In Remembrance of Vincent Van Gogh

The painting on the front of the book’s
dust jacket is of Dr. Paul Gachet

By Moristotle

Having recently been reminded of a little book about Van Gogh that my wife gave me in October 1978, I have been reading it again and would like to share a bit of it here, in remembrance of its subject:

That last Sunday in July [1890], Vincent slipped out of the Pension Ravoux, where he was staying. He made for the fields of ripe corn, where a few days before he had painted the famous Wheat Field with Crows. The village was deserted. He stopped in front of a farm. Nobody there. He entered the courtyard, hid behind a dunghill and shot himself in the chest with a pistol. He had the strength to return to the inn, go up to his room and get into bed like a wounded animal. He died two days later, in the presence of Theo, who had hastened to his bedside. He was thirty-seven years and four months old.
    Unbalanced, painful, tragic, such was certainly his life. That he suffered from neurosis and epilepsy is equally true. Like Rousseau, like Baudelaire, Van Gogh felt very vividly that his life was a failure and suffered deeply from it. He was perpetually anguished, and against his anguish he tried various means of defence: religion, humanitarianism, art. He gave himself to painting with all the more passion as he saw himself threatened by an implacable disease. Lifted out of himself by art, he was able to overcome his physical failings, or at least not to think of them too much. This unstable, high-strung, obsessed man, in unceasing conflict with society and himself, created a body of work outstanding in its concerted perfection of ends and means. However impetuously inspired and executed it may be, this art is certainly not that of a madman.
                            –Van Gogh, by Frank Elgar
                            [Leon Amiel Publisher, New York, 1975;
                            pages not numbered]

Copyright © 2018 by Moristotle