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My dear brother, the painter's household with its great and petty vexations, with its

calamities, with its sorrows and griefs, it has a certain goodwill in its favour, 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,

naïve 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 rehang, 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.

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.

And we really hope that when they come here, they will discover that the story is much more

intricate and has a lot deeper meaning.

I think the rehang makes it clear that Van Gogh 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.

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 and really show, you know, what,

on the one hand, made him an artist of his time and, on the other hand, also what makes

him special with regards to the art and artists around him.

The man and the artist are one.

It's not two separate identities.

So we do address some of the myths.

We discuss his illness, what we know about it.

We discuss his suicide.

We give all the information that we have assembled as an institution.

It's not an illustrated diary that we are presenting here.

It's the of one of the greatest artists of all time.

And to put the focus back on the art by giving more attention to the myths as well.

That sounds contradictory, but I think it really helps in understanding

what makes Van Gogh so important and special.

The art, which is essential.

So, 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 Ministerpool Museum of Art, the Stiedelijk 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.

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 already wrote letters to his brother before he became an artist.

And the last letter is five days before his death.

They did five days before his death.

So we know all about the development of Vincent as an artist.

About his doubts, about his influences, about his relations with his peers, his contemporaries, everything.

The letters are, of course, an enormous treasure for us.

Because in the letters, van Gogh talks so much about 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.

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 in Dutch or in French, or in English even.

He writes in various different languages, depending on the correspondent and on the place where he writes them.

And you really get a very comprehensive picture of who he was as a personality, his trials and tribulations, his joys and fears.

So in that sense, the letters, you know, are an essential aspect of our understanding of van Gogh the person and also of van Gogh as an artist.

The benefits of the van Gogh museum is that we have so many works by van Gogh.

So it's amazing.

We have over 200 paintings that you really can follow his development as an artist, as a person, his intentions, technique, developing materials.

So there's a lot to discover for us as researchers, but also for the visitor.

It is important, of course, being the van Gogh museum.

That's what it says on the can.

So, you know, 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.

It's 12 self-portraits in one room.

So you really come eye to eye with van Gogh.

And, you know, it has 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.

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 model.

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.

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 model's always there.

He's for free.

And the model doesn't mind too much if you take liberties and you're testing out something.

You are not compromised by the need to get a lightness.

You are at liberty to explore how you're going to use paint to shape a face and to communicate character and feeling as well as reproduce the geography of a human physiognomy.

Because it's potential for him to explore stylistically what he wants to do and because capturing a human presence on canvas is a great achievement.

And those are the paintings, you know, in any gallery, I think.

It's the faces that people instinctively look towards because we were always programmed to be looking for other people.

I don't think you could surmise that by painting himself all the time he was sort of 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 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.

But he signed his pictures all with Vincent, partly because he didn't like the family name, partly perhaps this is also a tradition with great masters.

So Rembrandt is also a first name.

Van Gogh's personality was of course the personality of a driven man, a man obsessed.

Somebody who wanted to achieve something in life. Partly that I tend to think had something to do with this 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 in words you certainly would.

Because he would immediately try to convince you of his opinions.

But the testimonies on behalf of his parents, for instance, is that from early on when he was still a kid, that there was always something with him.

And it also had to do with his mood. He could easily change moods.

Even also in later life we have testimony of the suave lieutenant in the, in Ireland in 1888.

That he remembered afterwards that, in fact he was quite a gentleman and a soft man as well.

An interesting man, but he could suddenly change his mood. Just like that.

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 belong 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 For 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 and Company,

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 his family.

And particularly with his younger brother Theo, who had also joined Goupil.

My dear Theo, I saw from your letter that you have art in your blood.

And that's a good thing, old chap.

Find things beautiful as much as you can.

Most people find too little beautiful.

Always continue walking a lot, and loving nature.

For that's the real way to understand art better and better.

Painters understand nature and love it.

And teach us to see.

Have I already taught you that I've taken a pipe smoking again?

