Van gogh why he painted

In addition to two self-portraits with his bandaged ear, he produced this still life with onions. He painted a series of personal items, including his pipe and tobacco. He travelled to Arles the moment he heard from Gauguin that Vincent had wounded himself. It is thanks to these letters that we know how Theo felt during this period:.

Van Gogh had been a good friend of Joseph Roulin since the summer and the postman was a great support for Vincent in Arles. I received sad news today. Vincent is gravely ill. I don't know what's wrong, but I shall have to go there as my presence is required. They were afraid of the painter and wanted him out of the Yellow House. Thirty local residents signed a petition to have Vincent committed to an asylum. He concluded from their statements that Vincent was indeed suffering from insanity and posed a danger to those around him, and therefore might have to be committed to an asylum.

Vincent realized in April that he could not risk living alone any more for the time being. He would eventually spend a year there. Vincent arrived at the asylum on 8 May , accompanied by the Reverend Salles. Dr Peyron determined that Van Gogh was suffering from a form of epilepsy, accompanied by acute insanity and hallucinations.

The rhythm and structure at the asylum initially brought Vincent some respite. He was allowed to set up one of the rooms as a studio and he could also work outside the institution when he felt well enough. Painting was the best remedy against his illness, but he was unable to work during his attacks.

Vincent found this idleness unbearable. He worked there frequently, making the most beautiful drawings and paintings. Some of these show the garden as a whole, while others are close-ups of flowers, plants and all manner of insects he found there. It will, I hope, suffice to say that I feel decidedly incapable of starting to take a new studio again and living there alone, here in Arles or elsewhere — for the moment not possible. The first period in the asylum went well. Vincent felt good and after a while he was allowed to work outside the asylum.

One day, however, he felt a new attack coming on while he was painting a quarry. It would be followed by further crises. Despite his diagnosis, Van Gogh received very little treatment as such, merely taking hot and cold baths twice a week. The asylum had special bathrooms for patients. Taking alternating hot and cold baths was a standard treatment for mentally ill people at the time.

All the same, he went on to make several portraits of other inmates. Vincent was unable to work for several weeks. After a while, he cautiously began again. Vincent might have identified with the recently deceased Christ. This new crisis, my dear brother, came upon me in the fields, and when I was in the middle of painting on a windy day. The return of his illness made Vincent extremely uncertain and sad, and he lost hope that he would ever recover.

He felt trapped at the asylum and wanted to leave as soon as possible. Unusually, Van Gogh was able and permitted to work during his final crisis. The little sketches are endless variations of the same theme, in a powerful, but nervous style. They seem to reflect something of his disquiet.

Van Gogh painted this resurrection of Lazarus after a print of a work by Rembrandt. He finished it shortly before leaving the institution for Auvers. Was it the subject that appealed to him? The long-anticipated departure from the asylum might have felt like a fresh start for him as well. Since his death, he has become one of the most famous painters in the world.

The following excerpts are from letters that Van Gogh wrote expressing how he evolved as a painter. Don't you think I am right to consider it so? But he was persistent. If you became a painter, one of the things that would surprise you is that painting and everything connected with it is quite hard work in physical terms.

Leaving aside the mental exertion, the hard thought, it demands considerable physical effort, and that day after day. Van Gogh firmly believed that to be a great painter you had to first master drawing before adding color. The pipe and tobacco he found steadying.

A letter from his brother Theo. A teapot. And one more thing: a large, emptied bottle of absinthe. Has he drunk the absinthe since leaving hospital? Does its emptiness represent a promise to swear off the stuff from now on? The first thing to be said about this painting is that it is revolutionary.

It is a new kind of art. Van Gogh was its originator. In the months after this mostly self-taught Dutch artist in his mid 30s arrived in Arles in February he invented a new kind of art that would come to be called expressionism. It has been decades now since radical psychiatrists such as RD Laing celebrated mental illness as a sane response to an insane society. His belief in the creativity of mental illness was clearly inspired by expressionism and its cult of madness that goes back to Van Gogh himself.

Its new exhibition is part of a longstanding struggle to free his paintings from such melodramatic views. His real last canvas is on display: it is a tangled and dreamlike study of tree roots. The jagged strokes, expressive unreal colours — the tree roots are blue — and empty areas of canvas are just as suggestive as those menacing crows.

He left this painting unfinished when he killed himself. It even has a drawing of him on his deathbed. His last letter, which Theo found in his pocket, has stains on it which forensic scientists have not yet been able to prove or disprove are blood.

What it shows is perfectly accurate on its own terms. Van Gogh entered the realm of doctors and asylums after he removed his ear on 23 December That upsetting story is told with great clarity. Here you can see not only his moving portrait of Dr Felix Rey who saved his life after his horrific act of self-harm but the petition signed by many of his neighbours in Arles to have this strange, scary, foreign artist locked up. No one knows to this day what precisely his illness was: all the rival theories, from epilepsy to syphilis to schizophrenia, are explored in the exhibition.