"Van Gogh's Women"; By Derek Fell: A Review

There are a lot of Vincent Van Gogh biographies out there. Derek Fell's 2004 effort Van Gogh's Women: His Love Affairs and Journey into Madness is one of the best because it centers on one main aspect of Vincent's life -- how he got on with women. It starts off with Vincent's relationship (or lack thereof) with his mother. He also points out that being born on the same day as his stillborn older brother -- and sharing the exact same name as the dead baby -- really messed Vincent up before he had a chance to mess himself up.

For some reason, Vincent's relationship with Paul Gauguin is also included in great detail. I wasn't entirely sure why, as Fell notes that the two bohemian artists did not have a homosexual relationship (although they shared at least one whore between them.) I also did not care about reading so much about the creepy Gauguin when I wanted to read about Vincent.

This book also pushes the theory that Dr. Paul Gachet (Vincent's last doctor) helped kill Vincent. I'm not entirely sold on that theory, but it sure is interesting to read about.

The hardback edition I borrowed from the library had many reproductions of Vincent's works and photos of Vincent's family.  Again, Gauguin intrudes into the limited space the publishers made available for illustrations. (Big sigh.)  Still, I highly recommend the book.

An Overview of Van Gogh's Relationships

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890) painted people with remarkable sympathy but failed to get along with people in real life. He was deemed a failure by most of his family, had no lifelong friends and never married. In his entire short life, he had just one trusted confidant - his younger brother Theo. Theo was so attached to Vincent that he died a mere six months after his older brother.

Van Gogh's Family

Vincent was the oldest son of five children. He was born about one year after his mother gave birth to a still born son named Vincent. His father was a pastor, but more importantly his Uncle Vincent worked as a successful art dealer for the French firm Goupil & Cie. Vincent originally was going to follow his uncle's footsteps and sell art as opposed to creating it. He even worked in Guopil & Cie.'s London branch for two years.

Vincent did not receive any support from his large family with the sole exception of his brother Theo. Most of Vincent's letters to Theo survived and have been published. Vincent was considered bizarre and a misfit by his other family members. Vincent tried to woo his widowed cousin but she refused him. This caused a huge rift in the family that already was pushing Vincent away.

Van Gogh's Lovers

Although the legend claims that Vincent cut his ear off as a present for his favorite whore, this legend has been debunked. But Vincent did go to prostitutes. No "decent" woman would have anything to do with him. Modern doctors state that Vincent's bizarre behavior may have been the result of a combination of mental illness and a chronic ailment such as epilepsy or migraines.

Vincent moved to The Hague in 1881. In 1882, he met a pregnant prostitute, Clasina Maria Hoornik, and fell in love with her. They lived together, which caused a major scandal. The relationship was doomed from the start, but Vincent's tenderness towards his lover shows in his drawings of her, including the much loved Sorrow.

Van Gogh's Contemporaries

Most other artists would not have anything to do with Vincent, since his poverty made him have poor grooming habits and his ailments made his behavior unpredictable. He did briefly study under Anton Mauve, then a famous Dutch realistic painter. But Mauve soon tired of his scandalous student and soon would have nothing to do with him.

The only artist to attempt to collaborate with Vincent was yet another social misfit, Paul Gauguin. They briefly shared lodgings at Arles, France but often fought. Both were alcoholics and both were impoverished. Some biographers claim it was Gauguin who cut off part of Vincent's ear.

Additional References

Van Gogh.Rene Huyghe. Crown Publishers; 1967.

Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh. Irving Stone & Jean Stone, editors. Plume; 1995.

Looking at the Desk of Van Gogh's Great-Great Grandnephew

Imagine being named after one of the most famous artists in the  world.  No, really -- imagine it.  You are saddled with a name that you can never live up to in no way, shape or form.

Frightening, isn't it?

This is the everyday dilemma for Vincent Willem Van  Gogh, the great-great grandnephew of the artist (and subject of this blog) Vincent Willem Van Gogh (1853 - 1890).  It was also the dilemma of Great-Great Granduncle Vincent, who was named for his stillborn older brother (who also happened to be born on the same day Vincent was.) 

The current Vincent Willem Van Gogh (pictured above with two other Van Goghs) works on the board for the Van Gogh Museum  in  Amsterdam, founded by the current Vincent's grandfather named (you guessed it) Vincent Willem Van Gogh.  In an interview in July of 2013 when he visited Japan for an art opening featuring 3D works of Van Gogh masterpieces, he said:

“It never fails to touch me when I see how much the work and life of Vincent van Gogh mean to people all over the world."

He also has quite a desk.  He gave a semi-detailed interview to Haute Living.com about the items you can find on them. Take a look at it and the honkin' big Van Gogh art book.  The desk itself (perhaps also named Vincent Willem Van Gogh -- hey, I've seen crazier things in my life) looks like it came from Ikea.

Did Drinking Absinthe Cause Van Gogh to Lose His Mind?

