Vincent Van Goghs life in Auviers sur Oise

AUVIERS SUR OUISE

Ever since I started painting I was fascinated by the famous artist Vincent Van Gogh, not only by the intensity of his artistic vision but by his mysterious turbulent life. This increased interest led me to visit Vincent s’ tomb in Auviers sur Ouise, limits of Paris, where he lays resting in the churchyard. Beside him lays his brother Theo who helped Vincent throughout his life. In this peaceful atmosphere Vincent s’ spirit can be felt as do his brilliant paintings.

Vincent Van Gogh was born on the 30 th of March, 1853 at Groot Zundert Holland and from his early childhood Vincent showed a strange temperament which was then reflected in his later life. Vincent s life turned out to be a turbulent one, with shadows of loneliness and sorrow and where Vincent spent his life looking for love till he found it in Art. That was an endless struggle which led him to North and South, coldness and warmth. The last stop had to be Auviers sur Oise, a town forty miles away from Paris.

Auviers was at that time the haven for artists with many connections with painters and where both Pissarro and Cezanne worked there for some time. The vast countryside and corn fields which surround the town are a source of inspiration for artists who visit this place. On the 20 th of May 1890 Vincent Van Gogh arrived in this town where arrangements were made for him to be under the care of Dr. Cachet. Instantly, the two men got on well together as the doctor had a passion for painting.

It seemed that in Auviers sur Oise Vincent found the so sought after peace and threw himself at his work capturing the many views of the town. Vincent Van Gogh painted around 80 paintings and 60 drawings including portraits, landscapes and views of town. The mental disturbance was wearing off and Vincent was happy as his paintings portrayed which were full of vitality and color.

However, this was not to last for long as by the end of June another blow struck Vincent. His brother Theo could no longer help him due to illness of his new born baby. With this shadow overbearing him Vincent kept on working but the feeling that Theo no longer needed him tormented him deeply. Feelings of loneliness crept over him, Vincent again, felt defeated by his ill fate and nearing the end of July in 1890, Vincent had another attack. One morning while he was in the fields he took his revolver and shot himself at his stomach. Vincent died two days later on the 29th of July in the presence of his brother Theo. In the early morning Vincent said, I wish I could die.’ He died a few minutes later. His brother, Theo died six months after him and where he was buried near his brother Vincent.

Auviers sur Oise will always remind us of the story of a great painter who could not have one thing, the whole love from another human being. And the cold wind blowing on the fields in Auviers sur Oise honours the last breath of a great painter whose paintings remain with us through time and time. The painful fact remains, that Vincent Van Gogh could not express himself in any other way than by his pictures. Through his end Vincent had succeeded and now he lives forever in his great Art.

Biography: Vincent Van Gogh – Part 6

Vincent van Gogh is ranked as one of the founding fathers of modern art. At only ten years of drawing and painting, van Gogh had one of the briefest careers in art history.

Van Gogh was born March 30th, 1853, in the villiage of Groot Zundert in the Dutch province of North Brabant.

Van Gogh’s family consisted of mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, father, Theodorus van Gogh, one brother, Theo and three sisters. Although the eldest child, Vincent Willem van Gogh, was not the first born. One year before his birth, to that day, his mother delivered a child, a boy, also named Vincent Willem van Gogh. He was still born.

Theo, four years younger than Vincent, was to play a major part in van Gogh’s life. Without the support of Theo, Vincent’s art and life would have come to nothing.

Vincent was a very stubborn child and hot tempered too, given to strongly, contrary behavior. When he was praised by his parents, for a model elephant he had made, Vincent destroyed it. It is likely that praise embarrassed him.

Van Gogh had a very wealthy Uncle, who he called Uncle Cent. Vincent’s uncle asked him to work for his company when he finished school. So, at 16 years of age, Vincent did just that.

Uncle Cent’s headquarters was in Paris but he had business in London, Berlin and Brussels.

Uncle Cent sent him to work in an office at Goupil & Co. at the Hagile. Goupil’s was a conservative house, speacialising in well-made reproductions of famous paintings.

After about three years, Theo came to visit. Soon, thereafter, the two brothers began exchanging letters.

The letters were so vivid. So revealing of Van Gogh’s innermost feelings.

In 1875, Van Gogh’s uncle arranged for him to be transferred to the Paris office. At Christmas, that same year, Vincent went off to Holland to visit his parents. Vincent had become increasingly careless in work. So on his return, he was given three months notice. Six years of training as an art dealer came to an end. To Theo he wrote, “When the apple is ripe, a soft breeze makes it fall from the tree; such as the case here…” (Quote from The world of Van Gogh).

