What van Gogh Knew:
An Analysis of the Dutch Master’s Most Personal Works

Marina Lee

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde

When people think of van Gogh, they see the side of him that most of us are familiar with—the stereotype of the troubled genius.  He cut his ear off in a fit of rage, painted in increasingly fanciful and erratic patterns and ultimately died by his own hand.  Most viewers, however, miss the light that brings out the shadow.  The truth is, van Gogh mastered his turbulent emotions by way of creating an idealized inner world in his art, a world that represented the hopeful, bright ultimate haven he ceaselessly strove to reach.  He was the same person who was hounded by his demons day and night, yet seeking the ultimate respite from those demons in the form of immersion in the divinity of nature.  To him, nature, especially in the skies and clouds, was a wondrous place of infinite color and light in ever-changing patterns.  Not only is there evidence in Starry Night, but also his numerous renditions of olive and cypress trees with clouds in other paintings.  With the uncertainty and numerous disappointments in his life, van Gogh instinctively understood that nature was loyal and unchanging enough to support his tortured mind.  Apart from his self-portraits, most of his other renowned works all place nature in the center, with humans playing a marginal or even nonexistent role.  For him, including humans in a portrait would compromise our rapt contemplation of nature deeply, as we would inevitably focus on the human subjects and be drawn away from the sublime heaven he longed to attain.[1]  Ultimately, he would reject the depiction of humans in his paintings as hindering the consolation the natural artworks would bring.  Even in his self-portraits, van Gogh sought to depict his inner emotional and mental states, and eschewed any overt signs of self-glorification.  The key to his artwork is how he captures the psychological struggle and visualizes it.  Without that flickering spark of hope in his heart, he could not possibly have realized his negative mental states and emotions in such colorful definition.

For his entire life, due to his unique personality, described as “thoughtful and serious” by art history author David Sweetman,[2] van Gogh went through an unending series of rejections and setbacks.  Even with a cursory reading of his biography, one can see that he failed on all fronts for his endeavors whether in family dynamics, professional pursuits (religious positions or artistic aspirations), romantic relationships (being rejected outright or failing due to lack of economic resources), and friendship developments (especially seen with Anton Mauve and Paul Gauguin).  For van Gogh, painting helped him ward off the feeling that the world was forcing him toward a destiny he did not wish for.  Two major fears contributed to that sense of fatalism: that his desires and impulses would overcome and destroy him, and that he would be a lonely outcast his entire life.[3]  His paintings were the results of his attempts to stave off such feelings, and each time the feelings became more intense, so did his experimentation with various color combinations and patterns.[4]  In this article, I will discuss three of his self-portraits and Starry Night.

In his self-portraits, namely the three which show the course of his mental condition and its effects on him (Self Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe and Self Portrait which he did shortly before his death), all of them have a dynamic—some would say post-Impressionist—touch to them.  He accomplishes this by way of the constantly-flowing patterns, especially in the background of the last.  One of van Gogh’s most prominent artistic skills is capturing motion in his self-portraits, making the image permanent without taking away from the vitality.  These self-portraits are the most famous artworks in which he depicted a human subject.  For him, human subjects were suited to portraiture rather than landscape painting, and he drew a clear line between the two.  van Gogh created many self-portraits, more than one almost every year of his artistic life.  He had two important reasons for focusing on self-portraits.  The first was that he was not fond of painting portraits of his family members, with whom he had difficult relations.  They, too, found his anxious energy unsettling and thus refused to pose for him.  The second reason was that van Gogh constantly struggled with his emotional turmoil and felt that the only way of coping would be to visualize them.[5]  He stated, “People say – and I’m quite willing to believe it – that it’s difficult to know oneself – but it’s not easy to paint oneself either.”[6]  One of the most striking features in all three self-portraits is so many brushstrokes, it is as if his face is somewhat “hairy” even where he does not have facial hair, such as his forehead and cheeks.  The “hair” of brushstrokes appears all over his visage.  As with a standard Impressionist, van Gogh breaks down how light falls on his face, emphasizing both the dark and bright areas.  This could be a symbol of the psychological subtext in the background, indicating how van Gogh’s emotional states changed dramatically.  He could be elated beyond measure one day, yet suicidally depressed the next.  This also leads to another standard Impressionist trait, that of movement.  The paintings all seem to be dynamic even though the artist is still at first glance, posing for his own portrait.  One can almost sense the nervous tension pulsing under the artist’s skin, at the ends of his synapses.  In a sense, van Gogh’s Post-Impressionism is closer to the later movement of Expressionism in just how visceral, how real it is, how close he seems to us by way of imparting his own heartbeat into every brushstroke.  It is thanks to his flexibility with paint application methods, ranging from the thick impasto we see most notably in his Sunflower series to the tiny, red-brown pinpoints that are scattered across the blue backdrop.[7]  Through his decision to focus on the smallest details in the creation of the larger image, the painting as a whole has a feeling of quiet but persistent energy.  Viewed from a distance, the concentric circle-like patterns surrounding the artist’s head look as if there is a sound wave realized on the canvas.

