Van Gogh’s Japanese Idyll

At least it’s in the HN edition now! The Père Tanguy portrait is just wonderful.

The letters are fascinating and totally worth a read. There's one letter in which he simply says (to his brother, IIRC, and I paraphrase): "a painter must, above all, paint well". It struck me as a very Zen-like observation.

Did you finish it? It comes to this conclusion:

> Ultimately, however, the Japan-as-inspiration-narrative collapses under the weight of van Gogh’s staggering range. While many of the portraits from this period incorporate the cropped perspectives and jagged linearity in Japanese woodcuts of aristocrats and courtesans, they just as often borrow heavily from the hyper-individualized, introspective examples of the Dutch Golden Age portraiture of Rembrandt and Vermeer, painters van Gogh had long admired.

Some of it involves tracing the originals in a fair amount of detail. But that it seems that just what he wanted: the exact picture with its essential forms in the same places and proportions, but with his style over it, making possible an A-B comparison. There is a method to it.

-> Nothing in Van Gogh's experimentation with or usage of Japanese elements looks egregious to me.

Can't read the article at work. But they hosted a exhibit on this subject at Tokyo where I saw some work of his. And this was my impression. It is closer to a "experimentation".