At 23 years of age, Vincent was unemployed. He didn’t have the slightest idea what to do next. Although he had sketched a few illustrations, he seemed not to have thought seriously about becoming an artist.

It was at the age of 27, that Vincent decided to turn to art. He thought he could communicate to people through his art. Through his art, he could poor out his

Best art galleries in London

London is home to a number of wonderful art galleries, and depending on your taste, you are sure to find one that fits. Most popular is the National Gallery, located in Trafalgar Square. Home to European art from 1250 onward, the Gallery boasts works from Leonardo, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Monet, Rembrandt, Seurat, Vermeer, and Rubens.

Adjacent to the National Gallery is the National Portrait Gallery, which, like its neighbor, offers free admission. The Portrait Gallery, as one would expect, houses portraits – many famous – of British men and women. Many pictures are easily recognizable from history textbooks: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, and William Shakespeare are among the early examples. Portraits continue through to today, including many famous and easily recognizable Britons.

For a peek into the best of the Royal collection, a visit to the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace is in order. If the palace is open for the summer visiting period, it is worthwhile to take the tour simply for the art on the walls (among the many other reasons to visit). If you aren’t lucky enough to be in London between the end of July and the middle of September, the Queen’s Gallery is still open year-round. Representing the tastes of monarchs for over 500 years, the Queen holds the collection in trust for the nation, which includes over 7,000 paintings, 3,000 miniatures, and over 1,400 pieces of sculpture. Among the artists represented are Van Dyck, Gainsbourough, Canaletto, Holbein, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. While some of the collection is on display in royal residences, much is viewable in the Queen’s Gallery, one of the lesser known galleries in London.

If modern art is more your style, head to the south bank of the Thames for the Tate Modern. Located in an old power station across the Millennium Bridge from St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tate Modern is a fascinating collection of modern sculpture, photography, painting, and printing. From Dali to Picasso to Warhol, a vast number of artists are represented. Unlike many museums, the Tate Modern is organized by subject and style; the visitor is thusly given many different interpretations of similar topics and ideas, presenting a unique look at contemporary art.

London is full of superb galleries. No matter what your taste, you are sure to find something is this amazing center of art and culture. A little research before you go will help you make the most of your time, and allow you to better experience London’s treasures.

Monet’s Garden

You can visit Monet’s garden at Giverny in France – it’s a truly wonderful experience.

The artist Money created a lasting and wonderful garden in the small town of Giverny near to Paris. The garden was where he did many of his paintings and the inspirational scenes remain today. Visiting Monet’s garden is like walking around inside an impressionist painting.

Giverny is less than an hour to the west of Paris. The garden is open from April to October except on Mondays – it’s a wonderful place to visit but beware – it’s very popular with tourists – and you’re not likely to find a quiet time or place for reflection.

The water lily pond with the Japanese bridge that features in one of the artists most famous – and certainly most reproduced – paintings forms the centre point of the garden. The plants grow in great drifts of colour and you can clearly see where the inspiration for the impressionist style of painting came from. Not all of the garden is based around flowers. Some of the most pleasant sights are of the lawns and shrubs planted by Claude Monet – his eye for design and balance is to be found everywhere you look – even in the smallest details.

Monet lived in the house by the garden from 1883 until he died in 1926 and he believed that the garden was his greatest masterpiece – a bigger work than any of the paintings that the garden gave life to. The gardens are maintained by great squads of gardeners and helpers who work from dawn to dusk year round to ensure that the gift to the world left by the artist is regenerated year after year.

The best time to visit Monet’s garden is probably in May or June when the rhododendrons are in full bloom and the wisteria is draping itself over the Japanses bridge – but to be honest, the whole place is overwhelmingly beautiful at any time of the year.

You can get to Giverny by taking a train from the Gare Paris St Lazare to the nearby town of Vernon. The journey takes about forty minutes and there are five trains a day. Once at Vernon you can either take a bus from the station or rent a bike and enjoy the short cycle to the outskirts of Giverny. You can also take a bus from the centre of Paris to Giverny itself – a pleasant and quiet small town with many nice cafes and bistros.

Near to Monet’s garden is the Musee d’Art Americain – a large museum devoted to the work of the American artists who came to France at and around the turn of the century to sit at the feet of the great impressionist masters.

