Page 1

Sara Cecilia Johnson

Honors in Art History

American University College of Arts & Sciences

Spring 2014

Undergraduate Capstone

Vincent : Originality and the Validation of Repetitions

Dr. Juliet Bellow

Professor of Art History at American University

ABSTRACT: This paper explores van Gogh’s tendency to repeat: the artist often made copies or variations of other artists’ work and of his own paintings. The fact that van Gogh frequently repeated his works may seem like a form of obsessive action, playing into the myth of van Gogh as a mad genius. My paper instead uses van Gogh’s repetitions to develop a discussion of the avant-garde concept of originality, examining how his practice of repetition operated within a value-system that prized uniqueness. Looking critically at van Gogh’s artistic process of making repetitions, guided by the recent Phillips Collection exhibition catalogue, Van Gogh: Repetitions, I show that van Gogh’s process was intentional and complex. I compare his process to traditional academic methods of art-making, premised upon emulation and copying, and to that of his contemporaries in the avant-garde who were against copying. I conclude that van Gogh’s process of artistic production, which combined originality and repetition, represents the Post-Impressionist synthesis of Impressionist and Academic approaches to art-making. Page 2

“We are forgetting that painting was a simple craft, and we are adopting the modernist principle that innovation is primary and any reiteration of themes needs to be explained and justified.” - Patricia Mainardi 1

The idea that Impressionist painters were unanalytical and only painted what they saw in nature has been discredited.2 Although the Impressionists made it appear like their work was completed en plein air, the evidence reveals that those artists had studios where they took time to finish each painting, such as in Gustav Caillebotte’s painting The Floor Scrapers [figure 1]. The image is cropped, as the body of the figure on the left side is cut off by the edge of the painting, illustrating its transient quality, convincing its viewers of its quick production. Yet, this painting brings attention to lighting and, on further inspection, the composition is quite complex, indicating that it could not have been completed in one sitting. This and other paintings by the

Impressionists were not done spontaneously as they appeared in style and composition, but they were thoroughly planned out pieces— a constructed image.

The same goes for Post-Impressionist : the theory that he painted in wildly emotional states of pure genius is no longer valid regarding his work. The answers to explaining van Gogh and the Impressionists’ implied impermanence lies in their artistic method.

One cannot assume that based on his style of heavy impasto and visible brushwork that he lacked a painting process. A large portion of scholarship on van Gogh is dedicated to either proving or disproving his stigma as a mentally unstable yet expressive artist. Scholars tend to put him into his own category and isolate him from influences, viewing him as an anomaly of great creativity rather than another artist building upon previous artistic ideas. The recent exhibit on van Gogh at

1 “Copies, Variations, Replicas: Nineteenth-Century Studio Practice” Visual Resources 15 no.2 (1991): 138.

2 Robert Herbert, “Impressionism, Originality, and Laissez-Faire.” Ed. Mary Tompkins Lewis, Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 23-29, 148-161. Page 3 the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, titled Van Gogh: Repetitions, analyzes van Gogh’s means of production and, in doing so, has brought up the heavily avoided subject of the abundant repetition in van Gogh’s oeuvre, demonstrating his influences and bringing him into context with the artists of the nineteenth century. 3

Van Gogh: Repetitions thus allows us to rethink the myth of originality that still hangs over the late nineteenth-century French artistic avant-garde. Indeed, it allows us to examine an inherent contradiction in the painterly tradition that van Gogh inherited and extended. On the one hand, the Impressionist concept of plein-air painting implied that each painting was the product of a spontaneous and unique encounter with the motif; on the other hand, these same artists contradict the concept of implicit aura of originality through the practice of copying other artists’ work as well as their own. Though art historians have long recognized that the practice of copying or working in a series was a mainstay of painters’ working method at that time, the theme of repetition is shunned in the discussion of famous nineteenth-century artists. What it is about the copy that makes art historians turn a blind eye to this issue? It is probable that they wish to preserve the greatness of the artist, which reaffirms the traditional canon of art as well as the myth of originality.

In this paper, I will discuss van Gogh’s artistic production in relation to the notion of repetition, illustrating his modes of production and how they change over time through his experiences and interactions with other artists. I will discuss the hypocritical nature of the avant- garde in their rejection of academic painting, which promoted copying, while they often drew from traditional practices. I will also discuss the implications that repetition has on van Gogh’s

3 Eliza E. Rathbone, Van Gogh: Repetitions. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013. Page 4 mythic persona and how art as a whole consciously or inevitably uses imitation, whether through mimicking other artists or nature itself. Originality, which is often attributed to van Gogh and the

Impressionists, is something that can grow out of repetition and copying.

Repetition played a significant role in van Gogh’s artistic process that affected his fundamental views of making art. In Eliza Rathbone’s introduction to the Phillips Collection’s exhibition catalogue on this theme, she asks the primary question of this study: “what can we learn by looking at... examples of repetition in his [van Gogh’s] work, in portraits as well as landscapes?”4 The catalogue presents, in chronological order, thirteen serial paintings done by van Gogh that span his entire career, identifying a unique and systematic approach. Van Gogh would make a study from life and then rework it through variations of that same theme, applying his own term “repetition” to define these particular series. Because of all the letters that van

Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo van Gogh, explaining what the artist was doing at the time, they confirm van Gogh’s use of the word and what it means. To van Gogh, “repetition” meant reworking the same painting over and over to perfect it, making changes but keeping the composition and subject close to identical. The catalogue goes through an extensive description of each of the thirteen repetition series by providing historical background to the paintings and discussing them in comparison to the other works in the same series. The discussion primarily focuses on the technicalities of each piece and tries to determine how van Gogh might have produced these repetitions since they appear remarkably close to one another in composition yet they lack indication that the artist used any tools to aid in their replication. One issue with this catalogue is its privileging of the first or “original” repetition in each series, meaning that the

4 Rathbone, 1. Page 5 authors of the study attribute a large portion of each entry to determining which painting was made first in each series. It is rather difficult to tell what was painted first because they were painted so close together in time and because some paintings bring up issues of authorship, indicating that they are forgeries and not painted by van Gogh at all. The issue of originality is problematic because if one is to view each of van Gogh’s repetitions as works in their own right then why should it matter which painting came first? Besides this methodological flaw, the works in the catalogue bring together pieces from collections worldwide for the first time that aid in exploring van Gogh’s repetitions.

