you really come eye-to-eye with van Gogh,
and it has an immediately a strong impact,
and then you enter the story, as it were.
"My dear brother, people say,
and I'm quite willing to believe it,
that it's difficult to know oneself. (MATCH IGNITES)
But it's not easy to paint oneself either.
Thus, I'm working on two portraits of myself, at the moment,
for want of another one,
because it's more than time that I did a bit of figure-work."
His face in itself, of course, is an icon.
Everyone knows his face.
Maybe they figure there might be an ear missing,
but, of course, there's not, uh, and, for him, of course,
in the first place, they were just practice,
but, of course, it's also a sort of artistic,
and maybe even psychological research.
I paint self-portraits,
and I've known a lot of other artists who do,
and we do it because, for a start,
the models are always there, it's for free.
And those are the paintings in any gallery,
I think it's the faces that people instinctively look towards,
because we are always programmed
to be looking for other people. (LAUGHS)
I don't think you could surmise that by painting himself all the time,
he was engrossed in the idea of his own identity,
or the trauma that we might imagine
he was exploring about himself.
I think he was just, uh,
he was just painting the model that he knew best.
It's a bit funny to talk about van Gogh
because, actually, he wanted to be named as Vincent,
and we know him as van Gogh.
Uh, but he signed his pictures all with 'Vincent,'
partly because he didn't like the family name.
partly, perhaps, this is also tradition
with great masters, so Rembrandt is also a first name.
Van Gogh's personality was, of course,
the personality of a driven man, and a man obsessed.
Somebody who wanted to achieve something in life, um,
partly that I tend to think had something to do with his character.
It was a man who was easily...
who had emotions, strong emotions.
I mean, if you would go out with him and go to the pub,
you would have, within five or ten minutes...
well, not fighting,
but perhaps fighting with words, which he certainly would,
uh, because he would immediately try to convince you of his opinions.
Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853,
in the rural Dutch village of Zundert,
near the border with Belgium.
He was the eldest son in a family of six children,
and his father was the local Protestant preacher.
Vincent attended a boarding school,
where he was well-educated, learning several languages.
From an early age, Vincent loved nature,
and being surrounded by the natural world.
He would often go on long walks,
exploring the rural landscape around him.
He also loved to read.
And this was the normal thing in the 19th century.
If you belonged to the middle class, you read.
And especially in a Protestant family where the word is very important,
you did read, so the whole family did read books,
like we watch television nowadays.
But in the case of van Gogh, this really grew
into "you have to read to develop yourselves,
and to learn about yourself."
And that's what he did.
Vincent's father decided that his eldest son
should be an apprentice at Goupil & Co.,
an art dealership partly founded by van Gogh's uncle,
also called Vincent.
Goupil was a very big firm,
with showrooms and offices across Europe.
During this period, Vincent became exposed to the art market,
visiting many galleries and museums.
He was quick to formulate his own opinions on what appealed to him,
and started communicating his thoughts through letters with hisfamily,
and, particularly, with his younger brother, Theo,
who had also joined Goupil.
Vincent was transferred to Goupil's offices in London.
He moved into lodgings in Brixton, South London,
and spent his time reading, taking long walks,
and visiting museums.
Vincent became increasingly disillusioned with his work,
but found solace in reading and writing,
particularly religious texts.
The van Gogh that we know was being born in London,
because he simply realised, I think, at the time,
that he had to look for something else.
He liked art, but I don't think he liked
really what he was doing, within the firm.
In 1875, Vincent was transferred
to Goupil's head office in Paris,
to improve a lacklustre attitude to his work.
The plan failed, and Vincent left Goupil and Co.,
having decided his path lay with helping the disadvantaged.
"My dear Theo,
not a day goes by without praying to God,
and without speaking of God.
Not only praying, but also admitting to it.
Not only speaking, but also holding fast to praying.
Oh, Lord, join us intimately to one another,
and let our love for Thee make that bond ever stronger."