As a day trip from Paris – or as part of a specialist garden tour – a visit to the artists garden at Giverny is a wonderful way to pass the time. You can step back into a time when the world was a different place and when life truly ran at a different pace. Take your camera (and maybe your sketch pad) and perhaps you’ll be inspired too to create either a work of art or another great garden of your own when you return home.

Biography: Rembrandt

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) is one of those rare artists (like Titian or Matisse) who changed and grew at every stage of their lives, reaching an artistic pinnacle in old age and capturing their knowledge of life on canvas along the way for all to see. Painting in the Baroque age, Rembrandt was emphatically a Dutchman, but his vision came from within and not from antiquity, like his contemporary, Rubens.

Although he painted during the Dutch Golden Age, much of his later life was beset by trouble and bankruptcy. Although he continued to grow and change as an artist, this was not well accepted by society or his peers, and his later years were not marked with the kind of success that would follow him into history.

Early Years

Rembrandt was a miller’s son, of a middle class background, which was in and of itself a sign of the times. Dutch society was changing after its break from Spain, and the middle class was growing, creating a new art market for serious portraits and scenes from daily life.

He was a natural painter from an early age, who started young and whose talent was recognized almost immediately. Educated at the university of Leiden, he eventually left to apprentice with an important painter of historical scenes, and while Rembrandt painted several Biblical scenes himself, it was portraiture which captured his imagination.

Eventually Rembrandt set up his own studio, where his influence led him to receive a steady stream of commissions, including from The Hague. The shadow of genius is a peculiar thing, however. For some artists, it can never be recreated. Under Rembrandt’s shadow, however, those painters working under his supervision in his studio flourished to the extent that several of the paintings once attributed to the Old Master have now been reclassified as the product of his workshop assistants.

Portraiture and the Self Portrait

The human face fascinated Rembrandt from the beginning, a fortunate circumstance that brought him many commissions. Realism was critical to Baroque painting, and Rembrandt provides a prime example of Dutch portraiture of the Baroque period. Yet he was not interested in external surroundings (a common tool used to identify a sitter’s position in society). Instead it is the workings of the mind that obsessed Rembrandt, and which eventually resulted in a loss of his position and the respect of his peers.

In his paintings, the two worlds (inner and outer) are not in opposition. Instead, it is precisely through the

Biography: Vincent Van Gogh – Part 12

Vincent Van Gogh, dutch born and an exquisite painter. I visited the place that Vincent spent his last 90 days and the place he ultimately took his life. The field where he painted his last paintings with the black crows and ominous skies and where he wrote disturbed letters to his brother about his state of mind.

We walked the cobble streets, and winding pathways into the natural green ancient trees that probably shaded Van Gogh as he walked to the fields everyday.

We went to the place where he died, the small room where he hung his paintings – everything had been left exactly as it was before he died. No one had changed it since then, the hooks in the wall.

Watching the paintings flick up on the slide show, they displayed his words of emptiness and despair, and one felt desperately for this man who wanted to paint for a

living and felt like a burden on his brother.

Auvers sur oise is a beautiful town that still remains old looking. Not much different to the paintings that he did of it that are placed outside the famous church, the garden, the steps, the fields, the buildings that he painted!

This took my breath away. This man, who didn’t ask for much in life but felt too hopeless to continue, ending his brother’s torment, he ended his life.

When I returned from Paris and our trip to England and Ireland, I read his letters to his brother Theo and began to delve deeper into his suffering and into why he killed himself. I also wrote an account of his death, from his point of view.

So special was the bond between the brothers that Theo died within six months of Vincent, he never recovered from the loss of his brother. His devoted wife after burying Theo in Holland, moved him to be with Vincent in the field where he died and now they have this wonderful grave with ivy growing over their graves, they are together, as in life, they are in death.

It is one of the saddest and most touching stories that I know of, not only his beautiful art but the love between these two brothers and their devotion for each other. Even Theo’s wife’s determination to keep them together in death.

Amazing story. Vincent there is so much more to say about him, but I couldn’t possibly fit it all in. I have done a lot of reading and studying about him. However this was my most profound experience of Van Gogh. Leaving this town felt like we were leaving Van Gogh. It was a truly moving experience.

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A Guide to the Museums of Amsterdam

Amsterdam has much to offer the lovers of history, science and art with its myriad museums catering to each field. Here’s a quick snapshot of some of the museums you can expect to see in Amsterdam.