I've rediscovered in my pipe an old trusty friend.

And I imagine we'll never part again.

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.

You have to keep in mind that London was, of course,

the biggest city, I think, of all Europe at the time,

with all the negative and maybe also the positive sides of such a city.

But I think Verhoogh was mainly impressed by the negative sides of it.

So, a lot of people who were poor.

And this was already at the time being recognised as the people

as the great problem of the age, of that particular period.

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 Company,

having decided his path lay with helping the disadvantaged.

He travelled back to England

to take up a poorly rewarded teaching position at a boys' school

in the coastal town of Ramsgate.

My dear Theo,

herewith a little drawing of the view from the school window

where the boys stand and watch their parents

going back to the station after a visit.

Many a boy will never forget the view from that window.

After a few months,

Vincent took up a post as a supply teacher

and apprentice preacher in Isleworth,

a poor suburb on the outskirts of London.

While he worked fervently on writing sermons and rhetorical texts,

he also read books about pathos and the human condition,

writers like Dickens, Shakespeare and Hugo.

No matter the sacrifice,

Vincent's whole purpose in life

was focused on evangelising to the poor.

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 prayer.

O Lord, join us intimately to one another

and let our love for Thee make that bond ever stronger.

After returning home that year for Christmas,

Vincent's parents prevented him from going back to London

out of concern for his health.

But the seed of religious conviction had been sown.

Vincent was determined to follow his religious vocation

and started studying for the theology entrance exams in Amsterdam.

But he found the academic demands overwhelming.

He gave up and returned home.

He wanted to do something with religion and want to preach.

And he thought, well, you don't need an academic degree to be a minister.

But you know the gospel very well by heart, like he almost did.

And you care for people, then you can also preach the word of God.

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, he decided to go to the Borinage, which was a difficult region,

the south of Belgium, French-speaking, but French-speaking with a heavy accent.

Quite difficult to understand from in the beginning, as he said in his letters.

But he wanted to be there. It was a mining country.

My dear Theo, one of the oldest and most dangerous mines in the area, no less, is called Makas.

This mine has a bad name because many die in it.

Whether going down or coming up.

Or by suffocation or gas exploding.

Or because of water in the ground.

Or because of old passageways caving in and so on.

It's a somber 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.

The women generally sallow and withered.

And all around the mine are poor miners' dwellings with a couple of dead trees,

completely black from the smoke.

And thorn hatches, dung heaps and rubbish dumps.

Mountains of unusual coal.

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 a bit naïve, it's not yet as developed as when he was really starting out as a draftman.

He's experimenting with pencil and watercolour, but this was before he decided to become an artist.

It's quite interesting to see that he's put little colournotations in the drawing.

So probably he made the drawing on the spot and then finished it at home or added the watercolour at home.

So, for example, here we can see vert jaune, which is green, yellow, clair, which is bright, and here rose.

He put those notations in order to know how we should fill in the colours later.

Vincent's time in the Borinage village of Petitouam 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,

which were often very long and full of biblical rhetoric.

Vincent moved to the neighbouring village of Quem, where he found new lodgings.

From that moment on, almost for a year, we don't know really what he actually did.

He didn't write any letters anymore to his brother Theo.

We have some information from the 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 and Company,

and he thought it might help his brother if he considered a new path as an artist.

It must have triggered something in the sense that, okay, I've been drawing already for quite some time,

and it's not very much, I'm not very confident of becoming an artist,

and I probably lack the talent, but he set himself to discourse.

And the next letter we have is, it's from that letter onwards, you might say,

it's only about art and becoming an artist.

Dear Theo, you should know that I'm sketching large drawings after Milan,

and that I've done the four times of the day, as well as the sower.

Despite the fact that every day new difficulties present themselves,

and will continue to present themselves, I couldn't tell you how happy I feel to have taken up drawing again.

It had already been in my mind for a long time, but I always saw the thing as impossible and beyond my reach.

But now, while feeling both my weakness and my painful dependence in respect of many things,

I have recovered my peace of mind, and my energy is coming back day by day.