Some examples included in the catalogue are his repetitions picturing the Moulin de la

Galette in Montmartre, a motif he explored during his stay in Paris with his brother from

1886-88. There are two versions of the painting, both made in October, 1886. The version from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo [figure 2] was the first in the series, and the second version from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin [figure 3]. The general consensus from the scholars who contributed to the Phillips Collection catalogue concluded that the first work in any series is his painting that exhibits the thickest impasto and the loosest brush strokes, and this idea solidifies the differences between the two Moulin paintings.5 In comparing the two paintings, the

Otterlo version has more distinct and visible brush strokes, as seen in the jumble of strokes that create the street in the foreground and how the buildings are represented by short vertical strokes.

Although the Berlin version contains visible brushstrokes as well, there is more clarity and crispness with slightly tighter, smaller strokes and the use of dark blues and blacks that define and outline objects in the painting. There is evidence of revision in the Berlin painting because

5 Rathbone, 6. Page 6 van Gogh removes two small figures in the middle ground and the changes mood of the painting from warm browns to cool blue tones. After a technical analysis of the two versions, it would seem that the Otterlo painting was completed en plein air because of the charcoal sketches underneath the paint, because of the thick impasto of “a rapid wet-on-wet technique,” and because of the holes in each corner of the canvas, indicating that it was pinned up on a board so that the artist could work outdoors.6 The Berlin painting lacks these elements. This relates to the idea that a thick and freely applied impasto linked to direct observation, while a controlled and crisper application of paint meant refinement in a studio. This comparison indicates that van

Gogh used Impressionist techniques of painting outside but that he also used a studio despite the heavy impasto characteristic of all his paintings.

The Phillips Collection study takes an in-depth scientific approach to understanding van

Gogh’s repetitions, which aids in understanding how they were executed and what makes them different from other artists. Through x-rays and the use of other radiological equipment, the lack of evidence in van Gogh’s tool usage concludes that these repetitions were not done with the help of any instruments to aid in transferring a picture to another canvas. There are only a few instances recorded where van Gogh used some kind of tool to help him transfer or make a copy and that is in his Japanese-inspired paintings. His painting, The Courtesan (after Eisen) [figure

4], 1887, was taken from a magazine cover that van Gogh traced and then gridded so that he could transfer it onto the canvas, as seen in his traced sketching paper [figure 5]. Van Gogh was fascinated with Japan and their flat pictorial style of art, which he tried to emulate, and to him

Japan represented the perfect utopian society that he longed to visit. His move to later in

6 Rathbone, 56. Page 7 his life, which to him was another “Japan” because it satisfied his desire to find a pure community where he believed the people were kinder and more spiritually connected, such as in

Arles.7 Excluding his copies of Japanese prints, the catalogue concludes that Van Gogh began his technical process by first painting a sketch en plein air and then painted an edited second version in his studio, making many more versions which have become his repetitions. His academic procedure of sketching and executing a finished painting is subverted because of the repetitions.

Although there is no clear answer as to how van Gogh made his repetitions (aside from the aforementioned copies of Japanese prints), there is enough evidence to establish a pattern that manifests his technique. To answer Rathbone’s question, we can learn that van Gogh followed a system of production that challenges his mythic biography and establishes the artist as an intelligent man who exhibits a “more disciplined and reflective process” than was originally perceived.8 He purposefully constructed these repetitions not out of madness but in the development of a unique artistic process. His production method shows a synthesis of

Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques unique to himself in making a work that is a painting of his own painting. He is both repeating and not repeating his own work, making new works in their own right from his previous works, not making exact copies, which differs from his contemporaries’ practices of working from sketches but not repeating their own works to such a degree of repeating the same work numerous times.

After establishing how imbedded repetition was in van Gogh’s artistic production, I would like to consider how he defined “repetition” and what his motives were in making them.

7 See Tsukasa Kodēra, Christianity versus nature: A study of the thematics in van Gogh's oeuvre. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1988.

8 William H. Robinson, “The Artist Versus the Legend: Repetitions and Madness.” Van Gogh: Repetitions. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013: 10. Page 8

Van Gogh’s prolific personal letters to Theo indicate that he used specific terminology to differentiate the types of works he made. For example, he used the word étude to mean the work was merely a study, in contrast to a tableau, by which he meant a finished painting.9 His use of the word “repetition,” his own term apart from academia, began in 1888 when he decided to make a répétition of Pink Peach Trees [figures 6-7].10 The reason he did this particular repetition was in order to give the original as a gift to his cousin, Mauve. Van Gogh often painted repetitions so that he could retain a copy for himself before giving them as gifts, as he did for his portraits of the Roulin family in Arles, or to send to friends. Also, he could have had the art market in mind; by sending them to his brother, who was a Parisian art dealer, or his uncle the printmaker, or to his other artist and critics friends, he was seeking to disperse his work, have enough works to sell, and ultimately looking to gain recognition as an artist.11

Another reason he made repetitions was to further his work towards a state of perfection or idealization. The Moulin paintings were completed in the same month, on the exact same size canvases, and utilized the same composition and perspective of its subject matter, so why would he want to repeat it? To van Gogh, repetition meant not only a mode of production but also a mode of perfection, a way to continually “refine, improvise, and innovate” his work.12 In a letter to Theo, van Gogh remarked about his Peach Trees series, “Perhaps as it ages this repetition will improve. I worked on it a lot,” which indicates his work ethic as well as his personal goal to

9 Van Gogh to Theo (Arles, letter 594), April 9, 1888.

10 Van Gogh to Theo (Arles, letter 595), April 11, 1888.

11 William H. Robinson, “On the Origins and Evolution of van Gogh’s Repetitions.” Van Gogh: Repetitions. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013: 37.

12 Robinson, “On the Origins,” 29-30. Page 9 master certain themes.13 This concept of repetition and perfection originated in van Gogh’s self- taught technique inspired by conventional French academic tradition.

