The Self-Forged Education of Vincent van Gogh: A Passionate Pursuit of Art
Vincent van Gogh, a name synonymous with post-impressionism, is celebrated for his vibrant colors, emotive brushstrokes, and profound impact on modern art. While his artistic genius is widely recognized, the unconventional path he took to acquire his education and hone his craft is often less explored. Van Gogh's story reveals a self-directed learner, driven by an insatiable hunger for knowledge and a burning desire to express his unique vision. His education was a mosaic of formal training, independent study, and relentless experimentation, shaped by his personal passions and a critical eye towards traditional methods.
Early Life and Unconventional Beginnings
Born in 1853 in the Netherlands, Vincent van Gogh's early life offered little indication of the artistic heights he would later reach. He was a serious and thoughtful child. He was taught at home by his mother and a governess, and in 1860, was sent to the village school. In 1864, he was placed in a boarding school at Zevenbergen, where he felt abandoned, and he campaigned to come home. Instead, in 1866, his parents sent him to the middle school in Tilburg, where he was also deeply unhappy. Little is known about Vincent's early years other than that he was a quiet child with no obvious artistic talent. Van Gogh received a fragmentary education: one year at the village school in Zundert, two years at a boarding school in Zevenbergen, and eighteen months at a high school in Tilburg.
Van Gogh began apprenticing at The Hague branch of the art dealership Goupil & Cie at 16 years old, with the help of his uncle, who was a partner there. During his time at the firm, van Gogh began exchanging letters with his younger brother Theo, who worked for Goupil in Brussels. The brothers developed a life-long bond, with Theo emotionally and financially supporting his brother throughout his artistic career. He spent seven years at the firm. However, he lost all ambition to become an art dealer. Instead, he immersed himself in religion, threw out his modern, worldly book, and became "daffy with piety", in the words of his sister Elisabeth. Van Gogh then took a post as an assistant teacher in England, but, disappointed by the lack of prospects, returned to Holland at the end of the year. He now decided to follow in his father's footsteps and become a clergyman.
To support his religious conviction and his desire to become a pastor, in 1877, the family sent him to live with his uncle Johannes Stricker, a respected theologian, in Amsterdam. Van Gogh prepared for the University of Amsterdam theology entrance examination; he failed the exam and left his uncle's house in July 1878. In January 1879, he took up a post as a missionary at Petit-Wasmes in the working-class, coal-mining district of Borinage in Belgium. To show support for his impoverished congregation, he gave up his comfortable lodgings at a bakery to a homeless person and moved to a small hut, where he slept on straw. Van Gogh’s earliest paintings were earth-toned scenes of nature and peasants.
Embracing Art: A Late Bloomer's Journey
It was Theo who, after seeing the drawings and sketches sometimes included in his brother’s letters, suggested he start an artistic career. October 1880 marked the beginning of his artistic career, as van Gogh moved to Brussels in pursuit of honing his drawing technique. Believing that learning the fundamentals of art first was an essential before working in color, he concentrated on perfecting his skills with black and white and studied from anatomy, perspective, and composition books, like Charles Bargue’s Exercices au fusain and cours de dessin. He came to Brussels, Belgium to study with the prominent Dutch artist Willem Roelofs in October 1880. He also signed up for a drawing course at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles after being recommended by Willem Roelofs and the art dealer, Tobias Schmidt. Vincent was initially not interested in the lesson, but the education in Brussels was free and studying at the art academy would gain him access to a warm, well-lit studio in winter. He studied anatomy, the standard rules of modelling and perspective at the academy but left not long after losing a competition on 5 December 1880.
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Van Gogh returned to Etten in April 1881 for an extended stay with his parents. He continued to draw, often using his neighbours as subjects. In August 1881, his recently widowed cousin, Cornelia "Kee" Vos-Stricker, daughter of his mother's older sister Wil and Johannes Stricker, arrived for a visit. He was thrilled and took long walks with her. Kee was seven years older than he was and had an eight-year-old son. Van Gogh surprised everyone by declaring his love to her and proposing marriage. She refused with the words "No, nay, never" ("nooit, neen, nimmer"). After Kee returned to Amsterdam, Van Gogh went to The Hague to try to sell paintings and to meet with his second cousin, Anton Mauve. Late in November 1881, Van Gogh wrote a letter to Johannes Stricker, one which he described to Theo as an attack. Within days he left for Amsterdam. Kee would not meet him, and her parents wrote that his "persistence is disgusting." In despair, he held his left hand in the flame of a lamp, with the words: "Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame." He did not recall the event well, but later assumed that his uncle had blown out the flame. Mauve took Van Gogh on as a student and introduced him to watercolour, which he worked on for the next month before returning home for Christmas.
He quarrelled with his father, refusing to attend church, and left for The Hague. In January 1882, Mauve introduced him to painting in oil and lent him money to set up a studio. Within a month Van Gogh and Mauve fell out, possibly over the viability of drawing from plaster casts. Van Gogh could only afford to hire people from the street as models, a practice of which Mauve seems to have disapproved.
