In this thread I will narrate the life of Vincent van Gogh from his birth in 1853 until his death at the age of 37.
I intend to cover:
>his youth and adolescence
>his relationships with others
>his struggle to become an artist
>his thoughts on European art and culture
>his poverty and declining health
Please bump this thread to keep it alive if it interests you.
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On the second birth of Vincent van Gogh
>"On March 30, 1952, Anna gave birth to a stillborn son. "Levenloos" - lifeless - the town registrar noted in the margin of his book next to the nameless birth entry, "No. 29." [....] A grave was dug in Zundert's little Protestant cemetery [...] The marker bore only the year, 1852; and instead of the bereaved parents, it named the stillborn: Vincent van Gogh. [...] when Anna gave birth to another son on March 30, 1853, exactly one year after the death of her first, [...] he would take the name [...] Vincent"
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On Vincent's mother Anna
>"By her own telling, Anna's world was "a place full of troubles and worries [that] are inherent to it"; a place where "disappointments will never cease" and only the foolish "make heavy demands" on life. Instead, one must simply "learn to endure," she said, "realize that no one is perfect" [...] and that people must be loved "despite their shortcomings." [...] Anna carried this dark vision into adulthood.
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On young Vincent's relationship with his mother
>"Vincent's attachment to his mother was profound. Later in life, the sight of any mother and child could cause his eyes to "grow moist" and his "heart to melt," he confessed. [...] He clung to a childlike maternal affection, and its tokens, well into his twenties."
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FUCK YES I LOVE THESE THREADS
YOU'RE ONE OF THE BEST POSTERS IN THE HISTORY OF THIS WEBSITE
Very good thread user, really interesting. Keep it going!
On Vincent's preacher father Dorus
>"He was a short, slight man; hardly remarkable in most crowds. [...] Every Sunday, Dorus van Gogh ceremoniously climbed the steep stairs to the sacred enclosure and stepped inside. [...] When not preaching or praying, Dorus remained aloof from his growing family. Moody and reclusive, he spent long hours in his attic study, reading and preparing his sermons, with only his cat for company."
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On the influence of Vincent's father on his eldest son
>"Vincent [...] adopted the same circuitous way of talking and metaphorical way of seeing. [...] He approached the outside world with the same defensive suspiciousness. He treated those who challenged him with the same self-righteous inflexibility and reacted to perceived slights with the same paranoid anger. [...] The sight of his father helping the needy and consoling the grief-stricken [...] became the central image of Vincent's adulthood, the image that drove all his subsequent ambitions in life and art."
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On the closeness of Vincent's family
>"Not only was their family uniquely happy, [Vincent's mother] maintained, but a "happy home life" was essential to any happiness. Without it, the future could only be "lonely and uncertain."[...] Her children grew up clinging to family like shipwreck survivors to a raft. [...] "I feel that we all belong together, that we are one. [...] If there would be one missing now, I would feel as it this unity did not exist anymore."
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Please, originally, continue user. I enjoy these posts very much.
On Vincent's memories of his family
>"The family feeling and our love for each other is so strong," Vincent wrote years later, "that the heart is uplifted and the eye turns to God and prays, 'Do not let me stray too far from them, not too long, O lord.'"
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On Christmas and New Year's at the van Gogh household
>"Every Christmas, by the warmth of the back-room stove, the family concluded the annual reading of one of Dickens's five Christmas books. Two of them stayed in Vincent's imagination for the rest of his life: A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man. Almost every year, he reread these stories, with their vivid images of Faustian visitations, children in jeopardy, and the magical reparative power of domesticity and the Christmas spirit. [...] Every New Year's Eve the Van Gogh children gathered and prayed together: "Preserve us from too much self-reproach." None prayed more fervently than the eldest, Vincent."
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On Vincent the childhood recluse
>"A visitor approaching the Zundert parsonage in the 1950s might have seen a small face in one of the second-story windows, eyeing the activity in the Market. It would have been hard to miss the hair - a head full of thick, curly read locks. [...] Most visitors, if they saw him at all, would only have caught this fleeting glimpse of the parson's reclusive son Vincent."
