Art: Van Gogh / The Potato Eaters

“I have tried to make it clear how those people, eating their potatoes under the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in their dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food. I have wanted to give the impression of quite a different way of living than that of us civilized people. Therefore I am not at all anxious for everyone to like it or to admire it at once.”

- Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), on his first major work The Potato Eaters, painted early in his artistic career and before his involvement with impressionism.

Question: Why do the people in the painting sit on the corners of the table instead of the straight parts? Would that not make a crowded room more crowded?

Art: Vincent Van Gogh / The Night Cafe

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890), letters to his brother Theo about The Night Café, painted in 1888:

"Today I am probably going to begin on the interior of the café where I have a room, by gas light, in the evening. It is what they call here a “café de nuit” (they are fairly frequent here), staying open all night. “Night prowlers” can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in.

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.

In my picture of the “Night Café” I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace of pale sulphur."

The café depicted is a café in Arles in which van Gogh had a room. In other letters he writes of searching for peace in his life: “I only wish that someone could prove to us something calming which comforted us, so that… we could go forward without losing ourselves in the solitude or nothingness.” His painting of the café shows his struggle between the artificial pleasures on offer (absinthe, prostitutes) and his search for peace and something more.

Last words: Vincent Van Gogh

"The sadness will last forever."
- Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)

Vincent Van Gogh set out into the fields with his easel and painting materials on 27 July 1890. He had been painting the wheat fields of Auvers since May. By July the weather had worsened and he wrote to his brother Theo of "vast fields of wheat under troubled skies", saying that he did not "need to go out of my way to try and express sadness and extreme loneliness" One of his last paintings, Wheatfield with Crows, is often referenced as being the work he painted on 27 July, however it can only be identified as having been painted in the month of his death. It is a powerful painting and is commonly interpreted as showing his troubled state of mind, with a dark, forbidding sky, the indecision of three paths going in different directions and the black crows overhead being signs of foreboding or even death.

On 27 July whilst in the fields he shot himself in the stomach with a revolver. He was able to make his way home and survived for 3 days, dying in Theo's arms. Theo later wrote "He himself wanted to die; when I sat at his bedside and said that we would try to get him better and that we hoped that he would then be spared this kind of despair, he said 'La tristesse durera toujours' ('The sadness will last forever.')

Vincent's funeral and burial took place on 30 July. His long term friend, the painter Emile Bernard, wrote to Gustave-Albert Aurier: "On the walls of the room where his body was laid out all his last canvases were hung making a sort of halo for him and the brilliance of the genius that radiated from them made this death even more painful for us artists who were there. The coffin was covered with a simple white cloth and surrounded with masses of flowers, the sunflowers that he loved so much, yellow dahlias, yellow flowers everywhere. It was, you will remember, his favourite colour, the symbol of the light that he dreamed of being in people's hearts as well as in works of art. "