Disquiet Experiences in Quiet Places: Vincent Van Gogh

Disquiet Experiences in Quiet Places: Vincent Van Gogh

Over the course of Vincent Van Gogh’s bizarre life, he experienced a wild myriad of emotions and battled several mental disorders. These hardships, along with his struggle to become an artist, caused him to create very emotionally charged pieces. This can be especially observed through his depictions of spaces from memory. These paintings focus on an magnificent sense of movement in the inanimate objects. This is done by use of thick texture and intense color, as Van Gogh doesn’t abide by the laws of perspective or light. This causes these works to feel strange and uneasy, as though the ground beneath the viewer is tilting, or the walls are closing in. The people depicted in these spaces are few, but their placement and expressions add to the overwhelming emotional vibration of the space. Standing before these pieces, the viewer is sure to become sucked into Van Gogh’s emotion, wether they find it pleasant or uncomfortable. These feelings range from the grave sadness he felt at his worst, to the moments of bliss he scarcely experienced. Walking away from these pieces, a viewer is left with their memory of the emotion they felt when looking at it, that overshadows their memory of the formal elements. Van Gogh’s feelings about these places are made clear to the onlooker, causing them to feel as though they too are within the environment, and vulnerable to it’s sentiment.

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh

Title: The Night Café

Date: 1888

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Yale Art Gallery

This eerie café in Arles, below Van Gogh’s rented room, was a heavy place for Van Gogh during his years there. He uses loud, contrasting reds and greens, and a man who stares straight out of the frame, to cause unrest in the viewer. The furniture is stretched and squished without conformity to perspective, causing it to seem just as nightmare-like as the colors. These aspects, coupled with the hanging lights, which have been given a humming glow, haunt the space and transfer Van Gogh’s anxiety for this area, to the observer. At the time he began painting The Night Café, he wrote in a letter to his brother, “It always seems to me that I’m a traveller who’s going somewhere and to a destination. If I say to myself, the somewhere, the destination don’t exist at all, that seems well argued and truthful to me.” (Van Gogh, letter 656).

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh
Title: Starry Night 
Date: June, 1889
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Museum of Modern Art

The aesthetic beauty of Van Gogh’s Starry Night is a testament Van Gogh’s pleasant nostalgia for this place. It is a scene from the window of his room at the mental asylum where he stayed while attempting to heal his illness. Painted from memory, his admiration for the starry sky and rolling landscape is clear through the magical swirls of blue and yellow that float effortlessly over the story-book valley below. His use of deep blues and greens communicate rest and calm, while the accents of luminous yellow add a fantasy-like aspect. The vast ocean of this famous sky causes the viewer to become wrapped up in the enormity of it, and less concerned with their own presence. Van Gogh’s emphasis on the beautiful liveliness of the starry sky shows a gratitude for this place and the escape that looking out the window gave him, from the troubles of himself.

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh

Title: Enclosed Field with Ploughman,

Date: October 1889

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Museum of Fine Arts

After painting the Starry Night earlier that year, Van Gogh produced many paintings of his memories looking out at the world beyond his room. This painting was a result of Van Gogh’s memories of the rolling hills and blue skies. The direction of the sweeping lines seem to catch the viewer in their current and pull them out to a sea of sun-lit wheat fields. The warm blues and yellows are playful and bring the painting to life. These delightful elements bring the hot sun and open spaces right to the onlookers feet, and Van Gogh’s feelings of admiration for this view are contracted from it. During this season of life, Van Gogh felt he was truly recovering from his illnesses and finding himself to not be “mad” after all. Perhaps this moment in time depicts a happy atmosphere in which Van Gogh wished to find hope in. There is truly a feeling of fleeting bliss within this space, causing the viewer to want to stay a while, and bask in the sunlight.

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh

Title: Ward in The Hospital at Arles

Date: 1889

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Oskar Reinhart Foundation 

Van Gogh suffered a fit on December 23rd, 1888, in which part of his ear was cut off. He was hospitalized in Arles, where this painting was inspired. The muddy greens and rusty oranges he chose feel bleak, and the figures are hunched in dismay, emphasizing the emotional atmosphere of this hospital full of sick people. The ground comes up the bottom of the painting, allowing the viewer to feel as though they are standing directly in the middle of sickness. After suffering the breakdown that led to his injury, Van Gogh had to recover before returning to work. His frustration with his helplessness in combination with the uncertainty of what was causing such harmful fits, weighed on him during his hospital stay. This space makes the viewer feel the almost gross, painful time in his life, as they are backed into a Van Gogh’s corner of confusion and restlessness. 

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh

Title: Prisoners Exercising (Prisoners Round)

Date: 1890

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Pushkin Museum

Painted in the year of his death, Van Gogh’s Prisoner’s Exercising is one of his creepiest works. Like The Night Café, this work uses a luminous green and a figure staring straight at the viewer, to create discomfort. A group of prisoners marching in a circle makes the viewer feel unwelcome, and therefore causes unrest. Though the actual space itself comes from a print by More, Van Gogh used his own color scheme and added the foremost prisoner’s stare. 1890 was Van Gogh’s darkest year, in which he felt trapped in the asylum like a prisoner. The high walls and looming shadows give the sense that the viewer cannot leave, but the daunting stare of the prisoner, and the haunting green color makes the viewer want to run. This droning scene echoes Van Gogh’s overwhelming inner despair over his last months in the insane asylum, when he was too ill to even write to his brother.

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh

Title: Corridor in The Asylum

Date: 1889

Medium: Oil color and essence over black chalk on pink laid ("Ingres") paper

48.190.2

During his time at Saint Rémy Asylum, Van Gogh resumed his work. This drawing depicts a hallway in the asylum with warm yellows and reds that are not local to the real hallway. As grey as it is in real life, the colors of the painting are wild and whimsical, winding down the hallway in a dash-like texture. He used these highly charged elements to explain how it felt to stand there in the hallway and feel his mind wrestle with itself. Van Gogh projects this unrest onto the hallway so that the viewer can stand before it and feel a wide range of emotion. Pleasant at first, then it becoming strange, alluding to the idea that his experience with the asylum was plagued by uncertainty.“I’m perhaps exaggerating in the sadness I feel at being knocked down by illness again – but I feel a kind of fear.” (Van Gogh, letter 798).