Weemoed: Melancholy in the World of Vincent Van Gogh

'As my work is, so am I." - Vincent Van Gogh

In a few short days I'll be in Amsterdam which means in a few shorts days I'll be visiting the Van Gogh Museum. This means my mind will soon be gloriously flooded with beautiful works of art, art I've only seen in copies in books or on slides during art history seminars.

As a child, I remember a print of the 'Café Terrace' hanging on the living room wall. It struck me as a sad, desolate painting and I always hesitated looking at it for it seemed to be filled with a strange, albeit baffling loneliness. I thought that if I stared long at it, I would become trapped in the painting. Not only this, the man in white, the server looked more like a skeleton than a human being.

My mother loved this painting and she was the one who first hung it up. And I wondered why she liked it so much.

Café Terrace

Today I can look at it from a remove and see its aesthetics instead of being overcome with the emotions. I look at the bright yellow contrasted with the blue sky. I see Van Gogh's use of the vanishing point and perspective. And yet I know there's something symbolically more about that scene, whether it is the blinding, bold light emanating from the café or the vast sparkle of the sky. It is still laden with a melancholy as if this place attracted only the lost souls and no one else. 

I learned about Van Gogh in high school, my mother having lent me her copy of Don Maclean's Greatest His. I listened to the song 'Vincent' and though I heard the words, understood their meaning, I still hadn't arrived at a tender appreciation of the artist. I had seen 'Starry Night' in my grade 12 art class, my teacher Miss Armstrong was very passionate in her discussion of the painting. I noted the vibrant, swirling colours, the near organic and orgasmic quality to the piece. Yes, I saw that the artist had brought the canvas to life. But in the back of my mind, I thought, big deal.

In university, when I was going through my own lonely times I began to feel some compassion for Van Gogh. Prof Knight devoted an entire class to his work, starting from the beginning. I learned that Vincent Van Gogh began his working life in his late teens as an art dealer, that he worked in The Hague, Paris and London. But while visiting the latter city, he was introduced to the terrible working conditions of the poor. Eventually, he lost interest in his position - they fired him actually - and turned to the church. In his letter to his brother Theo, he wrote long sermons and discussed the Bible. He considered becoming a theologian. He moved around, couldn't get settled, he became a vehement preacher and lived in squalor similar to St. Francis of Assisi. 

The church and the church folk too, as it turned out turned their back on him because his passion was too passionate. The Dutch and Belgium burgers with their Calvinism and Dutch Reform ways found he wasn't too conservative for their liking. Sure, they appreciated a vow of poverty but Vincent took it too far.

Neuen Cottage

This is when he began to drawn and paint. Mostly he began with studies of peasants in the fields. His canvas was dark and drab. He asked locals to sit for him so he could draw their features. Highly influenced by the painters of the Barbizon School, a group of painters in France that depicted peasant life and rural scenes, Van Gogh used Jean-Francois Millet as his mentor. 

Prof. Knight introduced the class to the 'Potato Eaters', Van Gogh's first true masterpiece. In the painting, a family of farm workers sit around their table at night, eating potatoes, a single bulb illuminating their faces. One thinks of a murky coal mine, the dismal light so bare and stark - but its really a dining room. Van Gogh wanted to show the viewer the lives of the down-trodden, to show that these people were close to the earth, that they were the ones who had picked the very potatoes they were eating. 

What is fascinating about the masterpiece, Knight pointed out to my seminar is that the sketches Van Gogh did in preparation were far more fascinating, more alive. It was the sketches that give us a hint of his genius.

Van Gogh moved to Paris and lived for a time with his brother. This was a welcome relief to his family. His relatives in the Netherlands were fed up with his uncouth and erratic ways. Van Gogh was a loner and his family made sure of this. All attempts to reach out and connect were made difficult by them. He fell in love easily enough and tried to court a cousin, Kee. Maybe it wasn't the right time. She had a child, she was a widow. One afternoon at her home, Van Gogh put his hand to a flame, demanding his uncle to let him speak with her. Kee's father blew out the candle and lead the artist away to a pub where he could get drunk. 

His relations with his father had grown strained. Van Gogh in his desire to belong, to be seen as someone important, significant had pursued a career in the church purposely to be closer to him. He was well-read in The Bible, could quote scripture. But the pastor had no love for his son. If anything, the father could see the emotional turmoil lurking in Vincent and wanted to distance himself. Though Pastor Van Gogh was a man of the church, a man of Christ he was no Christian towards his son, unwelcoming, distant and judgmental.