High on the list is Rijksmuseum, which hosts a collection focusing on art, craft, and history, including pieces that feature the Dutch Golden Age and a large collection of Asian art. Located on the Museumplein, a new building was established where visitors find even the design of the building to be artistic and reflective of Dutch history thanks to the efforts of artisans who submitted ideas in response to several contests for this purpose. Works by Jacob van Ruysdael, Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt and Rembrandt’s pupils can be viewed at this museum. Rembrandt’s The Night Watch is exhibited among other masterpieces in the Philips wing.

The Van Gogh Museum focuses on the works by the famous painter himself. Reputed as the bearer of the largest Van Gogh collection in the world, this museum hosts pieces that follow Van Gogh through the various stages of his life, from childhood to death, as well as the various emotional phases that he experienced. Some of the best known pieces include The Potato Eaters, Bedroom in Arles, and one of the Sunflowers paintings.

For something a little more cutting edge, check out the Stedelijk Museum—targeted at modern art aficionados. Artists such as Mike Kelley, Neo Rauch, David Goldblatt and Atelier Van Lieshout are represented amidst the myriad collections and exhibitions. Science lovers can check out the NEMO science museum for hands-on displays, computer simulations, and numerous experiments.

One museum that is not to be missed is the secret wartime home of Anne Frank. Rescued from demolition in the late 1950s and later donated to the Anne Frank Foundation, the museum has drawn thousands of visitors from around the globe, giving them a view of life in the Secret Annex. None of the original furniture and few personal effects remain since these were seized by the Dutch officers when the family was arrested. Only a few personal belongings were rescued by friends of the family prior to the clearing of the annex and later given to Otto Frank, the only surviving member of the Frank family. Some of these rescued items as well as photographs from the period are on display at the museum. In addition to the collection featuring various aspects of Anne Frank’s life, including the original diary that made her famous, the museum hosts a collection that highlights persecution and discrimination.

Also dedicated to history lovers is the Amsterdam Historical Museum. Offering a full in-depth encounter of the history of Amsterdam, the museum—which is housed in what was once the city orphanage—displays paintings, prints, marquettes, historical objects, porcelain and silver items, and archaeological discoveries.

Those who plan on visiting more than five museums in a year in Amsterdam would be best advised to purchase a Museum Card from a small museum. The Museum Card is relatively cheap and offers free access to 400 museums across the Netherlands, of which 29 are in Amsterdam. The Card is especially useful for avoiding long queues at the entrance of the most popular museums.

Biography: Vincent Van Gogh – Part 17

Vincent Van Gogh was born in 1853 and he died in 1890. And he had brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and a mother and a father. But that’s all well documented and well known. Those 37 years that Vincent lived was the life of a true artist.

Vincent always dabbled in the art world when he was a boy but he was embarrassed by any recognition and he would put his pencil and paper away to follow his other endeavors. He worked in the family art gallery but he wasn’t much good at it. He would talk the customers out of the more expensive paintings in favor of the cheaper ones that were truer to nature. And he was always reading the Bible and writing down long passages. He was transferred to the art gallery in London and it was there that he fell in ln love for the first time, and had his first rejection.

Vincent then began a quest to follow in his father’s footsteps as a preacher. He got a late start being in his early to mid twenties, but he studied hard and threw his passion into his work. But he couldn’t finish his classes, or so he told his uncle who was teaching him. Later in life Vincent confided in his brother Theo that he didn’t finish his classes because he became tired of the hypocrisy of it all. Vincent was given an assignment in the Borinage, a mining community in Belgium where he could preach to some of the poorest human beings on the planet. Vincent always had a special place in his heart for the unfortunate.

But Preaching in the Borinage soon became another lost cause. Vincent had given away all the things he was allotted to him. He gave away his bed to a family that needed it more than he. He got out of the habit of bathing. He wanted to be one with the miners. His superiors didn’t think it was fitting for a man in his position to live in such a manner. It was at this time that Vincent reached his lowest. He stayed in the Borinage living in total poverty. And he severed all ties with his family. He took to drawing pictures of the miners to pass his time and to take his mind off of all his failures.

Theo finally traveled to the Borinage to find his brother. And he found him there living as the animals lived. It was hard for him to see his brother living such a life. But Theo never lost faith in his brother, and it was at this time that Theo started giving Vincent a monthly allowance to live on. At first he said that it came from their father but Vincent soon learned that it was Theo who provide

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