He wanted to do something with religion, wanted to preach.
And he thought, "You don't need an academic degree
to be a minister."
But you know the Gospel very well, by heart, like he almost did, um,
and you care for people, then you can also preach the Word of God.
Um, he decided, or it was more or less decided
within the family, that he would go
to a short course in Brussels,
in Belgium, for the Protestant church,
to be trained, more or less, as a preacher, an evangelist.
And after that, um, he decided to go to the Borinage.
It was a difficult region, the south of Belgium,
French-speaking, but French-speaking with a heavy accent.
Quite difficult to understand from the beginning,
as he said in his letters.
Um, but he wanted to be there, it was a mining country.
"It's a sombre place.
And at first sight, everything around it
has something dismal and deathly about it.
The workers there are usually people,
emaciated and pale, owing to fever.
Who look exhausted and haggard,
weather-beaten and prematurely old.
Later, I'll try and make a sketch of it,
to give you an idea of it."
This is one of the earliest drawings that we have in the collection.
It's from 1879, when van Gogh was staying in Belgium,
in the Borinage, the mining region.
And what we see here is a coal mine,
with a little person standing here,
and some kind of animal in the field.
It's er, it's a bit naive, it's not yet as developed
as when he was really starting out as a draftsman.
He's...he's experimenting with pencil, and watercolour,
but this was before he decided to become an artist.
Vincent's time in the Borinage village of Petit-Wasmes
was full of self-sacrifice,
and dedication to the small mining community.
But after six months, he lost his position as an evangelist,
largely due to his poor skills at delivering sermons.
From that moment on, almost for a year,
we don't know really what he actually did.
He didn't write any letters any more to his brother, Theo.
We have some information from letters of his parents to Theo,
where they talk about Vincent, and they only have concern about him,
what he's going to do with his life.
When Theo and Vincent started writing to each other again,
Vincent's despair and wretched situation
were all too apparent.
Theo was now working in the Paris office of Goupil & Co.,
and he thought it might help his brother
if he considered a new path, as an artist.
Van Gogh started as an artist in 1880.
He was living in the Netherlands,
and he would stay there for the next five years.
So the first half of his career,
he spent in the Netherlands, what we call the Dutch period.
He was moving around in the Netherlands.
He was living in The Hague for a while,
where he took lessons with Anton Mauve,
a well-known Hague school painter, and he was also family of van Gogh,
so it was easy to get some training with this established artist.
Van Gogh didn't take traditional schooling,
he only went for a very brief period to the academy,
when he started out as an artist,
and then decided that he would learn
his...being an artist by himself.
He used a lot of handbooks,
and he looked at other artists intensely also,
during these five years in Holland.
We always tend to think that van Gogh was an avant-garde artist,
but, in fact, if you look upon him, he was quite old-fashioned.
Drawing remains the main thing for an artist.
So he started that way, he started the traditional way
of how you become an artist in the 19th century.
You start with drawing.
Vincent kept working on his technique in The Hague,
though finding willing models was proving hard.
After setting up a studio in his lodgings,
Vincent met a prostitute called Clasina Maria Hoornik, known as Sien,
who was pregnant and living rough with a four-year-old child.
He decided to invite her to live with him.
The arrangement was kept secret from the family,
as Vincent was using money sent by Theo to support them both.
Vincent cared greatly for Sien and her children.
They became part of his domestic life,
and the subject of many drawings and studies.
When Vincent's relationship with Sien was discovered,
his family, including Theo, put pressure on him to finish,
which he did with great sadness
and after a long period of contemplation.
He was 30, and it was the first time
he felt he had a family of his own to care for.
Vincent left The Hague, and travelled North,
to the flatlands of Drenthe.
Here, he lived a frugal life,
and captured the landscape on paper,
until he eventually moved back to the family home,
which was now located in the Dutch village of Nuenen.
He was considered by locals as eccentric,
a loner, strange.