In comparison to the first self-portrait, the second, after he had cut his ear off and bandaged the wound, looks less dynamic, possibly from the artist’s frozen glance.  This could be an effect of his troubled mental state, as the selection of background color also matters here.  In the first self-portrait, we see him as the archetypal artist—brooding and restless with creative energy, but not troubled necessarily.  In the second painting, we see him in the wake of a major personal disaster.  This self-portrait shows a man trapped by his own fears and emotional struggle.  van Gogh was, by nature, a man who repressed his feelings when he quarreled with others, tending to harm himself rather than the adversary who had angered him.  His incident of cutting his ear off transpired after he had a bitter fight with Paul Gauguin, his housemate and fellow artist who had announced that he was leaving their shared apartment in Arles.[8]  The way the smoke from his pipe transparently blends into the background further emphasizes that the block-like, nearly abstract arrangement of background color could be another figment of van Gogh’s imagination, and thus is not real, as ambient as the smoke surrounding him.  The background in this painting is even more emotionally-charged, almost looking forward to abstract art with the bold, contrasting colors that directly contact each other with no softening of the boundary between them.  Even the dash-like brushstrokes which made up the previous painting have come into harsher relief, as if to emphasize the bristliness of the fur on his hat and the coarseness of his coat fibers.  Though the clothing may seem as if inanimate objects at first, van Gogh once again charges them with his inner restless anxiety.  He looks as if he is connected to his clothing and background by the way he positions them to surround his face in the painting.  Most viewers could conclude that van Gogh’s previously bright-hued works, which he had done during his trip to Arles in hopes of getting closer to nature and true artistry, were pushed over the brink toward a precipice of terror.  The artist was losing control of his surroundings and future, and thus his colors have become too bright and his lines too bold to be vibrant.

The last image, the self-portrait he did shortly before his death, also portrays the background as equally important a player as the subject in the foreground.  The swirls appear to be a visual realization of van Gogh’s dizziness, instability and ultimate breakdown brought on by his years of drinking, his struggle with syphilis and other abuses levied on his mind.  By this time, we can see that his face is much more sallow and gaunt than the earlier paintings, showing a physical being gradually deteriorating.  His hair has grown much thinner, too, as have the brushstrokes that go into portraying them.  This self-portrait shows a true visual struggle for dominance between the subject (the artist himself) and the background, which is shot through with representations of his inner mental state.  Van Gogh described the portrait to his brother Theo as follows: “I was thin and pale as a ghost…the head whitish with yellow hair, so it has a color effect.”[1]  With this sequence showing an increasingly painful life in mind, it is hardly surprising that he would envision death as a transient means to get to eternal rest and calm.  The Musée d’Orsay in Paris describes the painting as follows: “The figure’s rigidity contrasts with the flowing beard and hair, reflected and magnified in the hallucinogenic arabesques of the backdrop.”[2]  Though van Gogh still tries to stay firm and calm outwardly, as he is the subject of his own work, it is noticeable by now that he has paid much more attention to the detail of the background patterns.  The suggestion of the scenario is that he is trying to hold on to his sanity but is slowly being consumed by the swirling inner vortex of descent into madness.

Yet, in this apparently gloomy tale of the deterioration of an artistic and restlessly creative mind, van Gogh still seeks solace in his art.  He does not immediately turn to death as the only option to outrun his demons.  Time and again, he expressed in his letters to Theo (whom he confided his most personal feelings and beliefs in) that he believed throwing himself into his work would be the only way to avoid falling into immobilizing despair.  When he painted, he could experiment with colors and textures without fear of judgment.[1]  This is the explanation for Starry Night, the work that is the summation of van Gogh’s earlier attempts at expressing his true unique artistic style.

All three of the self-portraits foretell the artistic element that will become most important in Starry Night.  This element is the many dashes of color that make up the image.  The main difference is that in Starry Night, instead of pointing in all directions, they are lined up to form the impression of flowing continuity.  This time, the continuity is that of light itself rather than the color of light reflected on other objects.  As mentioned above, it seems as if once van Gogh has his mind on the stars, he can focus clearly on their light and paint only how he sees them, brilliant and all-illuminating.  The appearance of the dashes all going in the same direction suggests that they flow, as if light can flow like water.  He is very literally painting a river in the sky.  Like the first Impressionists, he makes the water dynamic, helping it move, but in a way very different from earlier artists like Renoir and Monet.  The French artists would blur the colors together, but van Gogh defines every single dot and line until they all blend into a feeling of traveling rays of light when the painting is viewed from a natural distance.  In some ways, Starry Night is Impressionism taken to the maximum, focusing solely on nature and very marginally on the human world beneath.  Previous Impressionists hoped to blend human forms with nature, but van Gogh completely chose to place almost no emphasis on the human world, instead focusing on the beauty and grandeur of the skies.  The only earthly entity that receives agency in this painting is the grand cypress tree, which itself seems to be enamored with—and reaching for—the stars.  There were many cypress trees growing around the hospital which van Gogh was admitted to following his incident of self-mutilation, and they had a double-edged meaning.  Cypresses were often seen as a symbol of death because of their prevalence in cemeteries, and yet they were considered synonymous with immortality and eternity owing to their evergreen leaves.