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Fuck yeah user, love these. Can you do a scientist next - Newton perhaps? Edison would be sweet too.
On young Vincent's behaviour around others
>"In meeting strangers, he was reticent and self-conscious. He tended to hand his head and shift in nervous unease. [...] The impression he left in many visitors' minds was an "een oarige" - a strange boy. [..] he often felt lonely and worried relentlessly, which made him a serious and anxious child - hardly a child at all."
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On Vincent the stroppy young man
>"Vincent hardened into an obstreperous, ill-tempered child. The process began early with fits of anger to remarkable that they merited a special mention in the family history. [...] They call him "obstinate," "unruly," "self-willed," and "hard to deal with"; "a queer one" with "stranger manners" and "a difficult temper" [...] He was noisy and quarrelsome and "never took the slightest notice of what the world calls 'form,'"
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On schoolmates' memories of young Vincent
>"His schoolmates recalled him as "aloof" and "withdrawn": a boy who "had little to do with other children." [...] The same schoolmates who remembered Vincent as moody and aloof remembered his younger brother (Ted, they called him) as playful and garrulous."
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are you the same guy that did a bunch of historical political figures (mainly nazi officers i think) over on Jow Forums a few months back?
if so, keep it up, those were interesting
OP here. Yes that's me. I will post those at the end of the thread if that's ok.
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On young Vincent's relationship with his teachers
>"Vincent's obstreperousness soon ran afoul of the disciplinarian schoolmaster Jan Dirks, who had a reputation for "boxing the eats" of recalcitrant students. A classmate remembered that Vincent "got into mischief" and was "beaten from time to time," a development that undoubtedly contributed to his chronic truancy. [...] At the end of October 1861 [...] [his parents] withdrew him from the Zundert public school."
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On Vincent recalling his lonely youth
>"Loneliness defined Vincent van Gogh's childhood. "My youth was gloomy and cold and sterile," he later wrote. Increasingly alienated from his parents, his sisters, his schoolmates, and even Theo, he more and more sought the balm of nature [...] throughout his life, he would seek comfort in his troubles by lurching into the wilderness, only to find more loneliness there and end up returning to the world in search of the human companionship that always eluded him"
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On young Vincent's love for nature
>"He sat on the sandy banks of the Grote Beek for hours observing the transits of water bugs. He followed the flights of larks from church tower to corn sheaf to nests hidden in the rye. He could pick his way through the high grain "without even breaking one fine stalk," [...] To his parents' distress, he seemed especially to love walking in storms and at night."
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Cool ideas for a thread, I will read once I'm done with my uni work
On Vincent being sent to boarding school
>"Nothing could have been more paralyzing for a sensitive boy with habits of sullenness in public and temperament in private than the emotional exposure of boarding school. It didn't help that Vincent, at eleven, was the youngest student in the school. As the little redheaded newcomer with a country accent, short temper, and strange manners, Vincent withdrew deeper into his shell of preadolescent melancholy."
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On teenage Vincent quitting school
>"In March 1868, only weeks before his fifteenth birthday [...] Vincent walked out of the Tilburg School. He may have walked all the way to Zundert - seven hours - instead of taking the train partway. If so, it would be the first of many long, lonely, self-punishing walks that marked turning points in his life. [...] He had no convincing explanation to give his parents."
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On Vincent avoiding work
>"Defying the guilt that accumulated with each passing month of idleness, he resisted all suggestions for his future, preferring to spend his days at the Grote Beek, on the heath, and in his attic sanctuary. His rich uncle, an art dealer in The Hague, probably offered him a job. If he did, Vincent refused it, preferring his solitary pursuits."
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On Vincent being forced to settle on a career
>""I had to choose a profession [...] but did not know which." He spent the rest of the year (1868) in obdurate paralysis [...] clinging to the familiar parsonage from which his parents had tried repeatedly to oust him. He wandered the moors, gathered bugs [...] ignoring the growing embarrassment as parishioners and townspeople began to talk about the parson's strange, indolent son. [...] on July 30, [Uncle Cent van Gogh] registered Vincent, just recently turned sixteen, as an "office clerk" at Goupil & Cie"
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On Vincent's growing interest in art
>"In his enthusiasm for his new job, Vincent took a characteristically sudden, feverish interest in a subject toward which he had shown no particular inclination before: art. He "devoured" books on artists, on art history, on art collections in Holland and elsewhere."