But nothing would deter him from walking into the countryside
with his artist materials,
endlessly attempting to capture rural life.
It's interesting to see that he always had this crude,
sort of bold way of drawing.
In the beginning, he was trying to fight against it.
And then, at some point, he understood
that this whole expressiveness that just keeps pouring out
of his chalk or his pencil
was just his strongest asset, in a sense.
And he learned how to use it in a very strong way.
So I think his marks in his drawings
helped him also to paint,
because he figures out,
what is his mark? What is his style?
When van Gogh started as an artist,
he admired the French landscape tradition greatly,
especially as it was painted by Daubigny
in a very personal, not sentimental, but more realistic mood,
but very personal and very free in his brushwork.
And this, of course, was also
the ambition of van Gogh, when he started as an artist.
So these French landscape painters
like Daubigny, like Millet, were his great models.
So, looking at all these great French landscape painters,
he...he tried to convey the same, er, mood
of...of human versus nature.
"My dear Theo, one would be wrong to my mind,
to give a peasant painting a certain conventional smoothness.
If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam,
fine, that's not unhealthy.
If a stable smelled of manure,
very well, that's what a stable's for.
If the field has an odour of ripe wheat or potatoes
or of guano and manure,
that's really healthy, particularly for city folk.
They get something useful out of paintings like this.
But a peasant painting mustn't become perfumed."
He was really focusing very hard on this,
reading about it, writing about it to Theo,
by making a lot of studies of peasant hats, for example,
and, finally, his most ambitious work, The Potato Eaters.
The play between light and dark,
the chiaroscuro, is so important in this painting,
that makes it into, technically and stylistically,
a very well-achieved painting.
This new way of...of presenting the peasant
in a very stark and very...
well, almost expressive manner,
um, was pretty radical.
The people that you see are not happy or sad,
they're just very tired from this intense work,
and, for van Gogh, it was something beautiful
that people worked hard, he worked hard himself,
and, of course, that's also something religious.
You work very hard, and you will reap what you put in the ground.
Vincent believed The Potato Eaters
to be his greatest accomplishment so far,
and showed it to both Theo and Van Rappard,
but was met with an unenthusiastic response from Theo,
and harsh criticism from Van Rappard.
Infuriated, he headed for Antwerp
to explore new ideas and seek academic training.
In Antwerp, he first of all went to the museums,
he discovered the Rubens, for instance, the beautiful colours of Rubens.
and especially the brushwork of Rubens.
From now on, when he would look at art,
he would always look at how they were made.
Before he was a painter, he would go to a museum,
and only talk about the images he saw, and their sentiment.
But now he would only talk about how they were made,
how the brushwork was. He wanted to learn something from the old masters.
After a short time in Antwerp,
he decided to head for Paris to be with his brother
and search out new inspiration.
In the late 19th century, Paris was the centre of modern art,
and Montmartre was the centre of artistic freedom.
The establishment lived elsewhere, but the hill of Montmartre
was a place for young artists and radical thought.
Vincent not only moved there to be closer to Theo,
an increasingly successful art dealer,
but also to involve himself with a like-minded community,
that thrived in this multitude of colourful bars,
burlesque theatres, and bohemian cafes.
On arrival in Paris, Vincent attended classes
at the studio of a well-known painter called Fernand Cormon.
Young artists were left to work in groups,
receiving advice once in a while from the established Cormon.
Although Vincent was disappointed with the level of tuition,
his time at the studio introduced him to other young artists
who later became close friends.
Emile Bernard, John Russell, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec,
who introduced him to the hedonistic world of Montmartre,
and engaged him in the artistic dialogue he craved so much.
The Impressionists like Monet and Pissarro
were already more or less established by the time that van Gogh arrived,
and their heydays were in the 1870s,
so there was this new generation of...of young men
who wanted to change and revolutionise the art world.