Catholics, when they want to become worthy of God, they go to the cloisters and they pray.

Protestants want to be worthy of God as well, but they do not pray.

They have this duty to show in their work that they're worthy of God.

And how do they show that? Well, they show that by doing their work as good as possible.

And that's how you get obsessed men. That's how you get driven men.

And that's what would happen with Van Gogh. He was very much aware of the protestant ethic from the moment he was born, I tend to think.

And he also had the idea that he really had to find his way in life.

So he had to choose a certain kind of occupation, because that's protestant ethic too.

You have to find your position in life, so to say.

So he really believed that if you want to do something in life, it had to be small, not large.

You didn't have to join large institutions. And what happened when he became an artist?

He didn't want to go to the academy. Of course he didn't go to the academy.

Because then it wouldn't be authentic, it wouldn't be original.

He really believed that he had to do it himself.

So he went out in nature and simply started to draw.

Which I always find very fascinating because, well, this is a nice way of starting.

But that defined him as a man. And with somebody who really could not draw very well, he wasn't Degas, he wasn't Hockney.

He had to conquer it. He really had to fight for it. And that's also what you see back, I tend to think, in this art.

The protestant work ethic also includes that you should not be rewarded for what you are doing.

Because it's in the end, it's God who's going to decide.

You do not know whether you are rewarded or not.

How you do it is simply to organise your work as economically and as healthy and as rational as possible.

That's the protestant work ethic.

So he's not a romantic genius who has inspirations. No, you simply do your work.

And in terms of fame, of course you do not want it. Of course you are not looking for it.

Because fame, to a certain extent, will even spoil you.

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.

And you have to do a lot before you even touch, you take up your brush.

And so for Gogh, I tend to think the key for all, for understanding as art even, is drawing.

Van Gogh was already 27 when he decided to become an artist.

He felt that it was the biggest challenge for him, to draw figures.

And also a very important challenge because his first ambition was to become an illustrator of the press.

So if you want to become an illustrator, you need to know how to draw your figures.

So that was the first thing he was really, really practicing on.

There were other things like placing figures into perspective.

He wasn't the biggest natural talent you would ever meet.

He needed to learn a lot.

He knew that he needed to learn a lot, so that helped.

What strikes us most is, although there are a lot of shortcomings in his drawings,

and when you look at them rationally, you can find a lot of things that are odd or maybe crude.

But then there's also this very big expressiveness that strikes us and really impresses us with his artisthood,

even in the early years.

Vincent had very large problems with perspective.

But he made use of a utensil in The Hague, which he more or less developed himself,

which was partly also known from books, which we call a perspective frame.

My dear Theo, the perpendicular and horizontal lines of the frame,

together with the diagonals and the cross, or otherwise a grid of squares,

provide a clear guide to some of the principal features,

so that one can make a drawing with a firm hand, setting out the broad outlines and proportions.

Assuming, that is, that one has a feeling for perspective,

and an understanding of why and how perspective appears to change the direction of lines,

and the size of masses and planes.

Without that, the frame is little or no help, and makes your head spin when you look through it.

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 Klassina Maria Hurnik, known as Sene,

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 Sene and her children.

They became part of his domestic life,

and the subject of many drawings and studies.

It is an interesting question to whether Ver Gogh really had the capacity to love.

He loved his brother,

but also at the same time there was this goal in life, whatever it was for him,

but he was an obsessed man and he wanted to paint and he wanted to do something,

and that isolated him the normal conditions of a normal life.

When Vincent's relationship with Sene 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 Drenta.

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 Noonen.

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,

and in the beginning he was trying to fight against it,

and then at some point he understood that this whole expressiveness

that just keep 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 he could make his mark into drawing and into being an artist.

So I think his marks in his drawings help him also to paint

because he figures out what is his mark, what is his style.

He had a talent, you might say, for a very broad approach of applying paint.

