Van Gogh

On October 14, 2022, while visitors at the National Gallery in London were enjoying Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, two girls approached the painting to observe it closely. Suddenly, they threw a can of tomato soup over the entire artwork. These two girls were activists from a movement called Just Stop Oil, an environmental group whose members stated that the world would be shaken the moment the soup hit Van Gogh’s painting, while humanity stands still as fossil fuels destroy the planet. They concluded their statement with the question: “What is worth more — art or life?”
Does art deserve more attention from us as humans than preserving life itself, or the lives of people who are suffering from the effects of global warming caused by the use of fossil fuels?

It is interesting to know that the artist himself, Vincent van Gogh, was a Christian preacher who defended the poor and their rights, specifically the coal miners who used coal as fuel, to the extent that Van Gogh was called the “Christ of the coal mines.” Undoubtedly, if Van Gogh were still alive today, he might have joined the movement of those two girls. And from here, we begin the story of the artist Vincent van Gogh.

The sensitive, brilliant artist, the man who kept people awake all night, unable to rest until they were certain that his painting was safe and that the tomato soup had not damaged it. Yet, tragically, during this artist’s own lifetime, people threw stones at him and labeled him as insane.

Vincent van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853 to Reverend Theodorus and his mother, Anna. From his childhood, he had only one goal: to please his father and mother, even if that meant becoming a replica of them. His mother was an amateur painter who would take him and his siblings on outings to teach them how to draw from nature. Vincent was the only one among his siblings who took his mother’s drawing lessons seriously, so seriously that he would pick plants, take them home, and draw them more than a thousand times until he mastered them perfectly.

On the other hand, Van Gogh used to say that he wished the spirit of his father and grandfather would enter him so he could become a pastor like them. But unfortunately, once again, the love was not mutual. His father described Vincent as strange and having a frightening tendency toward depression, while his mother, for her part, never appreciated any effort Vincent made and favored his younger brother Theo over him. This made Vincent feel that he was never enough.

When Vincent was eleven years old, he was struck by a deep shock when his parents decided to place him in a boarding school. This experience would make him taste the feeling of exile for the first time, a feeling that would stay with him for the rest of his life. It was this very sense of displacement that pushed him to move endlessly from one city to another, searching for a job that might finally make his parents proud of him, hoping—just hoping—that they would give him the love he had never received. Vincent would later describe his childhood as austere, cold, and barren.

When Van Gogh finished elementary school with excellent results, his parents ended his education and prevented him from continuing. At the age of fifteen, he and his brother went to work for their uncle Cornelius in the art-dealing business. And although Vincent did not complete his formal schooling, he mastered English, French, and German without a teacher, simply to help his uncle.

In a study titled The Conscience of Van Gogh, it is said that Vincent’s conscience was constantly torn between his desire to become an artist, surrounded as he was by paintings in his uncle’s gallery, and his desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a pastor. Inside him, two versions of himself were competing: one wanting to become a talented painter like the artists whose work surrounded him, and the other wanting to become a pastor like his father. This inner conflict kept burning until one voice began to dominate: the voice of his father. We see this young man who speaks four languages pointing at the paintings in his uncle’s gallery, telling customers that they were “worthless art.” And indeed, his uncle eventually dismissed him from the gallery.

After that, Vincent went to Amsterdam to study the Bible, but when it was time for the Latin exam, he refused to take it, describing Latin as a dead language. Here, we clearly see Van Gogh’s tension as he struggled to decide whether to follow his mother’s path in art or become a pastor like his father. He desperately wanted to be both, yet deep inside, he was terrified of choosing, because he knew that whichever path he chose would imprison him in that decision forever.

As a kind of middle-ground solution, Vincent volunteered as a missionary in a European town in Belgium, a town inhabited by coal miners and considered by the church a place of exile, where priests were sent as punishment. There, Vincent began drawing the miners and was deeply moved by their poverty. He even gave up the house the church had rented for him, handing it over to a poor elderly woman. Not only that, but he gave away his own possessions to the farmers and chose to live as they did. The people began to love him and called him the “Christ of the coal mines.”

Vincent was doing all of this while holding a certain image of himself as a hero saving people in a story he hoped would one day reach his parents, proving to them that he was a better person than they ever imagined, and that he truly deserved their pride. But while he saw heroism, the church saw something completely different. They interpreted his actions as strange behavior, where he transformed from a representative of the church into a homeless wanderer with no home, living among the miners and drawing them instead of advising them and preaching to them with the wisdom he was supposed to offer. At that point, the church decided to reject him.