Shortly after Vincent arrived in Paris,
the brothers moved to a larger apartment,
54 Rue Lepic.
Van Gogh had a small room there which he used as a studio,
and went outside to paint, to just set up his easel and paint
the landscape which was still quite rural in Montmartre.
On the hill, there were mills and allotments, little gardens,
not yet as many apartment buildings as there are today.
So, he was basically painting everything that he came across.
Street scenes, the view from his window,
but also still lifes in his studio,
when he couldn't go outside to paint. And of course the many self-portraits
of which we have several on view here in the museum.
I think it's impossible to understand what was happening
to van Gogh's palette and technique when he moved to Paris
without seeing the contexts that he worked,
and it was such a...a great change
from what he was doing in Holland.
Of course, it didn't happen overnight,
but it went really quickly.
Then in that time, his colour had changed dramatically.
It became very bright and very pure.
He used pure colours in his paintings.
His brushstroke changed. He was very much influenced
by the Pointillists who were painting in short stripes and dots.
The woman that we see on the portrait is Agostina Segatori.
She was the owner of a bar in Montmartre,
which was called Le Tambourin, a bar where artists frequently came,
and van Gogh, at some point, he had a relationship with Agostina,
and he also exhibited in her bar.
He hung his own paintings on the wall,
and he even organised an exhibition
of Japanese prints from his own collection.
The portrait of Agostina Segatori is hanging
next to a portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec,
painted in the same time, same year, actually. 1887.
And we have hung those two paintings together
because they show a similar subject, a similar composition,
of a woman sitting at a cafe table, which was, again,
a very modern subject at the time.
Another important thing he discovered in Paris were Japanese prints.
There was this rage about Japanese art in Paris at that time.
Some of his artworks are direct translations of these prints.
He really copied them in colour in his own way.
But also, the way that they made cropped compositions,
or they used a very stark perspective
are also reflected in van Gogh's art.
Paris was too overwhelming in the end for van Gogh.
It was too much visual noise, too much things going on.
And he needed to step away from it all,
and to be physically removed
from the centre of the world, basically.
So, he decided to leave.
He longed for a warmer climate,
and he was also anxious to discover the colours of the south,
of the strong light and the effect that
that would have on the countryside,
on the landscape, such as the land that he knew from the Japanese print.
So, when he arrived in Arles, he was really hoping to find a new utopia.
"My dear Theo, during the journey,
I thought at least as much about you as about the new country I was in.
But I tell myself that you'll perhaps come here as often yourself later on.
It seems to be almost impossible to be able to work in Paris
unless you have a refuge in which you recover
and regain your peace of mind and self-composure.
Without that, you'll be bound to go utterly mental.
Arles doesn't seem any bigger than Montmartre.
Before reaching Tarascon, I noticed some magnificent scenery.
Huge yellow rocks, oddly jumbled together in the most imposing shapes.
In the small valleys between these rocks,
there are rows of little round trees with olive green,
or grey-green foliage, which could well be lemon trees."
He always went out early in the morning with all his painting gear.
And he often painted and drew a subject
from various angles and in series of works.
I think that, for me, painting is all about light.
And as an artist, you've got to notice it and scrutinise it
because it shapes the world around us every day,
and most of the time, we don't give it a second thought.
And it might well be an overcast day, where everything feels
a lot more muted and softer and cooler,
and the shadows aren't so extreme, and you're searching
for the difference between areas of a building that are
supposedly closer to the sun than those that are away from it,
or it might be a blazing hot Mediterranean day,
when the sun is really shaping and sculpting
in combination with rich, dark shadows.
So, he's experiencing the weather, the temperature, the wind.
He's gauging all of that.
And when you get into the zone as a painter, and you're out there,
that energy becomes almost hypnotic.
You're painting and you're responding to what's happening in front of you,
you're mixing pigments in your palette,
and maybe you drop your brush and you get some earth
on the brush, and it mixes into the colour.
You become at one with this whole experience.
And you can almost get into a kind of weird trance.
