How Vincent Van Gogh Fell in Love with Japan - by Lesley Downer

‘a little yellow house with green door and shutters, whitewashed inside - on the white walls - very brightly coloured Japanese drawings - red tiles on the floor.’ 

A couple of weekends ago I was in Amsterdam to see an irresistible exhibition - Van Gogh and Japan at the Van Gogh Museum. I wondered what Vincent, poor tormented soul, would have made of that vast glitzy museum devoted to his works and memory, with its mobs of visitors and museum shops selling everything from Van Gogh luggage to Van Gogh dog coats. He was not exactly poor. His brother Theo who worked for a Paris art dealer took care of him. But he never found much success either during his life. He only sold one painting to anyone other than Theo.

Sudden Shower over Shin Ohashi, Atake, Hiroshige (L)

Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige), Van Gogh (R)

In February 1886, when Van Gogh was thirty three, he arrived back in Paris after ten years roaming from Ramsgate to the Low Countries. He lived there with Theo for two years and made friends with artists such as Émile Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac. 

He also became acquainted with the celebrated art dealer Siegfried Bing. Pretty much ever since Japan opened to the west in 1858 the west had been flooded with Japanese arts and crafts. All Paris along with half the western world was afire with Japonisme, unbridled enthusiasm for all things Japanese, and Siegfried Bing had largely cornered the market.

Over the following winter Van Gogh bought up more than 600 Japanese woodblock prints. He planned to sell them. But as he leafed through them he was transfixed by the dramatic designs, compositions, bright colours, strong lines and extraordinary viewpoints, all startling and fresh to western eyes.

It’s well known that Van Gogh was much influenced by Japanese art but this is the first exhibition to bring together so many of Van Gogh’s paintings alongside the prints that inspired them. It also broadens out the picture to reveal how much Van Gogh’s view of life was brightened by what he called these ‘cheerful prints’ - and how they played a part in shaping other aspects of his life.

Courtesan (after Eisen) by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh’s first forays into Japanese art were to paint copies of three woodblock prints. One was Keisai Eisen’s Courtesan which featured on the cover of a special Japan edition of the magazine Paris Illustré. The others were landscape prints by Hiroshige which he had bought. It’s extraordinary to contrast Van Gogh’s dense impassioned brush strokes with the clean cool lines of the Japanese originals. The images are the same though he’s surrounded his courtesan with Japanese motifs - bamboo, cranes, frogs and waterlilies. But the techniques and mood and final effect are radically different.

He also painted a portrait of his art dealer, Julien Tanguy, against a backdrop of woodblock prints, including Van Gogh’s own courtesan painting.

Portrait of Pere Tanguy by Vincent Van Gogh

After two years in Paris he couldn’t stand the hustle and bustle any longer and in 1888 moved south. It was as if he was besotted with Japan, looking for it everywhere. On the way south he kept gazing out of the train window to see ‘if it was like Japan yet.’ He was sure he would find his dream of Japan there. He took with him a few woodblock prints, not famous or expensive ones but cheerful colourful depictions of landscapes and women.

In Arles, the natural beauty and bright light and cheerful colours recreated Japan for him. The southern light, he wrote, turned everything into ‘Japan’. There was a field of irises there which he painted and described as a Japanese dream. He writes of the landscape of La Crau with its peach trees, ‘Everything there is small, the gardens, the fields, the trees, even those mountains, as in certain Japanese landscapes, that’s why this subject attracted me.’ ‘I’m always saying to myself that I’m in Japan here,’ he said in another letter. ‘That as a result I only have to open my eyes and paint right in front of me what makes an impression on me.’ 

Rock of Montmajour by Vincent van Gogh

Hakone by Ando Hiroshige

In the exhibition Van Gogh’s paintings hang close to the Japanese prints which inspired them. He sought out subjects akin to those which he saw in the prints. There is a dramatic painting of a quarry, The Rock of Montmajour, dotted with trees, of which he writes, ‘You’ll well remember there are Japanese drawings where grasses and little trees grow there and there’. Hung opposite is Hiroshige’s dramatic print of the crags at Hakone with a huge crag, with grass and trees growing out of it, dwarfing the people and hanging at an impossible angle over the water.

 

The paintings Van Gogh did in Arles are very different from his earlier work. ‘After some time your vision changes, you see with a more Japanese eye, you feel colour differently,’ he wrote to Theo. He plays with colour, laying on bright flat areas of intense colour with impassioned brush strokes. He painted The Yellow House set against a flat blue sky almost more solid than the house itself and his bedroom and yellow bed using ‘flat plain tints like Japanese prints,’ with strong outlines, flat colour planes and no shadows. Inspired by the Japanese prints which hung around his studio, he applied thick black contour lines and played with extraordinary perspectives and viewpoints. He painted Almond Blossom, seen from below against a dazzling turquoise sky, in honour of the birth of his nephew, Theo’s son. In The Sower, the dramatic diagonal of the tree trunk cuts across the picture, silhouetted against a huge yellow sun.

Self-portrait dedicated to
Gauguin by Vincent van Gogh

In Arles Van Gogh hoped to enjoy his dream of a Japanese way of life. He imagined humble Japanese woodblock print artists living and working together like monks in a monastery and decided to set up an artists’ colony with his friend Paul Gauguin as the leader. Like Japanese artists, they exchanged self portraits. In the portrait he sent Gauguin he depicts himself as a very un-Buddha-like Japanese monk with a shaven head and intense wild eyes, somewhat slanted.