Before his move to Paris, it is fascinating to note Vincent's frequent use of the word, melancholy in his letters. In his 7/8 February 1877 letter, he breaks the word down. In Dutch, melancholy is weemoed so we find, thanks to Van Gogh's discernment,  wee (woe) and moed (courage). In English, melancholy is derived from the Greek. Hippocrates and ancient medical science regarded excess of bile as the cause of the sanguine sorrow, hence melas (black) and kholé (bile). 

In addition to Dutch and English, Van Gogh also knew how to speak French and German. But it is this brilliant observation on a single word in Dutch and its meaning that we understand the artist. When he wrote this letter in Dordrecht, he was still focused on a career in the church. But like the 'Potato Eaters' we glean a hint of the future great artist. 

In fact, I think the word in Dutch is better than in English. For the artists of the 19th century, weemoed was a constant. The industrial revolution turned the farmer away from his fields. Cities became the new place of pilgrimage as towns and rural communities lost workers to the promise of jobs in factories and mills. The earth, the hearth held no sway. Artists could see the broken lives of the poor, as well as the broken spirits of the emerging bourgeois. In Germany, they turned to the realm of night and dreams, poetry and philosophy, music. In France, Romantic theatre took storm along with painting, novels and polemics. Cities became busier, crime-ridden, dingier, darker. 

Whether we interpret the Dutch word as 'courage in woe', or 'woe's courage', Vincent Van Gogh was not alone in the realm of artists. He continued on, fighting his woe with art, painting and learning, learning and painting. In Paris, as I mentioned he lived with his brother and painted the windmills of Montmarte, feeling a nostalgia for the windmills of his native land. He met fellow artists, was introduced to the work of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist. His canvas became brighter, livelier. He was influenced by the pointillism of George Seurat and Paul Signac but he didn't have the patience to apply the little dots to his canvas. Instead, he made the technique his own and instead of dots, quick, flashing, slashing strokes of the brush. 

Tired of Paris, he moved to the south of France, the town of Arles on the Rhone River. Though his brother and him couldn't live together (Theo complained of Vincent's untidiness and his erratic emotions), Vincent still longed for a community of artists. He convinced Paul Gauguin to live with him. But this wasn't to last. The two artists disagreed on everything. Van Gogh was a colourist and favoured the works of Delacrois and Rubens. Gauguin favoured the use of line and placed Ingres and Raphael on a pedestal. Neither could convert the other so the 'brotherhood' disbanded. 

Van Gogh was a loner, a wanderer. In a later letter he wrote: "I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate and feeling nowhere so much a stranger as in my own family and country." His father had been dead for some time now and though he never saw his mother again, he used a photograph to paint a beatific portrait of her, one where she beamed him a forgiving smile.

Landscapes, rural scenes. The light in his paintings was the brightest in Arles, a far cry from the murky, autumn and snow scenes of the north. His 'Potato Eaters' had lead him here and he still found beauty in the human face. He continued to paint portraits. The time he spent painting the everyday people around him, was a kind of haven, an authentic moment of longing and community. He dreamed of companionship but he could get no further than the paintings he created of couples walking, resting, standing together under the stars. 

In the famous self-mutilation incident, he didn't chop off his entire ear, merely his lobe. And some scholars wonder if it wasn't someone else who did the deed. The bleeding was intense, his cry for help even more so. He decided to leave Arles for Auvers, hoping to escape the weemoed he encountered in the south, in his self. 

He found a friend in Dr. Gachet. Vincent painted his portrait, depicting the melancholy on the doctor's face. 

He again turned to the scenes of life around him and painted, but somehow he knew that no matter what he created, it would only be worth something after his death. He had found out that a painting by Millet, his hero had sold for several thousand francs after the artist's death. He saw a similar fate for his works.

There has been recent debate over his death. While many scholars believe he shot himself, others are beginning to wonder if the romantic-martyr image of the failed, starving artist isn't a bit contrived. Some wonder where he got the pistol. And being a Christian, he knew suicide was a sin. Yes, he cut off his ear lobe but are we still certain about his courage to shoot himself?

In a recent, controversial book by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the two authors point to the possibility that he was accidentally shot by local boys. The boys had teased the artists, adding salt to his coffee in the local cafe, scaring him with a snake, even having their girlfriends try to seduce him, knowing how lonely he was. When one of the boys came in possession of a gun, it is believed the weapon either misfired or be mishandled and Van Gogh took the bullet.

Not in a wheat field, but closer to the town that he was shot. When the police asked if he shot himself, he said he thought so to which he followed up with: "Don't accuse anyone else." 

Van Gogh wanted to die and he died knowing his brother would no longer be burdened by him.