More than being a landscape painter,
he wanted to be a painter of portraits.
And this is something that he really started to do
in a very serious way in Provence.
He asked people from the town to pose for him,
such as an old woman of Arles.
All kinds of portraits of ordinary people,
everyday people, everyday life.
Such were the things that he wanted to paint, and draw in Arles.
When van Gogh was living in Arles, he started to have this dream
about an artist colony, and he hoped that other artists would join him.
And they could work together, share their materials together,
discuss art, and together they would
make better art, and become better artists.
One of these artists was Gauguin, and he came in the end.
In preparation of Gauguin's arrival, van Gogh started a campaign
of painting canvasses as kind of decoration for his yellow house.
And he started to make specific paintings
that would hang in Gauguin's bedroom,
and it was a very beautiful series
of nowadays icons of van Gogh's work.
Gauguin and van Gogh worked and lived together for two months in Arles.
They drank and ate together and painted the same models
side by side in the yellow house.
Unfortunately, it didn't end that well.
As most people know, it ended with the famous incident
that van Gogh cut off part of his ear.
They had a huge argument,
probably also about art and what modern art should be about.
Their characters didn't go well together.
Gauguin left Arles, and van Gogh was hospitalised for a longer period
to...to, um, well, recover from his ear injury.
The paintings of the sunflowers and his bedroom
were very important to Vincent.
They reflected the ambitions that he set himself while in Arles.
Critics of the day and observers of the avant-garde
recognised that the sunflowers were something completely new and unique.
These paintings may have become icons after van Gogh's death,
but they'd always been very important,
not only to Vincent but also to his brother Theo
and to other artists from his circle, like Gauguin.
Van Gogh was an incredibly creative person,
and tried out many different techniques,
and experimented with things that he'd picked up along the way,
but combining them in his own personal approach.
And what we see is that he often experimented with extremes.
So, first painting were very dilute oil paint, for example,
and then switching just a month later to using thick, creamy,
what we call impaste, a very strongly textured paint.
Though he was using basically the same materials
for these different approaches, um,
we do have to adjust our technique of treating paintings
according to the, you know, the build-up of the layers
and the way that the paint is applied.
So, this is an example of a painting that I'm restoring.
It's a view of Arles with irises in the foreground,
painted in May 1888.
And what you can see, what I'm actually doing is
reversing the restoration carried out by my predecessor.
Apparently, the conservator who worked on the painting in 1927
found this transition very disturbing,
so he applied retouches to soften
this transition, to blend it into each other,
even though, as in this case, van Gogh did not
intend his French paintings to be varnished
because he preferred a modern matte surface.
After recovering from his ordeal in hospital,
Vincent went back to his studio in his yellow house
and realised his dream of an artistic brotherhood had been shattered.
The episode of the cutting of the ear
was the start of a very difficult period in his life,
blighted by seizures and bouts of illness.
Van Gogh stayed a little longer in Arles, in and out of hospital,
and finally, he decided that he needed to get away from Arles.
And he committed himself
to an asylum in Saint-Remy, not far from Arles.
He stayed there for a long time, and he was treated for what he called
his, well, lunacy or his illness, his moments of depression.
We'll never know exactly what his illness was.
The doctor wrote down that he had a type of epilepsy,
so it was close to some kind of madness in the eyes of many people.
Painting is a difficult, troubling,
and enormously frustrating activity.
Every day, when I stand in front of my canvas,
I will expose the gap between
what I want to achieve and what I can achieve,
And the greatest artists in history
have been possessed by the need to create art and it exhausts them.
And it's real. That bit is real.
Painting takes it out of you,
if you're doing it as a conviction, as a passion.
Um, and that's no lie. (CHUCKLES) That's for real.
In Saint-Remy, in spite of his illness,
he created a lot of works that are considered his best works.
It's amazing how he managed to recover every time
and to continue to really develop his work,
his way of painting, his way of drawing.