He had using big brushes, white brushes, laying the paint thick on in general,

trying to model with paint,

and in that he was quite different from many other painters at the time.

His subject matter was very close to what was called the School of Barbizon,

so the peasant life, he was in a peasant community,

and he adored some of the peasant painters from the School of Barbizon,

and he tried to be this peasant painter of Holland.

The Barbizon School was a school of French painters.

They lived and worked in Barbizon, just south of Paris,

and they were the first generation in the 19th century to work outdoors

and to focus on nature and rural life.

They left city life behind, and their main theme became nature and peasant life.

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.

One of the paintings that Van Gogh saw was a great painting of a tree by Dupré from the Maestach Collection,

and Van Gogh describes it in one of his letters to Theo,

saying it was one of the most beautiful things he saw at this exhibition of French landscape painting.

It's a very large tree with a very tiny figure in the background,

and the whole tension between nature and human being was something that Van Gogh also really appreciated in the painting,

and he said it was like a portrait of a tree.

And this sentiment, the mood of nature, of landscape, was something that Van Gogh was trying to paint as well

in his own works at the beginning when he was still in the Netherlands.

So looking at all these great French landscape painters, he tried to convey the same mood 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 smells 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 heads, for example.

And finally, his most ambitious work, The Potato Eaters.

The play between light and dark, the chiaroscuro, that is so important in this painting, that makes it into technically and stylistically a very well-achieved painting.

But also the motive, of course, for Van Gogh was really important.

He wanted to become a peasant painter, but a modern one.

He wanted to do something different, of course, than all his great models, because every, well, I guess every artist wants to do something new and something of his own.

This new way of presenting the peasant in a very stark and very, well, almost expressive manner 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.

So, it's also the symbolic meaning of the cycle of life.

And the peasant was closest to nature, more close than the city people or the modern man that rose in the 19th century, of course, because of the industrialization.

And he made all these different studies of the peasants in Nune to finally make this painting of the potato eaters.

That was something that he was really, he had in mind for a longer time and he worked towards it by making drawings, making studies in color, all kinds of things.

And it was a very ambitious painting because it's also a difficult painting to make.

To make a group composition of several figures in a very small space was something that was artistically very difficult to achieve.

And then also put in all these details and make sure that the perspective is correct, that there's this relationship between the several figures in around the same table.

We wanted to show the context because it didn't come out of nothing.

It was a strong tradition of these group compositions, especially peasant people or simple people.

One is a peasant meal by Joseph Israels, a painter that was called the 19th century Rembrandt.

He was really the biggest in the 19th century and a great example for Van Gogh as well.

The other one is by Van Rappert.

Anton van Rappert was also a young artist and Van Gogh met him and they became friends.

They exchanged a lot of letters, but they also worked together for a while when they were at Nune.

Van Rappert came to visit him and for example, they did a campaign together of weavers in their interiors, weaving at their looms.

So Van Rappert was really his strongest connection at the time.

Their friendship and their correspondence reveals a lot about Van Gogh's own ambitions and ideas at that time.

Vincent believed the potato eaters to be his greatest accomplishment so far and showed it to both Theo and Van Rappert,

but was met with an unenthusiastic response from Theo and harsh criticism from Van Rappert.

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 these paintings were made.

Before he was a painter, he would go to a museum and talk about the images that he saw and the sentiment.

But now he would only talk about how they were made, how the brushwork was, so he wanted to learn something there from the old masters.

Vincent enrolled at the academy for drawing and painting classes,

but once again he failed to impress the academic staff with his radical approach.

After a short time in Antwerp, he decided to head for Paris to be with his brother and search out new inspiration.

My dear Theo, don't be cross with me that I've come all of a sudden.

I've thought about it so much and I think we'll save time this way.

We'll be at the Louvre for mid-day, or earlier if you like.

A reply, please, to let me know when you could come to the Salle Carré.

We'll sort things out, you'll see.

So get there as soon as possible.

I shake your hand, yours truly, Vincent.

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 the 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 Cormont.

