Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

> Pictures in a book or on web pages do not do justice to how vibrant the pictures are in real life

This is true and big.

The paintings are nice on books and screens but are stunning in real life. There is a lot of nuance in the colours that pictures don't replicate.

Same happens to Vermeer landscapes. His "View of Delft" is just nice on screen but almost magical when seen in real.

Next time your in the Netherlands, check out the Kröller-Müller museum. Its collection was created by an art lover who was one of the first to appreciate van Gogh. Although its collection is a bit smaller than that of the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, it is, I think, of a higher quality.

My wife and I both struggled to really get into his work until we went to the museum. There's something about the way the museum presented Van Gogh, as a struggling misfit of perhaps questionable talent trying to make friends and looking for a popular counter-culture style, that really clicked with me. I didn't identify with Van Gogh per se, but I suddenly felt for him and his humanity and it peeled away those layers of nonsensical pop-culture that surrounds him.

I think also that I had seen very few of his paintings in person and when you see his late works, after he figured out what he was, they explode off the canvas like nothing I've ever seen before. My wife and I went home and bought a reproduction we were so moved, and then promptly decided not to hang it when it arrived as it lacks that....whatever factor it is in his real works that make them shimmer like something from another plane of spacetime.

I really recommend people who don't like van Gogh to visit that museum.

That museum was definitely one of the highlights! I can only second every recommendation for it.

Also, his paintings are so thick. Photos don't allow you to see how the paint was applied on top of other paint. Seeing them in person allowed me to understand that Van Gogh attacked his canvas.

I guess I'm the only one who found the museum to be lackluster.

I went a while ago to the same museum. Jean-François Millet's work is in the basement there, as he's one of Van Gogh's inspirations. Millet's work is all dreary peasants toiling in the bleak fields, really grim and depressing stuff, and I would probably never look twice at it online.

Then you get to see his work up close. It's outstanding. It's jaw-droppingly beautiful and intricate. Some of the pieces absolutely overwhelmed me. His paintings are mostly done with a line technique, where he'll paint lines over and over again until the canvas is complete with a comprehensible picture. I'm not sure what it is about screens, but they just don't convey the detail properly at all. On his wikipedia page, Millet's work appears to me as the bleak flat paintings I'd have ignored before I saw his work in person - copies of the exact same paintings I'd seen in person, which overwhelmed me.

I don't really understand why, but there's something fundamentally different about seeing some art in person.

I've had that same rewarding experience at the museum. I figured at least part of it was because you don't fully appreciate the depth of the paint itself on the canvas when looking at a photo of Van Gogh's work. I was really struck by how much dimension there was in the medium, as opposed to a typical oil on canvas painting, like say, The Night Watch. It's physically a very different thing than a photograph can convey. I think you grow up hearing VG is this awesome painter who did these awesome works, here they are, and they look cool, but personally I never appreciated his work as much as I did after seeing the physical objects. The story is more than the graphical composition and color, the brush strokes are more two dimensional. The gestalt is beyond what a book or poster can convey.

You can still go right up to them and look at them very close.

I didn't have an opinion until I visited the Met and went through their impressionist exhibit. One of the centerpieces was a self portrait but I was absolutely enthralled by his Sunflower.

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436524?sortB...

That museum is great. Spending a day there gave me a deep appreciation for Van Gogh, maybe even art in general. Pictures online definitely don't do it justice. The museum also has a good guided audio tour that narrates Van Gogh's life story as you go through the collection.

The mesmerizing colors and poignant landscapes, the neurotic physicality of the brush strokes, all told through Van Gogh's letters to his brother -- it was a vivid experience. I understood that Van Gogh saw the world in a different way, and for a moment I saw it too.

> They look like they were painted yesterday.

Actually, some of the pigments van Gogh used have significantly faded or shifted in color over time. https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i5/Van-Goghs-Fading-Colors-I...

I was there last month…my goodness it was busy. So many people. Go early if you can.

When I went to Amsterdam, I made the mistake of not booking tickets in advance. It was totally sold out the entire time I was there. Would love to have gone.

The Rijksmuseum next door was impressive, though extremely crowded.

I’m in the “van Gough: meh” camp.

But one thing (of many) that I love about being alive is that not everybody has the same tastes, and I enjoyed reading your comment.

I was never a fan of Van Gogh until I saw Starry Night in person at MOMA in NYC.

The thing that jumps out at me is literally the paint on the painting. There is a lot of height to it. The paint is so thick in sections that it sticks out far above the canvas that it can cause a shadow next to it. We tend to think of paintings as 2 dimensional but Starry Night is 3D and seeing it online or in a book or poster is not the same experience.