But as we know it didn’t work out. The collaboration with Gauguin came to an end, the artists’ colony fell through. Van Gogh cut off his ear, checked himself into a hospital and painted feverishly, producing a painting a day. When he couldn’t go outside he painted through the bars of his window.

The last part of this absorbing and fascinating exhibition takes us right inside Van Gogh’s studio, surrounded by the Japanese prints that he had pinned to the wall - unframed, working tools, some torn and paint-stained. He often mentions the cheeriness of the brightly-coloured prints of landscapes and beautiful women. Perhaps he hoped to find peace of mind by surrounding himself with such serene images. But alas, that was the one thing he was destined never to find.

Van Gogh and Japan at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, continues till June 24th 2018.




Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All Van Gogh images © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

All other images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Mirror, Mirror... by Eleanor Updale

I've just been sold on eBay.  I went for £99.55 (if you include the postage) which is an enormous relief.  I was scared that no one would bid.  It turns out that I'm worth 2% of Tracey Emin and 22% of Tim Minchin. Astounding.

I was part of an auction of self-portraits organised by the charity Children & the Arts. They sent us all a canvas and some paints and told us to get on with it.  The brief was to do a picture that summed what you did for a living, and that's how I found myself inside my laptop, with the keys spelling out my name.

I can't imagine why anyone would want the picture, and can only thank whichever relative or friend saved me from adding the shame of being unwanted to the embarrassment of painting the picture in the first place. At least some money has gone to a good cause.  And the episode has given me a topic for this month's post, because I want to send you all to see the largest collection of self-portraits I’ve ever come across, which is hidden away in the Vasari Corridor in Florence.

Should any of you have read my book Montmorency and the Assassins, you'll know about the Vasari Corridor.  It's a passageway running  from the Uffizi, across the Ponte Vecchio to the Pitti Palace. For more than half a mile it flows alongside, between, round and over all sorts of buildings; finally opening out at the bottom of the Boboli Gardens.  The corridor was built in the mid 16^th century to give the Medici rulers a secure route from one side of the Arno to the other, with a stop along the way for a private booth from which the Grand Duke could observe services in the church of Santa Felicita.

In my book, the corridor is the site of a frantic chase after a 19^th century anarchist.  In real life, it's been severed by Nazi mines, and damaged by a mafia bomb in 1993.  Now, restored, it is full of pictures hardly anyone sees.  The corridor is open on only a few days a year, and you have to book a pricey guided tour to get in, but it’s worth it.  I went there to work out how it fitted in to my story, not knowing about the self-portrait collection it houses. This includes pictures of (and, obviously, by) Rembrandt, Velazquez, Van Dyck, Durer, Van Gogh Corot, Ingres, Delacroix, Andy Warhol and many more. 

It's a funny thing, a self portrait.  Inherently vain  (even - perhaps especially - when intending to depict a humble, tortured soul) and sometimes unintentionally revealing, just as an autobiography or a castaway's choice of Desert Island Discs can be.  Do you go for warts and all, or spruce yourself up?  Do you paint an imaginary country estate in the background, or surround yourself with the trappings of learning? 

What follows is, as Peter Snow would say, Just A Bit of Fun...

For more than a century, artists aiming for a likeness have been able to construct self portraits using photographs as references, but in the days before the camera they must have used mirrors. So I wonder whether, to find out what they really looked like, we should look at mirror-images of their work, because that double flip would show us their faces as they appeared to those around them.

Would it make any difference?  It might.  After all, There is no such thing as a symmetrical face.  If there were, some people we know well might look very different. 

Here’s Charles II as we are used to seeing him:

Although his face looks pretty symmetrical, if both sides were exactly the same, he would either look like this (two right sides) :

Or this (two left sides):

So when an artist paints a self portrait using a mirror, they may be presenting the face they recognise as their own, but it won't be exactly the same face those around them see.  Obviously, the difference won't be as marked as in the examples above, because the two different halves of the face will still be there, but I've chosen a couple of self portraits at random to see whether the artists look any different turned round.

Do we feel any differently about Rembrandt as he saw himself…

Or as others saw him?

I fancy he looks older and sadder in the second picture.

How about Van Gogh?

 

 His self-portrait                                                               Flipped

Here, I think that beady little eye at the back somehow has more prominence in the second image.  Could it be that I read faces left to right (like print) and give more importance to what I see first? So in the Rembrandt picture the wrinkles in the 'big' side of the face (the right side in the first picture) are balanced out by the smaller side, whereas in the second picture, they dominate - not just because that side is bigger, but because I see it first.

And what about the sitters in ‘normal’ portraits? Surely, until very recently their most frequent (sometimes their only) source of self-image must have been the mirror; so when they saw themselves in portraits painted by people looking directly at them, they might have got a surprise (I suppose the nearest thing we have these days is our shock on hearing a recording of our own voice for the first time).

Perhaps, if we want to see what the sitters thought they looked like (rather than what everyone else saw) we should flip over their portraits.  

I can’t help thinking that Queen Anne might have had a higher opinion of her looks than those who saw her in the flesh or only knew her from this portrait.

In the mirror, she looks prettier, and a little more cheerful, at least to my eye:

Maybe that's because I'm seeing her 'good' side first.

Or perhaps I'm fooling myself.

Anyway, it’s been fun to play.  Have a go with some of your favourite historical characters.  And remember, if you happen to be in Florence on one of the rare occasions when  the Vasari Corridor is open, book yourself a place on a tour.

www.eleanorupdale.com