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On Vincent's boss' low opinion of him
>"From the beginning, the smooth, dignified Tersteeg had been bothered by Vincent's strange, unpolished manner, which he attributed to his rustic upbringing. [...] that disdain began to show itself in angry words and sharp-witted disparagement. Vincent responded with the same bitter ambivalence that he felt toward his father: withdrawing into deference and "timidity" in his boss's presence, while nursing a wound of rejection that would never heal."
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Have a bump m8
On Vincent paying a visit to his younger brother
>"Theo's friends in Helvoirt [...] saw in Vincent only what everyone else saw: a strange and "difficult" young man - "good for nothing," in their estimation. When he came to visit, they made fun of him behind his back."
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On Vincent falling for a girl named Caroline Haanebeek
>"Open, lighthearted, and unselfconcious [...] she was everything the dour young apprentice was not. She loved music [...] She enjoyed entertaining, and treated men with a simply directness that must have seemed flatteringly flirtatious in the corseted world of Hague society. [...] Vincent['s] [...] describes his passion as "intellectual," not "physical." [...] If he ever declared that love, it was not a wooing, romantic voice that Caroline heard, but an insistent, contentious one - the voice that Vincent would always use to argue passions into submission. It was the voice of lonely depression. [...] Vincent's infatuation [...] went unrequited."
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On Vincent's first experience with prostitutes
>""If I cannot get a good woman," he told Theo," I shall take a bad one. I would sooner be with a bad whore than be alone." Driven more by loneliness than libido [...] he began seeing prostitutes. [...] Vincent's visits to the Geest, which began [...] when he was nineteen, were the first in a lifetime of trips down dark roads and dockside alleys in search of the intimacy he could not find elsewhere. [...] If the brothel keeper kicked him out, he would stand outside the entrance and just watch the customers come and go."
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excellent digits you have there my good user
On Vincent being sent to London by his employer
>"In 1873, London was the biggest city in the world. With a population of four and a half million [...] A contemporary critic described it is an "immense black spot" spilling across the countryside in a cartographer's nightmare of narrow, knotted streets. [...] Vincent was thrown into a roiling sear of humanity unlike anything he could have imagined."
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On Vincent's poverty in London
>"Just as language exacerbated his isolation, money exacerbated his guilty - as it would for the rest of his life. Even though his salary had almost doubled when he moved to London, it still barely covered his expenses. "To save on pennies," he stopped taking the steamer into the city and instead walked the whole way [...] By August, homesickness, isolation, and self-reproach had deepened into melancholy."
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On Vincent's depression in London
>"Vincent's expulsion (or flight) from the Hackford Road house marked the beginning of another of the long depressions that scarred his life. [...] Alone [...], Vincent quickly reverted to childhood habits of brooding and solitude. [...] He ate poorly and ignored his appearance. He withdrew from social contacts and neglected his duties at work [...] As if to punish his old family for the failure of his new one, he stopped writing home."
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"homesickness, isolation, and self-reproach had deepened into melancholy."
Genuinely fascinating thread OP, thank you.
Good bread. Nothing to contribute, just wanted to let you know it's appreciated.
This
Thank you for making my boring night interesting, OP.
OP here. I only include lengthy quotations if I feel they are particularly meaningful.
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On Vincent's appearance at the time
>"They found his looks odd and off-putting. Years later, they recalled his "homely, freckled face," his "crooked" mouth, his "narrowed, peering eyes," and his vivid hair cropped so close that it "stood up on end." [...] With his strange appearance and moody, solitary ways, Vincent invited scorn."
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On Vincent's attempts to overcome depression
>"Hungry for belief, but alienated from his childhood sources of belief, he reached out in every direction: to collections of poetry and philosophical tomes; to nature guides and self-improvements books; to George Eliot novels and silly romances; to ponderous histories and, the latest craze, biographies - searching for new sources of mystery in an increasingly literal world."