Since then I've seen about 10 other Van Gogh paintings in museums and I noticed this similar style in his paintings.

If anyone's ever in the Netherlands for more than a couple of days, I'd highly recommend checking out the Kröller-Müller Museum. It has the second-largest collection of Van Gogh paintings [1], but also a sizeable number of paintings from the period leading up to his work, and following his work. It's really interesting to see how it fits in the larger developments in the painting world, and feels like his work is a crucial link in the transition from Rembrandt to abstract work like Mondriaan's.

[1] And while you're at it, visit the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam for the largest collection.

the yellow paint in "A Starry Night" is made with what was called "Indian Cow Yellow".

It's made by feeding cows nothing but mango leaves and dehydrating their urine to a paste.

Now you know...

I saw it the other day. Its home is MoMA, but it is currently on loan at the Met through August 27th.

I just went the other day, and it was definitely worth seeing.

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/van-gogh-cypresses

I don't paint, but I do take pictures. And looking at how painters throughout history depicted the world had an impact on my photography. Especially Van Gogh, as it was the first painter, and museum, I visited by actively trying to learn something instead of just admiring, or not, works of art.

After all, the use of light and composition are almost universial concepts.

AFAIK his paintings were never intended to be 'realistic' in the sense we may value, but instead: symbolic. He played with color, intensity, and perspective, expressing vast emotion, and in some cases, turmoil. His mental health and state changed throughout his life which you can almost "see" evolving through his art as he aged. He's incredible to read about - https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/stories/vinc...

EDIT: I find this really interesting: a visual timeline of how his relationship with alcohol changed his artistic style in various phases of his life: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/536428/fpsyt-11-0...

'perspective' it's just a tool in toolbox of creativity and you can play with it whatever you think would be appropriate to archive your goals.

I used to think “painting is obsolete since we have photographs”.

I later came to realize that paintings can show things photographs can’t, often much more.

Every time you “say” (express) something you are making choices: emphasizing some things and glossing over others. Something strange happens to you but when you tell me about it you skip the extraneous details and focus on what reinforces your point. Taking a photograph, even if not edited (cropped, lighting changed, etc), and even if spontaneous or lucky, is as much about what is not in the frame as what is. In a good movie, we don’t have to wait while the character goes to the bathroom, or while they drive to the store. We just get the part of the story that matters (this is Chekhov’s gun).

All that is true of a painting, but like a story you can make lots of edits, pulling things literally into the frame that are metasyntactic, that a camera would never see.

In a way the sharp literalism of a photo is much too limiting, as it tunes your visual system to focus on the image itself more than what might be expressed.

I can’t speak on his behalf, but I can speak on my own experiences in creating art. It could be something as simple as that whatever you create is not always intended to be a great work, but rather it starts out as an experiment to teach yourself something, or learn a technique, and you work on it so much that you enjoy it, and it eventually becomes something. Artists aren’t really concerned with perfection all the time, sometimes we’re just discovering something in the craft.

noob here too, but I wanted to share what I found in one of the descriptions (“The bedroom”, which I chose while skimming through the thumbnails after reading your comment):

“The rules of perspective seem not to have been accurately applied throughout the painting, but this was a deliberate choice. Vincent told Theo in a letter that he had deliberately ‘flattened’ the interior and left out the shadows so that his picture would resemble a Japanese print”

Van Gogh was heavily inspired by Japanese woodprints, which often utilized 1-point perspective, leading to a sort of "flat" look.

When it comes to his understanding of perspective, Van Gogh was so obsessed with realism that he never drew from imagination and even used/invented his own physical perspective grid to check his work.

And for why his work might appear "amateurish": this was a deliberate style choice by Van Gogh. He was a person who wanted to disguise his expertise. In one of his letters, he notes to a fellow artist that he wants his work to draw people in who "swear he has no technique" and be so "savant" that his work almost appears naive and does not "reek of its cleverness". He's trying to fool us.

Well, you are right.

When it comes to drawing Van Gogh isn't really "a master". He began painting very late in life, didn't have a long apprenticeship and his career lasted just 10 years. Also, he lived in a cultural context (post-impressionism) that was moving away from classical notions of drawing and composition.

Besides, he wasn't the kind of guy that would spend days or weeks or months in a painting. Most of his paintings were the work of one day or afternoon on the field or beach, he wanted that quick burst of expression. That's why he was so prolific. Think jazz improvisation, not classical music composition.

The greatness of his work comes from the vibrant use of colour and brushwork, not drawing and composition.