Young artists were left to work in groups, receiving advice once in a while from the established Cormont.

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.

And those were really young, radical artists who wanted to change art.

They wanted to do something radical new.

The Impressionists like Monet and Pissarro were already more or less established by the time that Van Gogh arrived.

Their heydays were in the 1870s.

So there was this new generation of young men who wanted to change and revolutionise the art world.

And Van Gogh became part of them and one of them.

And he was, so to say, fighting with them to do something radical and to do something very new.

Because I've always worked from nature, I may perhaps be more daring than many others in dashing things off and tackling a group of things.

But the others will most likely have more knowledge of the nude, for which I haven't had so much opportunity.

If I make up for that, the sooner the better, the more benefit I'll get from Cormont.

Moreover, my health. When I paint outdoors, I don't eat and I won't overcome it, for I keep relapsing.

My constitution is still far from strong.

Shortly after Vincent arrived in Paris, the brothers moved to a larger apartment, 54 Rue Le Pieck.

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 life in his studio when he couldn't go outside to paint.

And of course the many self-portraits of which we have several home view here in the museum.

The Garden with Courting Cottbels is a very important painting. It really sort of summarizes ambitions that Van Gogh had at that moment in Paris.

He wanted to represent a modern subject in a modern way.

And he used a kind of impressionist, pointillist style, which was much freer than the pointillist would have used.

We can see how he used the complementary colours in order to have the very forceful contrast.

And how he expressed kind of an emotional subject, because this, these courting couples, it's also this idea of representing love as a, as a very timeless subject, but in a completely new, modern way.

And Van Gogh was very satisfied with this picture and chose to exhibit it at the first exhibition that he was, that he was invited to, to exhibit in, which was in 1888 in Paris.

He was looking at what other people did, but at the same time doing completely his own thing.

And this painting is an important step in finding his own style, which we will see more in the period after Paris.

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 context that he worked in.

It was such a, a, a great change from what he was doing in, in Holland.

Of course it didn't happen overnight, but it went really quickly.

In that time, his colour changed dramatically. It became very bright and very pure.

He used pure colours on, in his paintings. His brush stroke changed. He was very much influenced by the pointeists who were painting in, 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.

She's portrayed as a free, independent woman. She's smoking, she's drinking, which women from the upper classes wouldn't be doing.

This was more the case with women from artistic circles. This was also the last relationship that he would have with a woman because afterwards there would only be visits to the brothels and no girlfriends in his life anymore.

The portrait of Agostina Segatori is hanging next to a portrait by Toulouse Lautrec, painted in the same time, the 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.

Vincent experimented with his own painting style. So he came from Noonan and Antwerp and also the beginning of Paris where he experimented especially with, you might say, expressionistic brushwork and laying the paint on quite thickly.

Lautrec, on the other hand, was someone who painted quite lightly and he would dilute his paints so they became very fluid and with very small brushes would work up with small brush strokes his paintings.

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 color 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 center of the world basically. So he decided to leave.

He longed for a warmer climate and he was also anxious to discover the colors 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 there.

My dear Theo, during the journey I thought at least as much about you as about the new country I was seeing.

But I tell myself that you'll perhaps come here as often yourself later on.

It seems to me almost impossible to be able to work in Paris, unless you have a refuge in which to recover and regain your peace of mind and self-composure.

Without that you'd be bound to get utterly numbed.

Arles doesn't seem any bigger than Breda or more to me.

Before reaching Tarascon I noticed some magnificent scenery.

Huge yellow rocks, oddly jumbled together, with 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 the 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 train yourself 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.

But, depending obviously upon whether it's an overcast day or a sunny day, the colours and the tones and the shadows all change.

And the role of an artist is to try and, or I think anyway, is to try and seize the moment.

Seize the light of that instant and all the freshness and energy that is involved in that moment.

That moment of being alive, being illuminated and capture that on canvas.

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 the areas of a building that are supposedly closer to the sun and 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.

The first series of works that he was doing there was The Blossoming Orchards.