The Influence of Paris and the Impressionists
In early 1886 Van Gogh went to live with his brother in Paris. Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet and postimpressionists Paul Gauguin. the style he developed back in Holland was hopelessly out-of-date. In order to brighten it up, he began painting still lifes of flowers. Japanese masters. He came to Paris initially because he wanted to exchange ideas with other painters and because he wanted to see the work of the great masters and other traditional painters. He also wanted to learn about colour and how to add it to his work.
He went to an exhibition by Monticelli which dazzled him with colour, and met Pissarro who inspired him to use brilliant, pure colours. He hung out with Impressionists and studied colour theory, becoming what he called a “fervent colourist”. His skill and fluency as an artist grew rapidly, and the transformation in his work during his time in Paris is remarkable. Van Gogh brightened his somber palette and juxtaposed complementary colors for luminous effect. Inspired by Japanese woodcuts, van Gogh used bold stylistic choices to portray the same subject in a strikingly different way. The Dutch artist also discovered a newfound admiration for Japanese woodcut prints; he, along with Theo, began collecting them. During his time in Paris he made friends with such artists as Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Paul Signac, and Georges Seurat.
Arles and the "Studio of the South"
After 2 years though, Paris all became too much for him. He longed for “some place of retreat where one can recuperate and get one’s tranquility and poise back”. At the beginning of 1888, Van Gogh, now a mature artist, went south to Arles, in Provence, where he at last began to feel confident about his choice of career. He set out to make a personal contribution to modern art with his daring color combinations. he was swept away by the landscape around Arles. In the spring he painted numerous scenes of fruit trees in blossom, and in the summer the yellow wheat fields.
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Van Gogh planned to create a studio in Arles for a group of artists to sell their work through Theo in Paris. As a first step, in October 1888, Paul Gauguin moved in with van Gogh, allowing the two artists to work together. However, Gauguin mostly painted from his imagination, while van Gogh painted what he tangibly saw; their different beliefs caused frequent arguments. In a letter to Theo in December 1888, van Gogh wrote: “Gauguin and I talk a lot about Delacroix, Rembrandt &c. The discussion is excessively electric. He moved to Arles in the south of France, with the intention of starting a ‘Studio of the South’, a community of artists, living in a monastery-like setting, painting into being a new artistic movement that would redefine art. In Arles he continued to experiment. He pushed the boundaries in terms of how he used colour, and he picked up the reed pen, which we cut himself from local reeds. “These drawing were made with a reed sharpened the way you would a goose quill: I intend to make a series of them, and hope to do better ones than the first two. It is a method I tried in Holland some time ago, but I hadn’t such good reeds there as here”. It is from this period that some of what are, for me, his most extraordinary drawings, originate.
Mental Health and Artistic Output in Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise
Van Gogh’s mental health deteriorated, and he sliced off part of his own ear, wrapped it in newspaper, and gave it to a local maid. Van Gogh painted one of his most famous paintings in an asylum. He continued to paint, though he admitted himself to Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy in May 1889, as he feared another uncontrolled bout of mental instability. There, he experimented with his style, creating some of his most well known pieces, including Starry Night and Cypresses, from his residence. He painted what he saw both inside and outside the asylum, with the aforementioned pieces being just a few of his 40 different paintings of cypress trees. His fascination with these trees had grown from when he first saw them in Arles to the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy. Evidently, van Gogh created numerous paintings and drawings at his time in the psychiatric hospital, making many of his best-known works. His use of color, which had often been so intense in Arles, became more muted, and he tried to make his brushwork more graphic. Van Gogh also made a large number of "translations in color" of prints by some of his favorite artists, like Millet and Eugene Delacroix. The artist left Saint-Remy in May 1890 and went north again, this time to the rustic village of Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris. Although he now had a small but growing circle of admirers, Van Gogh had lost his original passion.
Near Theo in Paris and looked after by Dr. Paul Gachet (who was also an amateur painter), van Gogh effectively created a painting a day. In early July 1890, however, he became extremely worried about his financial future, as Theo, who had been supporting him, was planning on leaving his art dealing job to start a business. Van Gogh shot himself in the stomach on July 2th, 1890 and died two days later in his room at the Auberge Ravoux.
Key Elements of Van Gogh's Self-Forged Education
- Self-Direction: Van Gogh charted his own course, selecting what he needed from various sources.
- Experimentation: He constantly explored new techniques and approaches, unafraid to push boundaries.
- Learning by Doing: He believed in developing skills through practice, producing a prolific body of work.
- Passion: His unwavering desire to capture the world as he saw it fueled his relentless pursuit of artistic mastery.
- Rejection of Convention: He selectively engaged with academic institutions, taking what he found useful while remaining critical of their constraints.
Lessons for Education Today
Van Gogh's educational journey offers valuable insights for contemporary education:
- Cultivate Passion: Education should foster a love of learning and a desire to master skills.
- Encourage Self-Direction: Learners should be empowered to design their own pathways and pursue their interests.
- Promote Experimentation: Education should encourage risk-taking, exploration, and the development of individual expression.
- Value Practice: Hands-on experience and consistent effort are essential for skill development.
- Critique Traditional Methods: Learners should be encouraged to question conventions and seek alternative approaches.
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