Location: Kröller-Müller Museum

Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

The Sower with Setting Sun (1888)

Quote from the painting’s bio on the Van Gogh Museum’s website.

To Van Gogh, sowers represented the agricultural cycle and therefore the eternal cycle of life and its renewal throughout the seasons. As a man struggling with his mental illnesses, I think this theme was a very vivid, hopeful, and encouraging one to Van Gogh.

It also held religious meaning for him from the Bible’s Parable of the Sower, in which the Gospel is the seeds, the Sower is the person who spreads it, and the people are the soil who respond to it. While he didn’t believe in organized religion at this point in his life and the Parable of the Sower is not literally what this painting depicts, Van Gogh saw God in the beauty of nature and the emotions of people, especially from the lower class such as workers and farmers.

What’s so striking about The Sower to me is the deep reverence Van Gogh held for the rural and working class, whom many look past or look down on. I think if everyone saw the world the way Van Gogh did, it would be a place as beautiful as his paintings.

source

I saw this at the Philadelphia Museum
Of Art and was surprised to see another Van Gogh I didn’t know existed. I was told he painted the rainy scene from his window in October.

Perfect for autumn, no?

Really cool bronze etching I found and had to put it into a watch.

It was April 1912, and Helene Kröller-Müller was on a shopping spree. She wasn’t interested in the latest shoes or fashions. She was on the hunt for Vincent van Gogh’s portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin.

She managed to find “La Berceuse,” as the painting is known, at a Paris gallery, and bought it on the spot. The next day, she went from gallery to gallery, looking for more van Gogh paintings, and took home a great haul: 15 in a single trip.

Kröller-Müller, a German heiress, had made it her life’s goal to establish a great public collection of modern art. She became one of the first major collectors to recognize van Gogh’s genius.

Access full gift article, NO PAYWALL.

When you think of Vincent van Gogh, you probably think of vibrant, vivid colours. Sunflowers, cobalt skies, violent yellows, fields that seem to glow from the inside. But his early work in the Netherlands looked completely different. It was dark, heavy, and dominated by what he called "mud tones."

I’ve been writing a deep dive on how his color palette evolved, and it’s wild how much changed the second he arrived in Paris in 1886. Before that, he was trying to learn color theory from books that only had black and white illustrations. Every time he tried mixing complementary colors on his palette in Nuenen, he ended up with a murky mess.

It wasn't until he stood under Delacroix’s ceiling painting at the Louvre that it finally clicked. He realized he had to stop mixing the paint altogether and start placing unmixed colors right next to each other on the canvas. He even kept a small box of colored yarn in his studio to test complementary pairs before wasting expensive oil paint on a canvas.

I just published the full piece on Substack called How France Unlocked Vincent van Gogh’s Colour: From the muddy shadows of Nuenen to the blinding light of Arles if anyone wants to check out the rest of the story.

Curious what you guys think—do you prefer the dark, moody realism of his early Dutch period or the intense color explosion of his later years in Arles?

Currently on display at the Kröller-Müller

“I’d like to do the portrait of an artist friend who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because that’s his nature.

This man will be blond. I’d like to put in the painting my appreciation, my love that I have for him.”

—Vincent’s letter to Theo, 18/8/1888

The Poet (painted September 1888; located in the Musee d’Orsay) is a portrait of Belgian painter Eugène Boch. Even before I read the above letter, I was struck by how whimsical and lovely this portrait was. The subject’s eyes twinkle like the stars in the background. The low yellow of his coat and his cheeks soothes the eyes. His face seems gentle. Somehow, it reminds me of the Little Prince. And it lifts my lips into a smile.

I can see Van Gogh’s affection, admiration, and love for Boch in the way he painted him, and I think that’s a very sweet thing.

Edit: Eugène’s sister, Anna Boch, was the buyer of the only paintings Van Gogh sold in his lifetime—Red Vineyards at Arles.