The Blossom started in March and Ver Gogh worked really very quickly to get as many paintings as possible of this beautiful motif.

Which was obviously important also in the Japanese prints.

And he felt that it was a tremendously beautiful subject to represent.

It was a very cheerful subject.

And he thought that this subject might also interest buyers in Paris or in Holland.

So he was also thinking about how to market his own work.

My dear Benar, having promised to write you, I want to begin by telling you that this part of the world seems to me as beautiful as Japan.

For the clearness of the atmosphere and the gay colour effects.

The stretches of water make patches of a beautiful emerald and a rich blue in the landscapes, as we see it in the Japanese prints.

Pale, orange sunsets make the fields look blue, glorious yellow suns.

However, so far I've hardly seen this part of the world in its usual summer splendour.

The women's costume is pretty.

And especially on the boulevard on Sunday you see some very naive and well-chosen arrangements of colour.

And that too will doubtless get even livelier in summer.

I think that an artist like Van Gogh, you get the impression that this is someone who is being energised by the moment.

So when he wanders off into the outdoors, he is experiencing nature in every instance.

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.

And you're painting and you're responding to what's happening in front of you and you're mixing pigments on 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 Arle.

All kinds of portraits of ordinary people, of everyday people, of everyday life.

Such were the things that he wanted to paint and draw in Arle.

My dear Theo, today I rented the right hand wing of this building, which contains four rooms, or more precisely two with two little rooms.

It's painted yellow outside, whitewashed inside, in the full sunshine.

I've rented it for fifteen francs a month.

Now, what I'd like to do would be to furnish a room, the one on the first floor, to be able to sleep there.

The studio, the store, will remain here for the whole of the campaign here in the south.

And that way I have my independence from petty squabbles over guest houses, which are ruinous and depress me.

If necessary, I could live at the new studio with someone else, and I'd very much like to.

Perhaps Gauguin will come to the south?

When Van Gogh was living in Arle, 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 a 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 canvases as kind of decoration for his yellow house.

He made several ambitious paintings, such as the sunflowers, but also the bedroom, which was his own bedroom in that yellow house.

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.

They experimented with the same kind of materials, using a very coarse canvas, for example, a type of burlap, to see what it would do with the pigments and with the oil paint.

Gauguin's beautiful portrait of Van Gogh painting the sunflowers was made using this coarse canvas.

So in the beginning, it was a very fruitful and special period of collaboration.

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 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 had always been very important, not only to Vincent, but also to his brother Theo and to other artists from his circle, like Gauguin.

My dear friend Gauguin, in my mental or nervous fever, or madness, I don't know quite what to say, how to name it, my thoughts sailed over many seas.

I even dreamt of the Dutch ghost ship and the hauler, and it seems that I sang, I who can't sing on any other occasions, to be precise, an old wet nurse's song, while thinking of what the cradle rocker sang as she rocked the sailors, and whom I had sought in an arrangement of colours before falling ill.

Here in Arles, there was reed everywhere, so he cut his own pens, and he used them to make these most wonderful ink drawings.

And one of the examples you see here is probably one of the best.

When he drew this picture, he was there admitted, so you have to imagine that when he drew this, he was on a very low point in his life.

It's a very ambitious drawing, as you can see, to translate every part, the fountain, the trees, even the other patients in the courtyard, into this very distinct style.

Because that was what he was looking for, he was looking for his own style, and I think in Arles, he found it.

So there's hatches, there's little dots, there's little stripes, and with this reed pen and ink, he just uses the whole sheet to cover it with all these different graphic marks.

He must have seen it as an independent work of art, because there's a signature right there in the watering pot.

It's a very cute, anecdotal place to put it.

Van Gogh was an incredibly creative person, and tried out many different techniques, experimenting with things that he 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 with very dilute oil paint, for example, and then switching just a month later to use incredibly thick, creamy, what we call impasto, very strongly textured paint.

Although he was using basically the same materials for these different approaches, we do have to adjust our technique of treating paintings according to 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.