In order to understand van Gogh’s repetitions in context, we must reflect on the traditional ideas of copying that were upheld by the French Academy, an influential and affluent school of art based on Paris. Since the Renaissance, painting copies of other artists’ work remained a standard practice in academic environments. Scholar Patricia Mainardi explains that in the nineteenth-century, artists took seriously the difference between copies, imitations, repetitions.14 Each one had a distinct meaning that provided the basis for van Gogh’s understanding of repetition, who also was selective in the language he chose to characterize his work. A copy is something that could be taken as the original work, an exact replication of a work done by another artist. Copying a painting had educational value for art students, whose teachers promoted the practice. In her article on Delacroix, Patricia Mainardi notes that he was not the only artist to copy another master’s work: copying was a common practice, and “Courbet,

Manet, Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, all the major painters of the nineteenth-century made of copies of paintings they admired.”15 A copy is slightly different from a replica, the lowest form of studio practices, which referred to an artist copying his own work. Replications were done mostly by an artist’s atelier and his studio assistants for the purpose of mechanically producing works to sell, which is distinct from van Gogh’s method. An imitation of a painting was a more inventive practice that may reference other works in subject matter or style, but does not exist as an exact copy of a pre-existing work. A repetition is an artist’s variation of their own work, an

13 Van Gogh to Theo (Arles, letter 608), May 10, 1888.

14 Patricia Mainardi, “Copies, Variations, Replicas: Nineteenth-Century Studio Practice,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 15 no.2 (1991): 126.

15 Mainardi, 127. Page 10 additional version made by the same artist that are “originals in their own right, and were expected to vary from the first ‘performance’ of a theme.”16 Van Gogh was certainly not the only artist to make repetitions in a classical sense. Mainardi points out that Delacroix, Ingres, and

Alexandre Cabanel all made repetitions of their own paintings [figures 8-9].17 The nuances between copies, replicas, imitations, and repetitions are central to the shift that occurs in van

Gogh’s oeuvre and nineteenth-century art practices as a whole. Van Gogh invents a new concept with his repetitions, a unique process that created his own term separate from the avant-garde and the Academy.

Van Gogh was aware of academic traditions of painting through his self-taught study of art, but he was never formally academically trained. He learned about academic art processes through his interactions with prints, which are simplified black and white versions of paintings, therefore, van Gogh obtained a diluted concept of academic principles from an atypical path. In

1869, as a young man van Gogh was hired as a junior apprentice by Goupil & Cie, a prosperous art and print dealership that had branches in Paris, London, the Hague, and Brussels.18 Van

Gogh’s uncle and his brother Theo also worked for the company. Through his work there, van

Gogh developed an educational background in Old Master’s paintings from auction catalogues and books published by Goupil, which featured the works of Rubens, Van Eyck, Titian, Franz

Hals, Rembrandt, and Ruisdael. While intermittently working for Goupil and teaching, van Gogh travelled from branch to branch and was able to frequent the museums in London and Paris; therefore, despite lacking formal training in the arts, he was able to accrue a knowledge of the

16 Mainardi, 130.

17 See Mainardi article.

18 Van Gogh, Vincent. Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. http://vangoghletters.org (accessed April 16, 2014). Page 11 arts through his experiences. Van Gogh also gained access to artists’ prints from Theo, who became the manager of the Goupil branch in Montmartre in 1881, and he often requested prints from Theo to send to him while he lived in rural areas. One theme that van Gogh copied seven times in order to train himself was Jean-François Millet’s The Sower [figures 10-11].19 Van Gogh also amassed a collection of prints and magazine clippings that he kept and copied as a way of compensating for his lack of formal training. By 1882, he had collected over 1,000 prints mainly from illustrated magazines. Since van Gogh knew the academic processes and terms of art- making, it is clear that he adopted those methods for himself through what he could grasp from the prints, but times were changing during the decades van Gogh was active as a painter and new ideas of painting were working to usurp the authorities of the French Academy.

After establishing van Gogh’s pattern of repetition and the Academy’s history of copying, we must consider what it meant to be an avant-garde artists during van Gogh’s time, which happened to be a turning-point in the history of Impressionism. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Impressionists pulled away from academic restraints on painting and their standards of what art should be, moving towards less representational means of expression. This created a huge shift in the art world in terms of opening up new kinds of artistic styles and in the formation of a private art market. As Richard Shiff indicates in his article “The Original, the

Imitation, the Copy, and the Spontaneous Classic: Theory and Painting in Nineteenth-Century

France,” one of the biggest factors to change in the art world was that the artistic ideal revered by the Academy was replaced by the search for individuality.20 Art historian Cornelia Homburg

19 Van Gogh to Theo (Cuesmes, letter 157), September 7, 1880.

20 Richard Shiff, “The Original, the Imitation, the Copy, and the Spontaneous Classic: Theory and Painting in Nineteenth-Century France” Yale French Studies, No.66, The Anxiety of Anticipation (1984): 26. Page 12 summarizes the shift: “Whereas academic training had aimed at instilling young artists with the methods of the great masters of the past, modern art of the nineteenth-century was characterized by the exact opposite, the striving for an innovative, original use of pictorial means.”21 With innovation as the new ideal, copying was severely looked down upon and imitation became viewed as a form of copying, deserving no artistic merit.22

Since the avant-garde broke from the Academy and the government-controlled Salon, they had to construct their own avenues where they could sell their art, and in so doing they marketed their originality. Regarding the Impressionist painters, Robert Herbert states, “Forced to seek their own outlets, the painters had to claim value for their product. This value was located in their originality, in the very way their works were produced.”23 The Impressionists claimed that the artists who stayed in the Salon did not have to exhibit any originality as long as they continued on in the acceptable styles taught and upheld by the Academy; academic artists portrayed their art as heroic because it followed the modes of representation used by Old

Masters, preserving their legacy and by using their pictorial vocabulary they linked themselves to the great artists of the past. In response to the uproar from critics over the thick impasto technique of Impressionists paintings and how they seemed so unfinished, which made them assume the style required little skill, the Impressionists had to market themselves as hardworking. They created public personae as artists who toiled outside, painting en plein air in all conditions of weather and who did not resort to painting in a studio. This was commonly

21 Cornelia Homburg, “Affirming Modernity: Van Gogh’s Arlésienne,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 21, no.3 (1992): 127.

22 Shiff, 27.

23 Herbert, 26. Page 13 accepted as fact, and the Impressionists used this image as leverage to gain recognition and assign value to their work, demonstrating their political and artistic freedom.

