Файл: Vincent van Gogh.pdf

Letter 716 is a letter sent jointly by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard around 1 November 1888 shortly after Gauguin had joined van Gogh in Arles. Late that summer, van Gogh had completed his second group of Sunflower paintings, amongst his most iconic paintings, two of which decorated Gauguin's room, as well as his famous painting The Yellow House depicting the house they shared.

The letter is unique in being a joint letter from the two, and can be read in both the original French and an English translation at the website of the Van Gogh Museum's edition of the letters. In it they discuss, amongst other matters, their plans to form an artists' commune, possibly abroad. In reality their relationship was always fraught, and by the end of the year they had parted for good, van Gogh himself hospitalised following a breakdown in which he had mutilated one of his ears.

The autograph fetched €445,000 at a sale in Paris 12–13 December 2012.

Mental Illness.

Vincent was combating his anguishing mental illness — frequent episodes of depression, paralyzing anxiety and, according to some accounts, the symptoms of bipolar disorder — which would eventually claim his life in 1890, shortly after his 37th birthday.

In one of the early letters, Van Gogh expressed an aspiration that remained significant for him throughout his life.

It’s also a thought bittersweet in hindsight, given the self-compassion it implies for being eccentric. Years later, that very eccentricity would be interpreted as madness by his neighbors, who would evict him from his house and lead to his checking into an insane asylum.

Meanwhile, his bouts of depression, when they descended upon him, were unforgiving.

But underlying his deep despair is a subtle sense of optimism that carries him and enables him to continue painting despite the mental anguish.

Having at one point subsisted primarily on bread, coffee and absinthe, he embraces work as life’s highest reward, worth any sacrifice.

And yet, Van Gogh ultimately sees his psychological struggles not as something to negate but as his artistic truth, as a vital part of his honest experience, which is the necessary foundation of great art.

Features unique painting technology.

If you carefully study the paintings of Van Gogh, you can see how the artist makes unusual strokes, creating turbulence. Mathematicians who studied the paintings of Van Gogh argue that these twists on some canvases almost exactly describe the turbulent air flow, which are invisible to the human eye. This is expressed in the fact that a higher or lower brightness of points in the pictures is proportional to the velocities of the flow points in the corresponding coordinates in the mathematical modeling of turbulence. At the same time, it is known that these pictures were painted during the period of the artist’s mental health disorder.

Vincent van Gogh developed his own style. In the pictures he through color expressed their feelings, experiences. You may notice that many of his paintings have a bright, rich contrast. Vincent wrote to his brother that it works mainly with the contrasts of complementary colors.

Yellow is Van Gogh's favorite color. Exactly this color most often he uses in his paintings.

In one of the letters, the artist confesses to his brother that he loved to collect paint residues and eat them. Most of all he preferred yellow. It caused great harm to him, because the paint contained lead, which led to mental health disorder. Later works of the artist testify to this. Pictures have become more vivid. Maybe it was a sign of blurred vision and color perception due to lead exposure. Still one version of the love of yellow is that the artist used absinthe - strong alcoholic drink based on bitter wormwood extract containing in itself poisonous substances. This led to hallucinations and distorted color perception.

Some interesting facts.

Few people suspect that Van Gogh made more than 1,100 drawings (he usually painted them on days when the weather was too windy to paint or he simply did not have the money to buy a canvas).

Unlike most artists who made sketches as a draft of a future picture, Van Gogh usually made a drawing / sketch of his already painted pictures, as if in an attempt to rethink them. He was so “prolific” that he wrote a painting a day for two months.