In a way it's restoration because I'm changing the painting back to a previous state before it was restored and closer back towards what the artist intended.

So we're very lucky. In this case we have a good deal of information about how the painting was made.

We have to start with, we have a drawing that Van Gogh made on the spot just a couple of weeks before, which is actually signed Vudal and then with the signature Vincent.

It's done with a reed pen and ink in a very calligraphic, bold style.

Unfortunately the ink has faded, so it's a little less bold than it was originally.

But you can see these very strong graphic linear approach transferred, if you like, into the painting with these blue contours that were added later.

So there's a sort of mutual influence between his drawing and painting technique in the period.

A nice detail is if you look closely we can see the traced contour, the inner edge of a perspective frame, which is traced with pencil.

So this is for us very definite evidence that he was on the spot using the perspective frame to help him correct what he saw in front of him and transfer it onto the flat surface of his canvas.

After recovering from his ordeal in hospital, Vincent went back to his studio and 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.

My dear Theo, at the end of the month I'd still wish to go to the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy or another institution of that kind, which Mr. Salas told me about.

Forgive me for not going into details to weigh up the pros and cons of such a course of action.

It would strain my mind a great deal to talk about it.

It will, I hope, suffice to say that I feel decidedly incapable of starting to take a new studio again and living there alone.

Here in Arles or elsewhere, it comes down to the same thing.

For the moment, I have nevertheless tried to make up my mind to begin again.

For the moment, not possible. I'd be afraid of losing the faculty of working, which is coming back to me now, by forcing myself to have a studio and also having all the other responsibilities on my back.

Van Gogh stayed a little longer in Arles, in and out of the hospital, and finally he decided that he needed to get away from Arles.

And he committed himself to an asylum in Saint-Rémy, not far from Arles.

He stayed there for a long time, and he was treated for what he called his, well, lunacy or illness, his moments of depression.

We will 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.

The thing about Van Gogh and the mythology, which is important, is that people think that painting is easy.

They think it's just a sort of crazy, rabid energy that comes out like a dash of madness, and that's what artists are.

But painting is a difficult, troubling, and enormously frustrating activity.

As much as it can be therapeutic, as much as you can gain solace from being outside and painting something beautiful and getting it on canvas,

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 are doing it as a conviction, as a passion.

And that's no lie. That's for real.

In Saint-Rémy, 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 really continue to develop his work, his way of painting, his way of drawing.

The irises, for example, he's done at the end of his day in Saint-Rémy, 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 canvases 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, the 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.

And he had this beautiful series of peasants at work by Jean-Francois Millet.

And he made small copies, small paintings, one to one of these prints.

But he translated it into very colourful little depictions of these peasants at work.

Van Gogh himself believed that the only way to be cured was to really keep on working as much as possible.

So he was forcing himself every time to start over again and to go out to paint or to work in the little studio that he had in the asylum.

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-Rémy.

It was time to move back north and be closer to Theo, who had by this time married Jobonga and had a child named Vincent Willem.

My dear brother, I feel I have more confidence in my work than when I left.

And it would be ungrateful of me to speak ill of the South, and I confess that it's with great sorrow that I turn my back on it.

If your work prevented you from coming to get me at the station, or if it was at a difficult time, or if the weather was too bad, don't worry, I'd certainly find my way.

And I feel so calm that it would greatly astonish me if I lost my composure.

How much I want to see you again, and meet you and the baby.

It's likely that I'll arrive in Paris around five o'clock in the morning.

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 enquiries, and through the painter Camille Pissarro, found a homeopathic doctor called Paul Gachet,

in the rural village of Auvers-au-Ars, 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.

My dear Theo and Yo, I'd hope, then, that in doing a few canvases of that really seriously,

there would be a chance of recouping some of the costs of my stay.

For really, it's gravely beautiful.

It's in the heart of the countryside, distinctive and picturesque.