Although the avant-garde expressed a negative attitude towards copying, their works differ from their rhetoric because they did incorporate copied elements into their work. As

Mainardi already pointed out, the leading modernists copied Old Master’s works. It was also a common practice for the avant-garde to visit the Louvre and gather inspiration there, a museum that housed the greatest works by academic standards. Claude Monet’s late serial paintings demonstrates copying within the avant-garde, although it was a market-motivated change in approach to painting. In John Tucker’s article “Monet and the Challenges of Impressionism in the 1880s,” he portrays Monet as an artist worried about Impressionism becoming obsolete in the face of the Neo-Impressionists. Monet began seeking something that would challenge the likes of

Georges Seurat and his followers by retreating from Paris and exploring the rich countryside in an attempt to decentralize Impressionism and to demonstrate that the scope of the style could go beyond urban scenes, showcasing its versatility.24 One such series is Monet’s costal scenes on La

Belle Île, a small island off the coast of France. He made three versions of The Pyramids at Port-

Coton [figures 12-14], all varying in the time of day and in weather conditions but with exactly the same composition. Monet asserts in a letter that he painted this and other scenes over and over again in order to capture the complicated lighting effects and changing subtleties of the landscape: “I well realize that in order to really paint the sea, one must view it every day, at

24 John Tucker, ”Monet and the Challenges to Impressionism in the 1880s,” Ed. Mary Tompkins Lewis, Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 230. Page 14 every time of day and in the same place in order to get to know its life at that particular place; so

I am redoing the same motifs as many as four or even seven times.”25

Although Monet was worried that his series would not be given consideration, he exhibited these paintings as finished products and the received positive reviews from critics.

Surprisingly, the critics said that they grasped Monet’s “individualism though his series because of his “moral, isolation, self-focus, [and] immersion in nature.”26 Those comments are similar to the ones regarding van Gogh. Both Monet and van Gogh adopted forms of repetition, as well as the French countryside, another painterly tradition that Tucker notes:

It is also the rural France that had so preoccupied dozens and dozens of nineteenth-century French artists, particularly the Barbizon painters such as Millet, in addition to the hundreds of anonymous French artists who produced innumerable images over the centuries that serve as popular precedents for Monet’s later efforts... anyone who took up the motif, therefore, automatically took his place in this heralded lineage.27

Tucker demonstrates that the avant-garde utilized preexisting motifs, such as the ones used by the Barbizon school, some which were used and approved of by the Academy. Although the avant-garde painters of the late nineteenth-century promoted themselves as completely new and

“original” in their approaches to painting, they could not completely rid themselves of past traditions even with the invention of a modern pictorial style. Caught between these two worlds, van Gogh creates the new style of repetition that takes ideas from both the academic and avant- garde.

Repetition marked van Gogh’s entire career, adapting over time and over the course of his interactions with the avant-garde in Paris, which created a synthesis of Impressionist and

25 Tucker, 241.

26 Tucker, 243.

27 Tucker, 246. Page 15

Academic principles that formed his artistic production. The avant-garde’s collective disapproval

(yet widespread practice) of copying influenced van Gogh’s conception of copying, further turning towards making repetitions. William H. Robinson, one of the scholars included in the

Phillips Collection exhibition catalogue, notes, “It appears that his approach evolved over time, both with respect to how he conceived of repetitions and how he produced them,” and that by

1889 van Gogh made the careful distinction between copies and repetitions to avoid ridicule by his contemporaries.28 His interaction with the avant-garde, particularly his esteem for Gauguin, caused a shift but it did not compromise his roots that lay in the traditional camp of repetition.

It is evident that van Gogh learned and incorporated some of the avant-garde techniques and attitudes towards copying during his stay in Paris from 1886-88. His contact with prominent figures in art during those three years brought him “up-to-date” on some new ideas that were percolating through the avant-garde circles. He attended the last Impressionist exhibition in

1886, the end of an era for Degas, Cassatt, Monet, Renoir, and Braquemond as the Impressionist style began to wane in the face of Seurat’s, whose work introduced Neo-Impressionism and caused quite a stir. Van Gogh entered the avant-garde at a tumultuous time of change and resistance to that change. He was a neutral party in the dispute between the Impressionists and the Neo-Impressionists, wishing the two sides would coexist; he even visited Seurat’s studio (the so-called “enemy”) before leaving for Arles in the winter of 1888.

Being in Paris was certainly a learning experience for van Gogh, who became involved in the avant-garde art circles, learning about Impressionist and the new techniques that developed into Post-Impressionism. He became close friends with Emile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-

28 Robinson, “On the Origins,” 18. Page 16

Lautrec. He attended weekly meetings of artists in Toulouse-Lautrec’s studio in the fall and winter of 1886. Van Gogh quickly learned how to utilize his resources while in Paris and became heavily involved in the art scene. In February 1887, he organized an exhibition of his collection of Japanese prints, then in December of the same year he organized another exhibition that included works by his friends. Through his circle of friends, he met Seurat and Gauguin, and he visited many exhibitions, including the ones organized by Theo. In a letter to his friend and classmate from van Gogh’s brief stay at the Antwerp Art Academy, Horace Mann Livens, van

Gogh describes his experience after living in Paris for the first few months:

In Antwerp I did not even know what the Impressionists were, now I have seen them and though not being one of the club, yet I have much admired certain Impressionist pictures- Degas nude figure- Claude Monet, landscape... And so I am struggling for life and progress in art... and since I saw the impressionists I assure you that neither your color nor mine as it is developping [sic] itself, is exactly the same as their theories but so much dare I say, we have a chance and a good one of finding friends... What is to be gained is progress and, what the deuce, that it is to be found here I dare ascertain. Anyone who has a solid position elsewhere, let him stay where he is.29

Van Gogh admits that he had not studied or been aware of the Impressionists before coming to

Paris. That is not fully true because Theo did inform him of their existence prior to his arrival, but it was van Gogh’s experience of seeing that art for the first time that made such an impression on him. He described his struggle in Paris and how, being a traveler, he knew he would not stay long in the city and that he preferred to live in the country. He also firmly denied his affiliation with the Impressionists, stating that he was not part of their group. This is true— he was never an Impressionist, acting as a passive observer of both “sides” while he stayed in

Paris and engaging with their artistic ideas.

29 Van Gogh to Horace Mann Livens (Paris, letter 569), September and October 1886. Page 17

His interaction with the avant-garde continued after leaving Paris with infamous painter,

Paul Gauguin, whom furthers van Gogh’s artistic education by introducing him to modernist styles. Gauguin represents the typical avant-garde artist who promoted his own originality and who looked down on van Gogh for continuing to be stuck in the past by making art from nature rather than from imagination. Gauguin can also be identified as the culprit for the creation and perpetuation of van Gogh’s persona as a mentally unstable artist. Gauguin had witnessed the first of van Gogh’s several mental breakdowns, now known as the “ear incident.” From Gauguin’s side of the story, van Gogh attempted to attack him but ended up cutting off part of his own ear.