I don't really think I got it until I saw one in person.

It was only a faily small piece but the guy really gobbed so much paint on there that it looked like the flowers on it were real and sticking out of the painting. It was really quite impressive and I don't think I've seen anything quite like it since.

I think you could probably label the whole field of post-impressionism as just being smudgy or whatever, and it is a really easy style to copy (People have been doing it for like 100+ years now) so I can see where the idea that it's amateurish comes from. But you have to understand it came from a time where people would really deride your work if it didn't fit along established lines and that people like him really pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable to call "art" in their contemporary time.

It is definietely intentional, since some of the earlier and less expressionist drawings use classical perspective.

The goal of art is not to follow rules. That’s why you have all these books that are the “art and science” of this and this. When you follow strict rules you have science, but to make art you have to stop following rules.

We’re several hundred years past that anyway, with Picasso and those random paint splatter paintings.

But to give the science explanation, Van Gogh made impressionist paintings, the goal of which is to create and ambiance, an atmosphere of an impression the artist felt when creating the painting.

Finally, if you study great art you’ll see none of them have correct perspective. Van gogh just shoved it in your face. But having 100% correct perspective is a very amateur quality in itself

I highly recommend this long video:

"Waldemar On The Life Of Vincent Van Gogh"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=365r2m7_B10

Waldemar is awesome, Van Gogh's life is much more interesting than I ever thought.

Also highly recommend all of Waldemar's other "Perspective" videos. You will no longer be a noob. These are definitely from his perspective- it's all about Mary Magdalene with Waldemar.

Note that, already, "experiencing" the 3 dimensional aspect of the paint thickness - which is something that many in-person viewers comment upon, as one of the most striking parts of the experience - can be done at home by anybody with a web browser.

https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/462

They look more like telephone poles, and if my google-fu is serving me, it's unlikely that large scale power distribution was around in Paris in 1887:

https://histoire.bnpparibas/en/the-compagnie-parisienne-de-d...

1887 is in the beginning of France electrification it could indeed be electricity poles (mostly haphazard efforts in France from 1880 to 1890-ish but it’s the entrance of Paris so not an unlikely candidate).

Alternatively that could also be part of the telegraphs system which was fairly widespread at the time (the painting is of one of Paris gates).

There was a woman on television in the 1990s who actually met Van Gogh back when she was a kid. I was surprised to hear that, just as you are surprised to see telephone poles in his pictures.

Bit of both here. Definitely Van Gogh painted largely because he wanted to, but at the same time, the people helping him were constantly reminding him of the commercial necessities of the art, pushing him to produce more in this or that fashionable style.

You can get URLs to the high resolution images using the network inspector. E.g. https://iiif.micr.io/TZCqF/full/1800,/0/default.webp

You need to learn to scrape better: https://iiif.micr.io/qDCTO/full/1800,/0/default.jpg

This is how it should be done:

https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.163184.html

Downloadable JPEG in 4096 × 2441 pixels. Public domain licence.

Another example of the Rijksmuseum neighbouring the Van Gogh Museum:

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/rijksstudio/kunstenaars/johann...

Downloadable JPEG in 4226 × 4762 pixels. Public domain licence. Only downside is a required account there, but while it asks for an e-mail address, it doesn't bother to check it. (So why ask? Sounds like a GDPR violation.)

I consider these a baseline for important historical works unencumbered by copyright. There is no reason the Van Gogh Museum should hoard digital assets. That is not their mission.

I wouldn’t really say pathetic though. It’s a step in the right direction.

I (and someone else too) already mentioned the Kröller-Müller elsewhere, but if you're in the Netherlands anyway, I'd recommend the Mauritshuis as well, and close to it is also the Escher museum if you're into that. I assume the Rijksmuseum is already crossed off :)

From the lesser known Frans Hals in Haarlem is very nice and much less busy

I am intrigued by your comment. Is there a real effort to photograph paintings in nonvisible spectrum and fuller set of angles?

Van Gogh Worldwide has a number of photos of paintings done with raking light and sometimes even X-ray. The raking light really allows one to see the amount of paint applied.

There's a high resolution (30,000 × 23,756 pixels) picture of it on Wikipedia [1] - thanks to the Google Art project [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-_Starry_Night_-...

[2]: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-starry-night-vin...

Maybe they just wasnt attempting to create decoration for your kitchen.

Agreed, but the same can be said for any creative output by another human, can it not? Watching movies, reading books, listening to music... even reading articles and comments on Hacker News would be "worthless luxuries" if one is "chased by heat and thirst".

or if the entire solar system is being pulled into a two-dimensional black hole