At this point, Vincent realized that his dream of becoming like his father was impossible. So he turned to his other option, becoming like his mother, and at the age of twenty-seven, he confessed to his family that he was going to become an artist. He was shocked when both his father and his mother, the very woman who had taught him to draw, rejected the idea. His mother told him to stop this nonsense and find a job that actually made money.

Here, Van Gogh described his parents’ upbringing as a strict system that had been suffocating him all his life. For years, he had tried to become a copy of them in everything he did, yet all he ever received from them was rejection and dissatisfaction. But in the middle of all this disappointment, Vincent found support from his brother Theo.

Theo was working in his uncle’s art gallery, and he agreed to support Vincent financially until he could learn to paint and start selling his own artworks. Despite the harshness of their father and mother throughout his life, Vincent continued striving for their love.

In 1884, when his mother broke her leg, Vincent painted the church in her village, a church she could not visit to make her happy and allow her to see it from her place at home. When the black-and-white image of the painting faded, he wrote to Theo that he would repaint it in color so that it could always remain present with her. But Vincent’s desire to win his mother’s love did not end there. And from here, we move on to the first love story in Van Gogh’s life.

In 1881, one of Van Gogh’s relatives, the widow Kee Vos Stricker, came to visit the Van Gogh family with her children. At first sight, Vincent fell madly in love with her, because she reminded him of his mother. And here, you can imagine, in his subconscious mind, there was a certain image: as if the love he longed for from his mother could be reflected through this widow. He seemed to think, “If this woman loves me, perhaps my mother will love me too,” for that was the love Vincent had never been able to win in his life. 

Indeed, Vincent proposed marriage to her, but she replied with three firm words: “No, never, never.” This rejection drove Vincent almost to madness. In a fit of desperation, he went to her father and placed his hand on a burning candle, saying, “This fire will keep burning my hand until you agree.”Her father was indeed moved by Vincent’s intense romantic gesture, but he extinguished the candle, and both her family and Vincent’s family forced him to give up pursuing her.

A year later, Vincent moved to The Hague and fell in love with a woman named Sien. In the eyes of society, she had certain issues she was a carefree girl who had a child by a man she did not know. Vincent, however, was not content with simply loving her; he was determined to marry her to “save” her, as he saw it. When we look at his drawings of her, we see how he transformed her from what society considered a fallen woman into a respectable housewife. In the painting Sien with Umbrella and Prayer Book, she holds an umbrella and a prayer book, objects reminiscent of what his mother used to carry when taking him to church in his childhood.

Yet this relationship was never allowed to develop, as his family would not permit it fully. Later in his life, Vincent painted a work titled Memories of the Garden of Etten, which reflects his memories with his relative Kee and his beloved Sien. In the painting, we see his mother and sister in the foreground, and in the background, a woman representing Sien and Kee, simply explained that throughout his paintings, Vincent was trying to replace his mother with Sien and Kee. At the same time, his mother could not comprehend his love and was overwhelmed by the adventures Vincent lived through. She wrote to his younger brother Theo, saying that Vincent’s actions had humiliated her and the family, and she concluded her letter with the words: “Take him, Lord.”

And here arises the question: why did Vincent have such a deep, almost pathological desire to be the foremost obedient child to his parents? A normal person naturally loves their parents and strives to please and obey them, but not to the point of obsession. Moreover, he tended to view all the women around him as mother figures, even though his own parents had treated him with great harshness throughout his life and had a cruel desire to keep him at a distance, favoring his younger brother Theo over him. 

Imagine one day you go on an outing with your mother, and suddenly you see a grave engraved with your name and date of birth. Your mother immediately starts crying, embraces the grave, and insists that you visit it regularly and place flowers on it. You have no idea what's happening around you, why she suddenly pays attention to the grave, and why you should visit it from time to time to put flowers on it. And the most important question: why does this grave have your name? The scene you just imagined is, in fact, a real moment from Van Gogh's life. The sad and mysterious truth behind these behaviors is as follows: Vincent was not the first child of his parents.

 A year before him, another child was born and named Vincent van Gogh, but that child died immediately after birth. A year later, the Vincent we know today was born. We see that he was given the name of his deceased brother and his birth date, and in church records, he was also registered with the number 29, the same as his brother, who had died. His parents didn’t even spare him the burden of being assigned a new number!

Harold Bloom states that the core of Vincent van Gogh’s tragedy is that he was a living symbol of a dead child. Vincent grew up constantly confronting a grave with his full name, representing a deceased sibling—an unsatisfactory substitute for a lost dream. Christina Schalenieski explains that during Vincent’s childhood, his mother made him visit his brother’s grave every week and recorded him in the church register as his brother. In doing so, she set him in a competition he could never win. This was not a contest with a friend or relative he knew; it was a contest with the ghost of a child his parents idealized as perfect—an angel incapable of error. No matter what Vincent, who lived among them, achieved, he could never surpass this spectral figure in their eyes, never reach its imagined perfection, because, simply put, it had never truly lived. Its story seemed perfect only because it had never unfolded.