Most likely this story made its way to Paris where Gauguin told tales of his time in Arles, using it as an opportunity to publicize his own work. Upon hearing about van Gogh’s death, Gauguin’s reaction lacked sentiment: “However sad one is at this death, I do not really lament it, because I foresaw it and I knew the suffering of that poor boy, battling his madness.”30 Although van Gogh never really achieved the friendship he wanted with Gauguin, he adapted some of Gauguin’s modern notions about art that took him away from his traditional self-training.

Van Gogh’s admiration for Gauguin manifests itself in his art, which attempts to incorporate simplified modern styles and which adopts the principles of working for the imagination rather than nature. In February 1888, van Gogh traveled to Arles and settled into the

Yellow House, which he began converting into a studio that he could share with another artist, intending that second artist to be Gauguin. Van Gogh held great esteem for Gauguin and that comes across in his letters to the artist, which are markedly more reserved in comparison to his less self-conscious letters to friends and relatives. An example of Gauguin’s letters to Vincent is

30 and Maurice Malingue. Paul Gauguin: Letters to his Wife and Friends. Cleveland: World Publishing Co. (1949): 200. Page 18 one where he petitions Vincent to put in a good word for him with Theo about his paintings in the hopes of receiving some money: “I don’t want to put pressure on your brother, but a brief word from you on this subject would set my mind as rest, or at least enable me to hold on. My

God, how terrible these money matters are for an artist!”31 It seems like Gauguin took advantage of van Gogh and his friendly nature, especially his hospitality while staying with him in Arles.

Gauguin’s other letters give van Gogh artistic advice and criticism of his work, while Van Gogh’s letters are full of genuine interest: “My dearest friend Gauguin, I’m taking advantage of my first trip out of the hospital to write you a few most sincere and profound words of friendship. I have thought of you a great deal in the hospital.”32 Their correspondence began in March 1888 and ended June 1890, continuing on even following their tumultuous relationship when they lived together for about two months (October through December). Van Gogh displayed excitement about having company and artistic inspiration, while Gauguin was passive, if not bored, with the idea of living with van Gogh. Gauguin’s assertion of superiority over van Gogh manifests itself in how van Gogh’s artistic technique changed during their time working together. Because van

Gogh thought highly of Gauguin, he wanted to emulate him and chose to do so by making repetitions of Gauguin’s paintings.

Van Gogh’s repetitions of Madame Marie Ginoux, titled L’Arlésienne, exemplify the shifts inspired by Gauguin and illustrate the two artists’ differences in perspective within the broad nature of Post-Impressionism: Gauguin was interested in pioneering new styles of art while van Gogh was more interested in blending ideas from the past. Van Gogh painted the first two repetitions of Madame Ginoux, the owner’s wife of the café in Arles, in November and

31 Gauguin to Vincent Van Gogh (Pont-Aven, letter 581), February 29, 1888.

32 Van Gogh to Gauguin (Arles, letter 730), January 4, 1889. Page 19

December of 1888 while Gauguin was still living with him. The earlier version completed in

November, owned by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris [figure 19], shows Ginoux sitting at a wooden table, her body angling towards the left side of the canvas, staring off into space with her head propped up by her arm and her hand resting on her cheek. Van Gogh shows her in traditional

Arlésien costume, with her gloves and cane placed on the table in front of her. The brushstrokes are sketchy and the paint application is thin, especially in Ginoux’s white collar and in the faded yellow background. The paint application also looks quick and painted wet-on-wet like a lot of his painted “sketches,” which is seen in the large splotch of yellowish paint on Ginoux’s hand that rests against her face.

The second version [figure 20] done a month later shows Ginoux sitting at the table again in the same exact composition, but the changes demonstrate Gauguin’s influence through van

Gogh’s idealization of Ginoux and his change in paints. The notable differences between this and the d’Orsay repetition are the greater definition added to Ginoux’s face, hair, and costume, as well as the removal of her gloves and cane that are replaced with two books, one closed and off to the side, the other open in front of Ginoux, implying that she is reading even though she still stares up and out of the left side of the canvas. The d’Orsay repetition is more defined, done with smaller fine-tuned brushstrokes, and he also experiments with new pigments. The addition of lead white when van Gogh traditionally used zinc white may have been utilized by Gauguin’s encouragement, who believed that van Gogh needed a bolder and darker look to his paintings.33

Although the look of van Gogh’s work shifted, his personal idea and portrayal of Ginoux strengthened in his second repetition: Gauguin’s work represents the shift away from

33 Rathbone, 93. Page 20 representational art, and, even though his work is still largely representational, he distorts what he saw in nature and he wanted van Gogh to do the same. Van Gogh does change what he sees by switching Ginoux’s props, using his imagination to transform Ginoux into what he believed to be the ideal Arles woman.

Gauguin’s effect on van Gogh shows in how van Gogh portrays idealized people, which is what Gauguin did to the Britons prior to visiting Arles. As mentioned earlier, to van Gogh,

Arles represented a utopian place filled with friendly and spiritually-pure country folk. In popular culture at that time, there existed myths about the beauty of the women in Arles, and this piqued van Gogh’s curiosity to capture it. As he usually did, he most likely had difficulties finding willing sitters, especially youthful beauties, so he settled for the café owner’s wife who was not as young as he would have liked, and possibly not as beautiful. Van Gogh makes Ginoux into his perfected Arlésienne (hence the way he titled these works), a beautiful woman who wears the characteristic hat, shawl, long dress, gloves, and choker necklace of Arles tradition.

This traditional garb, which was outdated even in van Gogh’s time, demonstrates his idealization of the Arlésienne, which, for this particular work, may originate from Gauguin’s similar portrayal of the people in Brittany. Art historians Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton demonstrated in their article about Gauguin’s stay in Brittany how fabricated his representation of the region was, attaching otherness to their culture by manipulating what he saw, removing traces of modern technology, and presenting his art as realistic observation, as in his painting Four Breton Women

[figure 21], which shows four women in traditional clothing and white caps in a landscape.34 As

Orton and Pollock have proven, this painting is a distortion of reality because, in fact, the Breton

34 Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton, “Les Donnés bretonnantes: la prairie de la représentation,” Art History 3, no. 3 (September 1980): 314-344. Page 21 people depicted were consciously dressing up to create a tourist attraction as a possible source of income for their agricultural community. This instance illustrates another problem in avant-garde circles of misrepresenting the “other” and the “primitive,” of which van Gogh is not exempt in his characterization of the people of Arles.