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On Vincent's reading of Thomas Carlyle
>"For Carlyle, it was man's fate to be a pilgrim, to wrestle with doubt, to reject old creeds and seek new insights into the "Unseen World." [...] Like Vincent, the hero of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus was ejected from his idyllic childhood home, estranged from his family, unsuccessful in friendship, spurned in love, and forced to face the world alone [...] Like Vincent, they had struggled with self-doubt and discouragement. His Dante was "an unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man"; his Shakespeare, a sad soul who spent years "wading in deep waters" and "swimming for his life." His heroes cared not at all for the "smooth-shaven respectabilities" of conventional behavior, and their oddness blinded others, even their families, to their true worth. With nothing more than a "sincerity of heart" and a "clear, all-seeing eye," Carlyle promised, even a flawed, unconventional youth, estranged from his family and spurned by the world, could find the the "divinity" within himself. For Vincent, this was the ultimate consolation"
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Yeah I kind of sympathised there as well, it's interesting, he reads like the kind of man who would be browsing Jow Forums or atleast spend a lot of time online if he were here today. It's odd to think of those types existing in other eras.
On Vincent visiting prostitutes in London
>"Socially inept, craving human contact, and long stripped of any compunction, Vincent found himself in the world capital of paid companionship. More than eighty thousand prostitutes, many of them barely teenagers, plied their trade in a city where the age of consent was only twelve. [...] The trade was serviced by three thousand official brothels, and half again as many coffee shops, cigar divans, dancing saloons, and "night houses" all peddling the same wares. [...] They accosted passersby with a fearlessness that unnerved the unwary. They went by many names: drabs, Cyprians, fallen sisters, harlots, whores, and "degraded creatures." Vincent called them "girls who love so much.""
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On Vincent's relationship with religion at the time
>"Every Thursday evening and twice on Sunday, pilgrims thronged the Metropolitan Tabernacle in south London. They came by the thousands, blocking the streets in every direction. They filled the cavernous music-hall auditorium, packing it until the crowd spilled into the yard and spread as far as sound could reach. [...] Among the pilgrims in the winter of 1875 - 1875 was a lone Dutchman, Vincent van Gogh. [...] [Preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon] preached the promise of redemption: of "lifting men from the lowest degradation" and "bringing joy where there is sorrow. [...] Vincent surely added his voices to the chorus of thousands"
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Good to see you back user, saw your threads on Jow Forums some time back and I liked them
On Vincent's moving to Paris
>"In Paris, he launched into a paroxysm of piety. He read the Bible fervently every night and filled his letters with its wisdom. He imposed monastic self-discipline on his routine: rising at dawn and going to bed early (in contravention of long habit). [...] He eschewed the pleasures of the flesh and [...] deluged his family and friends with exhortatory letters: letters fat with scripture, hymns, inspirational verses, and homiletic aphorisms. [...] Ever distrustful of excess, Dorus may have recognized his son's newfound passion not the ardor of a man embracing new angels, but the desperation of a man fleeing old demons."
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On the artistic culture of Paris at the time
>"Paris was in uproar. It was the winter of 1875 and the art world was under attack by a rebellious cadre of young painters who styled themselves the Societe anonyme (Anonymous Society), but whose enemies had stick them with a range of dismissive labels including "Impressionalists," "Impressionists," and "lunatics." They claimed to see the world in a new way: making the improbable argument that their bright colors and loose brushwork captured images in a more scientific way [...] the Paris art world [...] called the new works "crimes," "absurdities," and "mud-splashes," and accused radicals like Claude Money of conducting a "war on beauty." [...] Desperate for money, a group of the upstarts (including Monet and Renoir) arranged to sell some of their controversial works at the city's central auction house, the Hotel Drouot. [...] So ugly did the event become that the organizers had to call the police to prevent the melee from breaking out into fistfights. Two months later, Vincent arrived in Paris."