Several art historians have compared this work to its two predecessors, Café Terrace at Night and Starry Night Over the Rhone, both painted in 1888, the year before Starry Night.  Van Gogh would reject Starry Night Over the Rhone owing to its presence of human figures.  In this painting, van Gogh did not directly depict, but only suggested, human activity.  He did so by way of the ushed village at the bottom of the painting, almost invisible next to the glory of the stars.  Meyer Schapiro states that this painting may be obliquely related to the Biblical image (from Genesis 37:9–10) of a woman dressed in the sun, moon and stars.[2]  Van Gogh’s admittance to the hospital was a turning point in his life, as it granted him the space and location necessary to put his inner torture and hopes of relief from it into his art.  Apart from the pantheistic idea that God is in all of nature, van Gogh may have had in mind the specific Biblical story of Christ’s agony.  It was during that time that Christ’s emotional state was most like van Gogh’s—vulnerable and uncertain, fearful of what pain and suffering could befall him.  The idea of the angel who came from Heaven to strengthen Christ’s resolve in acceptance of his fate ties into van Gogh’s interpretation of nature, how he could use the sublimity of the stars he saw to come to terms with his impending tragic end.  The way van Gogh excludes humans from this painting, though, is another sign that he believed that nature transcended humanity in representing the sublime.[3]  Instead, all signs of humanity are locked in the tree, which looks yearningly at the figure on the opposite side of the sun and moon united as one.  The tree could be longing for to break from its earthly bonds and seek heavenly delight.  In an essence, the tree is a representation of van Gogh himself.  He wishes to be free of all bonds of physical and worldly desire, which to him are a burden and a source of all his woes.  “If only I could fly to the stars,” the tree seems to be saying.  The only gestures that van Gogh nods toward humans are the church and village on the ground, a symbol of his childhood and early professional life.  A less well-known story behind the creation of this painting is that van Gogh had initially tried to work on a depiction of Christ’s Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, but did not complete the project.  All we know of the painting of Christ’s Agony that never materialized was van Gogh’s quote about its colors: “I have the thing in my head with the colors, a starry night, the figure of Christ in blue…and the angel blended citron-yellow.”  This passage foreshadows the two most prominent colors in Starry Night.

To conclude, van Gogh’s life was a constant series of experiments in endlessly revising his artistic style.  Because of his ever-shifting mental and emotional states, he could not possibly settle down in one fixed color scheme or texture. He showed an increasingly extensive range of moods throughout his life, be it in his self-portraits or depictions of natural beauty.  Owing to his never-ending quest for seeking means to realize his deepest expressions visually, he created a world in which the elements were mutable and lifelike.

[1] “Van Gogh’s Stars.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), vol. 10, no. 5, 1986, pp. 36–38, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45266439. Accessed 28 Apr. 2022.

[2] Sweetman, David.  Van Gogh: His Life and His Art. Touchstone Books, 1990.

[3] Meerloo, Joost, A. M. “Vincent Van Gogh’s Quest For Identity.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, vol. 14, 1963, pp. 183–97, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24705302. Accessed 28 Apr. 2022.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Art in Context.  Van Gogh Self-Portrait – Some of Van Gogh’s Most Famous Self-Portraits.  January 11, 2022.  https://artincontext.org/van-gogh-self-portrait/

[6] Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam.  5 things you need to know about Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits. https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/stories/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-van-goghs-self-portraits

[7] National Gallery of Art.  Self-Portrait – Vincent Van Gogh.  https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/van-gogh-self-portrait.html

[8] Meerloo, Joost, A. M. “Vincent Van Gogh’s Quest For Identity.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, vol. 14, 1963, pp. 183–97, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24705302. Accessed 28 Apr. 2022.

[9] National Gallery of Art.  Self-Portrait – Vincent Van Gogh.  https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/van-gogh-self-portrait.html

[10] Art in Context.  Van Gogh Self-Portrait – Some of Van Gogh’s Most Famous Self-Portraits.  January 11, 2022.  https://artincontext.org/van-gogh-self-portrait/

[11] Meerloo, Joost, A. M. “Vincent Van Gogh’s Quest For Identity.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, vol. 14, 1963, pp. 183–97, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24705302. Accessed 28 Apr. 2022.

[12] Soth, Lauren. “Van Gogh’s Agony.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 68, no. 2, 1986, pp. 301–13, https://doi.org/10.2307/3050939. Accessed 27 Apr. 2022.

[13] Ibid.

Copyright © 2022 Marina Lee