In using Gauguin’s own portrait of Ginoux as a comparison, one can see the extent to which van Gogh idealized her figure. There is evidence from van Gogh’s letters, the props used that van Gogh, and the fact Gauguin worked side by side in the same sitting with Ginoux.

Gauguin’s drawing of Ginoux [figure 22] manifests itself in his painting The Night Café [figure

23], which places the woman in a dark and smoky café surrounded by men and women Gauguin saw in brothels (which greatly displeased van Gogh).35 Ginoux looks older and less alert than in van Gogh’s representation; Gauguin gives her a larger nose, smaller less defined lips, larger ears, and thicker eyebrows, making it difficult to tell whether it is their stylistic differences or van

Gogh’s idealization of Ginoux that accounts for her varied appearance. Gauguin’s significant change of Ginoux’s surroundings demonstrates his value of the imagination, which he accused van Gogh of lacking: van Gogh wrote that during his experience working with Gauguin that he

“strongly advises me to work often from pure imagination.”36 It seems that van Gogh did take

Gauguin’s advice because in the second repetition but still in a traditional vein: van Gogh presents a romanticized version of Ginoux by adding books, creating an intellectual figure that the artist viewed as ideal.37 Van Gogh stayed in the realm of idealization, even moving back to copying in his repetitions of Gauguin’s drawing of Ginoux [figure 22]. These two repetitions of

35 Rathbone, 94.

36 Rathbone, 156.

37 Rathbone, 96. Page 22

Gauguin’s drawing, titled L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux) [figures 24-25], were painted in

February 1890, two years after his companionship with Gauguin, and they reiterate his esteem for Gauguin with his choice to repeat a work made by him. He kept the features Gauguin gave

Ginoux, despite how he portrayed them in his earlier paintings, using this as an opportunity to be like Gauguin and embrace a simplified, abstract style. One interesting aspect of those repetitions is that he still portrays Ginoux with several books, indicating his retention of values in Ginoux’s portrait that were different, more sensitive than Gauguin’s perception of her.

After learning about modernist techniques from Gauguin and the other artists he spent time with in Paris, van Gogh returned to the practice of copying and to traditional subjects. Van

Gogh’s love for Millet and the Barbizon school of painters stayed intact and his attitude towards repetition did not change, as seen in his works from his period following his mental breakdowns.

It could be that the artist was returning to what he thought was safe and comfortable after the trauma of the incident with Gauguin, or that he felt compelled to continue in his repetitions of

Millet, mimicking him in the hopes of achieving the same artistic success. In comparing two sets of repetitions, one early and one later series, it becomes evident that van Gogh changed yet stayed the same, imitating Old Masters until the end of his career, and establishing the complexities within his technique. The first set of repetitions comes from van Gogh’s drawings from his observations of peasant workers while he lived in the Hague, Netherlands. Most of his drawings of people and they are often repeated, asserting his careful study of the human figure, but also showing is interest in the prints he collected. The two versions of Sower, 1881 [figures

15-16], the first in charcoal and the second in pencil, follow the pattern of his copy of Millet’s work also from 1881 [figure 17]. These variations of the sower figure demonstrate van Gogh’s Page 23 interest in the subject as inspired by Millet. He turns the figure in all of his drawings, first a copy of Millet’s three-quarters view, and then the charcoal drawing profile view, the figure twisting behind him to distribute his seeds, and the pencil drawing portrays the sower straight forward, coming towards the viewer. The former shows just the figure while the latter has a small drawn frame and sets the figure in a roughly-drawn landscape setting. These drawings read as studies for paintings, not as finished works. In the early 1880s, van Gogh used his figure drawings as studies and his repetitions were meant as a teaching tools for the exploration of themes and to further his artistic technique.

Ten years later, van Gogh was still making repetitions of the sower with his painting

Wheat Field with Reaper [figure 17], completed in 1890, shortly before his death, demonstrating the importance of the subject and the process of repetition to the artist. His later approach masterfully assimilates his influences by Millet and what he learned in Paris into his own painting. In 1889, he wrote to Theo about his inspiration on the sower and reaper theme:

I then saw in this reaper- a vague figure struggling like a devil in the full heat of the day to reach the end of his toil- I then saw the image of death in it, in this sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped. So it you like it’s the opposite of that Sower I tried before... however I’m not letting go, and I’m trying again on a new canvas.38

Wheat Field with Reaper [figure 17] illustrates van Gogh’s idea of a reaper struggling under the hot sun. The painting depicts a small figure bent over in the middle of the expansive , wearing a large straw hat and wielding a small scythe. The figure is surrounded by rows of large wheat stacks that leads the eye back to a distant town and up towards a blue, partly cloudy sky.

Van Gogh’s characteristic wavy visible brushstrokes cover the canvas with a thick impasto. At this point, the artist is comfortable working in his own style of Post-Impressionism, transforming

38 Van Gogh to Theo (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, letter 800), September 5-6, 1889. Page 24 the character from Millet’s painting [figure 10] into van Gogh’s toiling reaper, placing him into the vast wheat fields of Saint-Rémy.

This transformation of his technique is evident in looking at his earlier and later repetitions of Millet: his earlier versions illustrate the way he taught himself academic principles, while his later works demonstrate a synthesis of academic tradition mixed with avant-garde ideas of abstraction and imagination. For example, in keeping with the sower/reaper motif, van Gogh painted a version of Millet’s The Sower, titled The Sower (after Millet) [figure 18] again in 1889.

But this time, although he copied the composition and position of the figure, he confidently executed his own version in his style, even alerting the viewer that he is copying Millet through the way he titles the work. He replaces Millet’s dramatic blended shading with short flowing lines of color filling the canvas from the sky to the ground to the sower’s shirt. He also changes the color scheme from Millet’s dark brown tones to a bright yellow and blue palette. These repetitions and variations demonstrate the complexities behind van Gogh’s production.