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bump. great thread OP. keep it up
On Vincent's racial stereotypes
>"For Vincent, Jews sold books or lent money and "Negroes" (any nonwhites) worked hard. Americans ("Yankees") were coarse and dull; Scandinavians, orderly; Middle Easterners (all "Egyptians"), enigmatic; southerners, temperamental; northerners, phlegmatic."
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On Vincent the struggling art salesman
>"Vincent later dismissively described his job in the salesroom at Goupil as "entertaining visitors," suggesting both the dreaded social demands of the work and his poor track record of sales. His inborn shortcomings as a salesman - rough appearance, unsettling gaze, awkward manner - must have stood out even more jarringly [...] The "stupidity" of some customers "exasperated" him, according to one account. And when someone defended by a purchase by saying "C'est lad mode" (That's the fashion), he would recoil in astonishment and anger. The customers responded in kind, indignant that this strange clerk "dared to question their taste.""
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bump. been a fun read so far. please do link those other threads OP. I vaguely recall seeing one for hitler around here a while ago - very interested. going to bed now Ill check again when I wake up
On Vincent's anger towards certain portions of the upper class
>"He developed a lifelong antipathy to the class he had once aspired to join - the class that, like his family, would not have him. According to his sister Lies, he came to see bargaining as nothing more than "seeking to get the better of another," [...] "Everything, everything," Vincent later wrote, "is in the clutches of the moneychangers."
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On Vincent's lifestyle in Paris
>"Angry and adrift, he complained of depression and took up again his cure for the "blues," pipe smoking. He endlessly wandered the streets of Paris, avoiding museum but lingering over cemeteries."
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On Vincent being fired from his job
>"the months of longing and anticipation only added to the burden of failure and guilt that he carried home with him on the overnight train that left Paris on December 23. The news he had to tell his parents would blacken his family's brightest, most cherished holiday: he could not stay at Goupil. [...] he called his dismissal "not entirely unforeseen" and admitted vaguely to having "done things that in a certain sense have been wrong." [...] Leon Boussod [...] delivered the news in an encounter that Vincent described as "very unpleasant." [...] For the rest of his life, Vincent would replay this humiliating episode in his head, regretting his Christlike "passivity" [...] But nothing Vincent might have said or done, then or ever, could mitigate the shame. "What a mess he has made!" Dorus wailed. "What a scandal and shame!""
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>>"Socially inept, craving human contact, and long stripped of any compunction
Was Vince /our/guy?
Hey I feel like someone did somethig like this with other historical figures. Was it you op?
Bumpty spagetti rolls
On Vincent returning to England
>"Vincent began responding to advertisements in English papers seeking teachers and private tutors. [...] At the last minute, a letter arrived offering a position at a small boys' school in Ramsgate, a resort community on the English coast. [...] It wasn't much (the job paid nothing initially), but at least it provided room and board and a place far away to hide his shame."
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On Vincent's life as a teacher in Ramsgate
>"Twenty-four boys between the ages of ten and fourteen crowded into the narrow townhouse at 6 Royal Road, only a hundred years from the edge of a cliff that dropped vertiginously to the sea. Vincent complained about the building's rotten floors, broken windows, dim light, and dark passages. "A rather melancholy sight," he called it. Dinner consisted of bread and tea, but so dreary was the rest of their day that the boys looked forward to it eagerly, he wrote. [...] From six in the morning until eight at night, he and a fellow "assistant teacher" bore full responsibility for all the school's students. [...] [Headmaster] Stokes had "but one goal," Vincent later wrote, "money."
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On Vincent's life upon returning to England
>"For the next eight months, he hardly stopped. Ricocheting from place to place, from job to job, he traveled hundreds of miles back and forth across the English countryside, "going somewhere." He took boats and trains and buses and carts and even a subway. But mostly he walked. At a time when rail travel was so cheap that even shopgirls could afford third-class tickets, Vincent walked. He walked in all weathers, at all times of day and night, sleeping in the open, foraging in the fields, eating in public houses or not at all. [...] He walked at a deliberate pace - three miles an hour by his own reckoning - as if the destination didn't matter"
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>Jow Forumsfag
Yikes.Didn't know Jow Forums would stoop this low. Get necked.