 Even more tragically, according to Schalenieski, any success Vincent achieved was seen by his mother as an attack on the memory of her lost son. This sheds light on a profound and crucial aspect of Vincent van Gogh’s life.

If you follow his work, you will see that he was the artist who painted himself more than anyone else, so much so that Van Gogh has been called "the first selfie king." Sources confirm that Vincent painted himself as a form of training and practice. At that time, Vincent was poor and, unlike other artists of his era, he could not afford to hire a model or travel to new places to paint landscapes. His only option was to look at himself in the mirror and reproduce what he saw on the canvas. The only other possibility would have been to hire prostitutes as models, a path he knew well because he could not afford professional models. It was through this path that he met Sien, his lover. However, a study titled Van Gogh: Fantasies of Replacement, Being a Double and a Twin supports the theory that he was not painting himself as much as he was painting imagined images of his deceased brother. In other words, these paintings might not have been of him at all. 

Vincent van Gogh began painting after becoming disheartened by his parents’ approval. He relied on his brother Theo, his only friend, who supported him not just out of love but also because he recognized Vincent’s talent. Theo would say that his brother was truly gifted and that one day he would achieve the stature of Beethoven in music. When Vincent began learning to paint in Antwerp, he felt extreme frustration whenever his teachers scrutinized the proportions in his works and demanded that he paint nature exactly as it appeared. This is why his early works show the influence of classical art schools, with precise anatomical depictions of the human body, free of error.

At this stage, Van Gogh felt as if he were repeating the same mistake all over again. Instead of trying to meet the expectations of his father or mother, he found himself trying to imitate the old masters. He would ask himself: "What is the point of seeing nature through their eyes? I want to capture it in its abstract essence! I want to live through my own personality, to paint with my own vision and impressions." Everything changed when he visited his brother Theo in Paris. There, he encountered the Impressionist school.

The Impressionist school began with the painter Claude Monet, who surprised the world with a painting he created in 1872 of the sunrise at the port of Le Havre, which he titled Impression. The details of this painting are almost blurry, with no clear lines, as if you are seeing it through a glass pane. You cannot form an exact, detailed image of the scene; all you can grasp is an impression. With every new change, critics emerged to attack the painting. Monet named this work Impression because he did not intend to depict the scene exactly as it was; rather, he aimed to convey the impression he felt at that moment, his emotion and sensation, the fog over the harbor, and the lack of clarity. He did not paint the scene for viewers to simply see it; he painted it so that they could experience the same feeling he had while creating it, as if standing with him in that very moment.

The significance of the Impressionist movement became even greater with the invention of the camera. The difference was now clear: a camera can capture nature exactly as it is with the simple press of a button. But if you wish to convey emotion, feeling, and personal experience, you turn to the artist. Painters who express their own emotions through the scenes they depict came to be known as Impressionists. This school, emphasizing the artist’s personal vision over mere replication, became one of the most influential movements in the history of art.

Vincent discovered himself within this movement because, for the first time, the world was asking him a question he had never been allowed to answer: You—Vincent van Gogh—not your mother or father, not the old masters, not your brother Theo, and certainly not the ghost of the brother whose name you carry, how do you see the world? It was as if art whispered to him: Speak your feelings. For the first time in his life, something demanded that he simply be himself. This is when Van Gogh declared, “As my work is, so am I”. If you want to know who I am, look at my art.

 He turned to the nature his mother had once shown him in childhood, plants, sunflowers, blossoms, the night sky, sunsets, and fields of wheat. But he would no longer paint them as exact replicas, as he had once done to win his mother’s approval. Nor would he paint them as others expected to see them. He would paint them with his own eyes, through his own sensations, shaped by his own soul.

There is a famous painting by Van Gogh called Sunset at Wheat Field. When you imagine it, you might picture ripe golden wheat, a clear blue sky, and a bright shining sun, but Van Gogh never saw it that way. Vincent did not paint the scene as it appeared. If you look closely at the painting, you will find no precise details. When you look at the wheat, you won’t see any great effort to render it realistically. The sky appears as strokes and blotches of color, not as defined clouds drifting in a certain direction.

 You do not see each stalk of wheat standing separately, nor do you see clouds formed with exact proportions. Instead, you see an impression, a state unbound by dimension or proportion, something not captured by the eye but by a feeling you can sense.