Van Gogh was pushed and pulled in different directions that challenged his conception of the ideal and what art should be, but he retained those beliefs despite Gauguin’s bullying and despite the ideas he was exposed to while living in Paris. He learned that if he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist at the turn of the century, he had to avoid copying, which is why he adopts motifs from other artists (especially Millet) and creates an adaptation in his own style instead of purely copying. Those results are found in his later versions of The Sower [figure 18] and in his repetitions of Gauguin’s drawing [figures 24-25] where van Gogh engages multiple sources, transforming them through repetition. Robinson characterizes van Gogh’s evolution of repetition as something that changed “over time from a practical convenience into an inherently, creative, Page 25

‘modernist’ activity.”39 For an artist whose career only spanned a decade, he had the capacity to change and adapt to his surroundings remarkably well.40

In a discussion regarding the theories of copying and repetition, the concept of the original cannot be overlooked. What does it mean for an artwork to be original? Can original art exist? Does van Gogh’s production style make his repetitions any less original? In September of

1889, less than a year before to his death, van Gogh wrote to Theo:

While I clearly sense the value and originality and superiority of Delacroix, of Millet, for example, then I make a point of telling myself, yes I am something, I can do something. But I must have a basis in these artists, and then produce the little I’m capable of in the same direction.41

Van Gogh struggled to see his art as original even until his death, and he died probably thinking that he had failed as an artist in comparison to the great Millet and Delacroix. Defining originality presents a great difficulty, and, as Shiff notes, the definition of original has been disputed even since the eighteenth-century.42 In grappling with the definition of “original,” Shiff writes “It seems, then, that one characteristic of the classic artist is that he serves as the model, both the original and the ‘copy’ for others, and that others imitate not his individuality, but his technical system.”43 Although Ernest Chesneau, a nineteenth-century critic, disagrees with Shiff, stating that “true originality escapes imitation,” and that a classic artist alludes copying because of his very distinct technique that would be immediately recognized by the audience if another

39 Robinson, “On the Origins,” 37.

40 Van Gogh did not decide to officially become an artist until August 1880 and he passes away in 1890, thus marking only 10 years of prolific work. See Van Gogh to Theo (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, letter 801), September 10, 1889.

41 Van Gogh to Theo (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, letter 801), September 10, 1889.

42 Shiff, 39.

43 Shiff, 36. Page 26 artist was to use that style.44 Regardless, Chesneau and Shiff both agree that originality can exist by their definition.

One major flaw in the Phillips Collection catalogue is that the text dedicates an exorbitant amount of time to identifying the first or the “original” painting in each of van Gogh’s series.

Even in a catalogue that explores the theme of repetition, the authors assign a higher value to the

“original” paintings opposed to seeing each repetition as a work that can stand on its own. The reason why the original has become highly valued is touched upon in Walter Benjamin’s essay,

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” where he asks the politically- motivated question: why do we invest artworks with an aura and what would happen if we no longer did so? He argues that photography reduces an artwork to the status of a copy, thus allowing everyone to appropriate artworks to their own ends.45 The value of art becomes weakened because it can be accessed anywhere: imitations are on the computer, on posters, umbrellas, t-shirts, iPhones, television, and in photographs, which makes “the quality of its presence... depreciated.”46 Appropriation of artworks, without using technology, is similar to what van Gogh was doing in the nineteenth century. Art historian Rosalind Krauss agrees with

Benjamin when she writes in her book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist

Myths:

The theme of originality, encompassing as it does the notions of authenticity, originals, and origins, is the shared discursive practice of the museum, the historian, and the maker

44 Shiff, 53.

45 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” [1936] (1936). Eds. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004: 63-70.

46 Benjamin, 65. Page 27

of art. And throughout the nineteenth-century all of these institutions were concerted, together, to find the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original.47

The existence of reproductions causes us to question and to seek the original, bringing an even more heightened attention to it. The original is treated like a venerated enterprise by museums and collectors, and the Phillips Collection catalogue validates that theory by focusing on showing the value of finding the original and through the verification of each painting’s authorship.

In Krauss’s discussion of the original, she uses Rodin and his mechanical reproductions of his sculptures as an example for how the avant-garde simultaneously used originality and copying. She looks at the two terms “originality” and “repetition” and how they “seem bound together in a kind of aesthetic economy, interdependent and mutually sustaining, although the one- originality- is a valorized term and the other- repetition or copy... is discredited.”48

Although copying was a discredited practice, the avant-garde heavily relied on it, practically reclaiming it from the Academy and transforming it into a modernist practice and not an academic one. Krauss also says that “Rodin courted the notion of himself as form giver, creator, crucible of originality,” similarly to the way the many of the avant-garde artists publicly presented themselves in their claim to originality though the self as origin.49

An aspect of copying that many artists faced and still face today is the inevitability of copying through the depiction of nature. Everything builds upon one another, having been copied from nature or taken from another artist. Even though the Impressionists thought of themselves as radical, their artistic processes still carry influences from traditional academic painting by

47 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985: 162.

48 Krauss, 160.

49 Krauss, 156-157. Page 28 participating in the ritual of copying. The writer and art critic, Emile Zola, reported Manet saying, “I can do nothing without nature. I do not know how to invent. As long as I wanted to paint according to the instruction I received, I produced nothing of merit.”50 Despite Manet’s statement in lament to the fixed nature of copying, Zola defends the originality of the

Impressionists by stating that he viewed copying as an avenue to see through an artist’s

“temperament,” which was unique to each artist. Zola and Manet illustrate the perplexing tension between those who accepted and those who denied the factors of copying in Impressionists work.51 Shiff discusses what he deems the “anxiety of anticipation,” which refers to how artists and viewers “grow anxious over the fact that all people and all things are like one another: the emulative imitation.”52 The avant-garde knew that their works masqueraded under the banner of originality, selling their “repetitions while maintaining the fiction of their uniqueness,” but few wanted to admit their sources of inspiration that would have been too “academic” for approval within the avant-garde, and that particularly applies to Gauguin, who wanted viewers to believe that he strictly worked from the imagination.53 Unlike Gauguin, van Gogh held no fear in exhibiting the likenesses of previous artists, but instead he strove for that likeness, looking to perfect his repetitions. It seems that one is forced to choose sides in this argument between the acceptance or rejection of copying and repetition, and the choice manifests itself in ultimately choosing whether all art is original or whether all art cyclically copies nature and preexisting works.

50 Shiff, 42.

51 Shiff, 44.

52 Shiff, 54.

53 Mainardi, 146. Page 29

The issue of copying still prevalent in today’s art world, especially with the trend of appropriating other artists’ works, and the media that has only continued to produce copies of art since Benjamin wrote his essay in 1936. Despite the avant-garde’s resistance to copying and repetition (in word but not deed), van Gogh firmly adopted those ideas that show his advanced state of thinking. Through his repetitions, van Gogh challenged his viewers to contemplate what originality meant. Van Gogh’s unique acceptance of repetition and copying demonstrates how his artistic process merged with principles of avant-garde painting and with academic principles, creating repetitions as a hybrid of the two.