I've seen Dr Gachet, who gave me the impression of being rather eccentric,

but his doctor's experience must keep him balanced himself while combating the nervous ailments from which it seems to me

he's certainly suffering at least as seriously as I am.

When Van Gogh was arrived on the 20th of 1890, he found the room the most expensive in the village,

a room built in the auberge Chavaux, on the 2nd floor, under the toits.

Normally, when we go to the hotel, we ask a room with a view.

Here, there's no view. There's a wall in front of the Vazizas.

And Van Gogh stayed only 70 days here.

But in 70 days, he made 80 toiles.

It's one of the most productive period of Van Gogh.

When Vincent went to Auverg, one of the first letters he wrote to Theo in Paris,

there was quite a remarkable thing he said.

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 meant, I was still working, but he was 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.

And that's what the state he was in, I tend to think, in the last months of his life.

My dear brother, I'd like to write to you about many things, but I sense the pointlessness of it.

You didn't need to reassure me as to the state of peace of your household.

I believe I've seen the good as much as the other side.

And besides, I'm so much in agreement that raising a kid in a fourth floor apartment is hard labor,

as much for you as for you.

Ah well. I risk my life for my own work, and my reason is half-founded in it.

Very well, but you're not one of the dealers in men.

As far as I know and can judge, I think you really act with humanity.

But what can you do?

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.

The end of the day, Theo was impriming the fair-parts for friends to come to Van Gogh.

As indicated on the fair-parts, the ceremony was planned at 2h30 at the church of Auvers-sur-Oise.

But at the moment, the curate d'Auvers refused to do a ceremony at the church,

because it was a suicide, and in addition, it was protestant.

So at that moment, at that moment, Theo Van Gogh decided to do a homage to Van Gogh,

in the dining room.

So they put Van Gogh's circle on one of the tables of the auberge.

In reality, it was a small yard.

And around there, they put all the tables that were in his room,

or in two other pieces that were drying up.

Many people have thought, because of that fear that's being expressed in this picture,

that it also was his last picture, and it's being described as such.

It wasn't.

But people are right, I tend to think, in the interpretation of the picture,

that there is a kind of fairness in it.

The idea that you're being overwhelmed by something which you cannot do anything about,

and it will threaten you, that's the idea of the picture.

Free Roots is his last picture.

So that's the picture that he made in the morning before he died.

Vincent's brother Theo was heartbroken,

proclaiming to his mother that Vincent had found the rest he was longing for.

With a similar obsession to his departed brother,

Theo tirelessly sought to elevate Vincent's position in the art world,

and bring to the public the hundreds of illuminating letters he had kept.

Tortured by feelings of regret and grief,

Theo's frail constitution started to give way,

and he suffered paralysing fits due to syphilis,

and passed away in Utrecht just six months after the death of Vincent.

In 1914, Theo's wife Jo had his body moved to a Versailles,

and buried next to his beloved brother, Vincent van Gogh.

Although today his works are among the most recognised and valued of any painter,

during his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh sold no more than a handful of paintings,

and just a few drawings.

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 artists of the avant-garde of their time.

To be so passionate about something, and for him it was art, and he lived it.

So I think with the rich collection of paintings, drawings,

but the letters too, and the documents we have,

you can step into van Gogh's world and his thoughts,

and you can see how he was living his art.

And that's an amazing story for everyone.

Van Gogh hoped to move and touch and inspire or console as many people as possible,

despite their background, despite their nationality.

He really strived towards an art that would be universally,

yet everyone could understand it.

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 the financial success.

It's really about a sincere ambition that he wanted to make this connection

and to try to give answers to all of our questions about our existence, about life,

and the fact that he still is 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.

The Queen, is not charming at all those animals.

The Queen is a member of his different BL nationality world.

He is full, and has drawn dark time to enjoy the village!

A basic Bunny Adam, is an animation to escape the future!

And his zebra's mirrored little story.

It's beenумed that it's just a decision for physical dying there!

A Tuesday day before leaving,

a long-ass lockout again at Sunday приехalaa

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