Did Van Gogh Like People?

Vincent Van Gogh is often hailed as an artist that truly captured the human experience.  He wanted to paint portraits because he (at one time, anyway) thought it was the hardest form of art.

But did Van Gogh actually like people?  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that he didn't.  However, he felt guilty about it.

He never got on well with anyone for long stretches of time. Even his saintly younger brother Theo couldn't stand living with him.  Paul Gauguin got so sick of Vincent that he cut off part of his ear with a sword (according to some art historians anyway.)

Vincent, always lonely, preferred to stay alone.  Even in childhood, he could not get along with people.  In a photo from his schoolboy days, he crosses his arms and legs tightly as if daring anyone to get close.  The photo shown here shows Vincent with the same expression.

Being Dutch, Vincent was drilled on duty to family and to other people since practically the womb.  His letters to brother Theo seemed full of hope to help others when he was sent to the Borinage as a minister.

But people always disappointed him.  In this I (and I think others) can readily identify.  He never got over being sent to boarding school when he was 11, writing into adulthood about watching his parents drive off in a carriage while he was on the school steps.  All his romances were failures.  Even God rejected him when he was kicked out of the Borinage ministry because he was too unkempt and too much like a Borinage native than a proper Dutch clergyman.

People in his paintings and drawings are often very far away.  This could be due in part to his inability to hire models (making a silhouette was cheaper than a model) but done so often that he must have thought it looked right.  He was far away from other people.  Some paintings show his point of view, such as being far back in a row of dinner tables in Interior of a Restaurant in  Arles (1888).  The tables closest to him are empty.  The tables go back and forth like prison bars.

So no, I don't think he liked people, unless they were abstract.  He had a much more successful relationship with Theo through letter writing than whenever they met in person.  By the end of his short life, he felt more comfortable in solitude than with others.  His last trip to Paris in July of 1890 included a dinner with Theo, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and 2 others who liked his work.  Before the last guest arrived, Vincent had slipped off, left the city and went back to Auvers.  He'd commit suicide three weeks later.