Ingres once said, “One can’t make something out of nothing,” which means that Ingres and van Gogh join the same side in the event of self-consciousness, not denying their participation in recycling art or copying, unlike the Parisian avant-garde who put on airs of superiority when they were only deceiving themselves in rejecting notions of copying.54 Van

Gogh did not parade under the masks of originality, like his contemporaries, he accepted the fact that he made copies and repetitions. He also enjoyed working in a studio in a controlled environment, rather than pretending to only work en plein air or from spontaneity, like the

Impressionists. Unlike the Phillips Collection believes, I think it is trivial to put merit in which repetition represents the “original” because all of van Gogh’s paintings should be viewed as a finished work, each one marking his evolution of style which carries equal merit to his earliest, latest, and premier work in a series. His unique merging of academic tradition and avant-garde practices demonstrates his uniqueness, and, dare I say, his originality among the Post-

Impressionists.

54 Mainardi, 138. Page 30

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). Eds. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004: 63-70.

Cornelia Homburg, “Affirming Modernity: Van Gogh’s Arlésienne,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 21, no.3 (1992): 127.

Gauguin, Paul and Maurice Malingue. Paul Gauguin: Letters to his Wife and Friends. Cleveland: World Publishing Co.: 1949.

Gauguin to Vincent Van Gogh (Pont-Aven, letter 581), February 29, 1888.

Herbert, Robert. “Impressionism, Originality, and Laissez-Faire.” Ed. Mary Tompkins Lewis, Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 23-29, 148-161.

Kodēra, Tsukasa. Christianity Versus Nature: A Study of the Thematics in van Gogh's Oeuvre. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1988.

Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985.

Mainardi, Patricia. “Copies, Variations, Replicas: Nineteenth-Century Studio Practice” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 15 no.2 (1991): 123-147.

Pollock, Griselda and Fred Orton. “Les Donnés bretonnantes: la prairie de la représentation,” Art History 3, no. 3 (September 1980): 314-344.

Rathbone, Eliza E. Van Gogh: Repetitions. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.

Robinson, William H. “The Artist Versus the Legend: Repetitions and Madness.” Van Gogh: Repetitions. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013: 8-12.

Robinson, William H. “On the Origins and Evolution of van Gogh’s Repetitions.” Van Gogh: Repetitions. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013: 13-37. Page 31

Shiff, Richard. “The Original, the Imitation, the Copy, and the Spontaneous Classic: Theory and Painting in Nineteenth-Century France” Yale French Studies, No.66, The Anxiety of Anticipation (1984): 27-54.

Steele, Marcia and Elizabeth Steele, “Methods for Making Repetitions.” Van Gogh: Repetitions. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013: 168-172.

Tucker, John. “Monet and the Challenges to Impressionism in the 1880s.” Ed. Mary Tompkins Lewis, Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 227-249.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. http://vangoghletters.org (accessed April 16, 2014).

Van Gogh to Gauguin (Arles, letter 730), January 4, 1889.

Van Gogh to Horace Mann Livens (Paris, letter 569), September and October 1886.

Van Gogh to Theo (Cuesmes, letter 157), September 7, 1880.

Van Gogh to Theo (Arles, letter 594), April 9, 1888.

Van Gogh to Theo (Arles, letter 595), April 11, 1888.

Van Gogh to Theo (Arles, letter 608), May 10, 1888.

Van Gogh to Theo (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, letter 800), September 5-6, 1889.

Van Gogh to Theo (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, letter 801), September 10, 1889. Page 32

Figures (figures are by van Gogh unless otherwise noted)

Figure 1- Gustav Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers, 1875, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Figure 2- Le Moulin de la Galette, October 1886, oil on canvas, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. Page 33

Figure 3- Le Moulin de la Galette, October 1886, oil on canvas, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Page 34

Figure 4- The Courtesan (after Eisen), 1887, oil on canvas, , Amsterdam. Page 35

Figure 5- Tracing of the Courtesan Figure, 1887, pencil on paper.

Figure 6- Pink Peach Trees, 1888, oil on canvas, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. Page 36

Figure 7- The Pink Peach Tree, 1888, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

1241 VISUAL RESOURCES Figure 8- Eugéne Delacroix, Medea, 1838, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Downloaded by [American University Library] at 07:18 29 March 2014

Figure 1. EugPne Delacroix, Medea, 1838. 260 x 165cn1.Musie des beaux-arts, Lille. (Courtesy of the Agence photographique de la RMN, Paris) Page 37

Copies, Variations, Replicasll25 Figure 9- Eugéne Delacroix, Medea, 1862, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Pairs. Downloaded by [American University Library] at 07:18 29 March 2014

Figure 2. Eugine Delacroix, Medea, 1862. 1225 x 845cm. Muske du Louvre, Paris. (Courtesy ofthe Agence photographiqueFigure de 10- la RMN, JeanParis) François Millet, The Sower, 1850, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Page 38

Figure 11- The Sower (after Millet), April 1881, pencil, pen and brush in brown ink, gray and green watercolor, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Page 39

Figure 12- Claude Monet, The Pyramids at Port-Coton, 1886, oil on canvas.

Figure 13- Claude Monet, The Pyramids at Port-Coton, 1886, oil on canvas. Page 40

Figure 14- Claude Monet, The Pyramids at Port-Coton, 1886, oil on canvas.

Figure 15- Sower, 1881, charcoal, pencil, chalk on paper, Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, Netherlands. Page 41

Figure 16- Sower, 1881, pencil on paper, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Figure 17- Wheat Field with Reaper, Auvers, July 1890, oil on canvas, Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio. Page 42

Figure 18- The Sower (after Millet), 1889, oil on canvas, private collection. Page 43

Figure 19- L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux), November 1888, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Page 44

Figure 20- L’Arlésienne (Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux), December 1888, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Page 45

Figure 21- Paul Gauguin, Four Breton Women, 1886, oil on canvas, Neue Pinakothek Museum, Munich.

Figure 22- Paul Gauguin, L’Alésienne (Marie Ginoux), November 1888, chalk and charcoal on paper, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Page 46

Figure 23- Paul Gauguin, The Night Café, November 1888, oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow. Page 47

Figure 24- L’Arlésienne (Marie Ginoux), February 1890, oil on canvas, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome. Page 48

Figure 25- L’Arlésienne (Marie Ginoux), February 1890, oil on canvas, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.