Leave him be, he isn't shilling for them. Jow Forumsfags can come as long as they leave their ideology at the door.
Good thread OP. Nice work
On Vincent's thoughts at the time
>"In those years," he wrote later, "I was abroad without friends or help, suffering great misery." Indeed, self-punishment may have been the true purpose of his ordeal. Clearly, a huge burden of guilt weighed on every step. "Keep me from being a son that maketh ashamed," he wrote soon after his arrival in England. In letter after letter, he confessed to feelings of "great inadequacy," "imperfection," and "unworthiness." He admitted to "hating his own life," and longed for the day when he could "forget the sings of my youth."
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On earnestness and irony
>"Far too earnest for irony, he drew from the densest Carlyle and deepest Eliot only the most forthright lessons. In huge novels, he sometimes saw only a single character, often a minor one, reflecting back his view of himself and the world."
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On sentimentality
>""I believe the fuller of sentiment a thing one makes is," he wrote [...] "the more it is criticized and the more animosity is rouses."
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>Vincent later wrote, "is in the clutches of the moneychangers."
On Vincent's job at a different boarding school
>"At school [...] Vincent led the twenty-one boys in their Bible study and prayed with them every morning and evening. At night, he sat between their beds in the dark dormitories and told inspirational stories from the Bible and literature. [...] At the end of each day, he would climb to his room on the third floor of Holme Court and fall asleep with a Bible still gripped in his hands and a print of Christus Consolator looking down from the wall."
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On Vincent the amateur preacher
>"on Sunday, October 29, Vincent stepped into the pulpit of the Richmond Methodist church to give his first sermon. [...] At the foot of the pulpit, he paused, bowed his head, and prayed: "Abba, Father, in Thy name be our beginning." As he ascended, he felt as if he were "emerging from dark cave underground," he said, and was overcome by a vision of his future "preaching the Gospel wherever I go." He chose his text from Psalms: "I am a stranger on the earth..." "It is an old belief," he began, "and it is a good belief, that our life is a pilgrim's progress.""
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>our life is a pilgrim's progress
I wonder if that was a reference in some way to the 17th century book of the same name?
On Vincent returning to his parents' home
>"Months of intermittent and uninformative letters had left his parents even less sympathetic than when he fled in April. Every time he moved from one unpaid, "futureless" job to the next, he reopened the wounds. "We are more and more worried with time," Dorus wrote Theo in September, "and we fear that he will become unfit for practical life. It is bitterly sad." They tried to talk sense to him. If he really wanted to be a preacher, they said, he should study for it - and find a paying job in the meantime. But their proposals were always met with "woolly" answers or ignored altogether. [...] When Vincent arrived in Etten on December 21, he was greeted not with open arms and tears of joy, but with what he later described as a "torrent of reproaches."
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On Vincent's parents criticism of their eldest son
>"In the absence of progress, they brooded over what had gone wrong with Vincent's life - in Vincent - to bring this trial upon them. As always, they blamed his failure to socialize in the right circles and his neglect of appearances. But mostly they blamed his attitude: his "morbid nature," his "inclination to melancholy." [...] If only he had "a jolly heart," Anna lamented, he would not be so prone to "excesses"; he would "become a more normal and practical person." [...] only Theo offered a defense. He told his siblings that Vincent was not like a "normal man" - to which Lies responded that everyone, including Vincent, would be better off if he were."
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Damn, he really was our guy
thanks for taking the time to make this
Bumping op still very interested and I'm very glad there's no pol politics injected into this
I'm killing myself tomorrow :)))
I was named after Vincent Van Gogh
I wonder how his story ends... I hope its a happy ending.
>Was Vince /our/guy?
uhhh
>craving human contact
No, no he was not ourguy. We only need art, music, and drugs... nothing more. Stupid bitches are an unnecessary distraction.
Fugg
She knows.
Sound boring as fuck friend
twitter.com
Forgot the link
Fug off.
Great thread OP
Van gogh always makes me tear up
lmao those fucking comments