The Irises, for example, he'd done at the end of his days in Saint-Remy
and during this period, he created an amazing amount of masterpieces.
"My dear Theo, I have a wheat field, very yellow and very bright,
perhaps the brightest canvas I've done.
The cypresses still preoccupy me.
I'd like to do something with them like the canvasses of the sunflowers,
because it astonishes me that no-one has yet done them as I see them.
It's beautiful as regards lines and proportions,
like an Egyptian obelisk,
and the green has such a distinguished quality.
To do nature here, as everywhere,
one must really be here for a long time."
He made beautiful close-ups of undergrowth
or butterflies, roses in the garden,
He painted the view of his window.
On the fields stood olive groves around the asylum.
But he also asked Theo to send him several of his favourite artworks,
such as paintings by Millet, Delacroix, Rembrandt in print.
So, he received his black and white prints from Theo,
and he started copying them like he did before
when he started out as an artist.
After a year in the asylum, van Gogh was feeling stronger,
and was anxious to move, to get away from the institutional
atmosphere of Saint-Remy.
It was time to move back north and be closer to Theo,
who had by this time, married Jo Bonger
and had a child named Vincent Willem.
Although Vincent was keen to be closer to his brother,
Paris was considered too much for his fragile state of mind.
So, he asked Theo to find him a location close to Paris
with a doctor who could keep an eye on him.
Theo made inquiries, and through the painter Camille Pissarro,
found a homoeopathic doctor called Paul Gachet
in the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise,
just to the north of the capital.
Gachet was both a well-known doctor and a well-known collector,
and would keep an eye on Vincent, while offering his companionship
as one who understood artists and the art world.
When Vincent went to Auvers, one of the first letters he wrote to Theo in Paris
is quite a remarkable thing he said
is that he felt that his whole life had been a failure,
that he was a failure as a painter.
We know that van Gogh really thought that ambition was gone in his life,
he was still working, but he was more working like a madman.
But why are you working like a madman?
You're working like a madman because you want to push certain thoughts
out of your mind which you do not want to think about.
Vincent was at a very low point.
Illness, despair, and an uncertain future
weighed heavy on his mind.
In the afternoon of July the 27th, 1890,
Vincent left his lodgings and disappeared into the countryside.
On his return that evening, he was evidently in great pain.
He confessed to having shot himself in the chest,
and Dr Gachet was called to tend the wound.
Theo arrived in haste the next day.
Vincent lay in some agony,
but still managed to smoke his pipe and talk with Theo,
until the following day, he fell into unconsciousness
and died on the 29th of July in his brother's arms.
"I want to die like this."
Many people have thought, because of that fear
that's been expressed in this picture,
that it also was his last picture
and it's been described as such. It wasn't.
But people are right to think in the interpretation of the picture
that there is a kind of fearness in it.
The idea that you're being overwhelmed by something
which you cannot do anything about, and will threaten you.
That's the idea of the picture.
Tree Roots is his last picture.
So, that's the picture that he made in the morning before he died.
Vincent's art wasn't appreciated very well by the audience,
by the people during his life.
But at the end of his life, his contemporaries, his peers,
considered him as one of the most important,
maybe the most important artist of the avant-garde of that time.
Van Gogh hoped to move and touch
and inspire or console as many people as possible,
and I don't think the fact that he's so successful now,
that his paintings belong to the most expensive paintings in the world,
or that we have so many visitors at the van Gogh Museum,
that's not, um, it's not the financial success,
it's really about some sincere ambition
that he wanted to make this connection,
and to be...to try to give answers
to all of our questions about our existence, about life,
and the fact that he's still able to make that connection
to so many people, that would have pleased him the most.
"My dear Theo, man is not placed on the Earth merely to be happy,
nor is he placed here merely to be honest.
He is here to accomplish great things through society,
to arrive at nobleness, and to outgrow the vulgarity
in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on.
Art is long and life is short,
and we must wait patiently while trying to sell our skin dearly."
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