One of the allures to the story of Vincent Van Gogh is that this brilliant artist went crazy.  He didn't just go crazy -- he went bug-fucking nuts. Things he did included:

eating his paints
following women into their homes when he was clearly uninvited
pissing off anyone who could have helped his career
that cutting off his ear lobe thing


So Let's Try the Question Again

Why did Vincent Van Gogh become bug-fucking nuts? Because he died in 1890 (even before Sigmund Freud's publication of The Interpretation of Dreams for crying out loud) we really have no idea what spicy stew of mental and physical disorders that Vincent actually suffered from.  It was known that around the time of his death he suffered from:

• syphilis
• impotence
• rotting teeth
• hallucinations, which may have been caused by temporal lobe epilepsy
• starvation due to extreme poverty
• paranoia
• alcoholism

Clearly, drinking absinthe was the least of Vincent's problems.

What About the Hallucinations?

One theory is that he hallucinated because he was addicted to absinthe.  The real absinthe was banned in France in 1915 but returned in 2012.  America's ban on real absinthe was lifted about 2007.  Until then, all anyone had to drink was weak substitutes.  Why was the stuff banned?  It was 110 to 144 proof.  I'm surprised Vincent lived as long as he did while quaffing this brew.  Rumor is that he drank it straight but absinthe was an expensive drink and so a bottle may have always been out of Vincent's price range.  It was usually drunk with lots of water and a melted sugar cube.

Absinthe has never been proven to cause hallucinations more than any other alcoholic beverage.  It could be that Vincent was especially sensitive to absinthe that it could have tipped him over the edge of sanity but Vincent was already teetering there.  Epilepsy and mental illness appeared frequently in Vincent's family.  Most of his siblings committed suicide.  His beloved brother Theo died insane and incontinent because of advanced syphilis. 

It wasn't just one factor that caused Vincent to go mad.  It was a large combination of factors.

"Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh"; Edited by Iriving Stone: My Review

One of the most popular books about Vincent written is this edited collection of Vincent's letters to his long-suffering brother Theo.  Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh (1937) begins when Vincent is full of missionary zeal and is off to the Borinage.  It goes on through his disillusion with the Church, with other artists and with life in general.  The collection was edited by Irving Stone, author of the popular fictional biography about Vincent, Lust for Life (1934.)

I'm not lucky enough to have a first edition, so this review is based on the far more available 1995 reprint with the cover shown at left.

This book is very hard going.  There are no footnotes explaining current politics, fads or nicknames.  There are also no pictures, so you need to read this in tandem with a book of Vincent's art or you could constantly Google names and painting titles.  This greatly interrupts the book's narrative flow. 

Vincent also would fall out with people he would glowingly write to his brother about in one letter and then never mention them again.  Vincent also suffered from paranoia and would describe in great detail conspiracies being plotted against him.  Since there is no mention in the book that these are just delusions, the reader does get the picture that Vincent was a long-suffering heroic target of the status quo.  He wasn't.  He was mostly ignored and survived only through the generosity of his brother and some other temporary patrons, but he was not the target of a sophisticated plot.

There are times when I wish I could've smacked Vincent upside the head.  Artistic genius or not, he was remarkably stupid.  He also would not shut up about money.  Granted, when I was homeless, I got a little obsessed over every penny I could get a hold of, but even I didn't grouse about it in every letter I sent my parents.

In conclusion, I don't recommend this book unless you are seriously nuts about Vincent and are familiar with the times Vincent lived in.

Did Van Gogh Have Syphilis?

It's generally assumed that Vincent Van Gogh had syphilis because (quite frankly) 10% of all European men had it in the late 1800s.  He was diagnosed with another sexually transmitted disease, gonorrhea, in 1882.  Both STDs have similar symptoms so Van Gogh could have been misdiagnosed.

Van Gogh is thought to have had syphilis for 2 reasons:

1. He frequented brothels
2. He was kinda loopy

According to Van Gogh:The Life (Random House; 2012) Van Gogh did have syphilis about 1885.  During this time he had terrible mouth sores and lost a lot of weight because he was unable to eat. (See p. 447)

Unlike gonorrhea, syphilis caused insanity (or seeming insanity) in it's last stages, called neurosyphilis.  In teriary syphilis, the face become deformed, as seen in the bust of such a patient (pictured.)

According to The Lobotomist John Wiley & Sons; 2005), one fifth of all patients in American psychiatric wards had syphilis in the 1920s and 1930s.  The book, a biography of lobotomist Walter Freeman, includes some really vivid passages describing neurosyphilis patients, such as this little gem from page 59:

Though largely forgotten today, neurosyphilis was a terrible disease, a near epidemic that left its targets -- mainly men thirty and over -- in a wasted, twisted condition, riddled with bedsores and unable to speak coherently...They frequently grew demented, demented, incontinent and unable to control their muscles.
 

The problem is that Van Gogh was not really old enough to begin showing symptoms of neurosyphilis.  Men usually begin showing them 10 to 20 years after they get infected. 

My theory (and I think I'm alone on this one) that Van Gogh thought he had syphilis.  Since he had spent time in asylums, he saw what happened to men suffering in the final stages of neurosyphilis.  Perhaps one of the deciding factors in his suicide was that he feared developing those horrible final symptoms.

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.

Why Van Gogh Signed with Just His First Name

One of Vincent Van Gogh's more endearing traits was to sign his work "Vincent" instead of "Van Gogh" or "Vincent Van Gogh" or his initials.  The use of his first name reminds me of my classmates at school who would sign their art projects with just their first names.  I had such an unusual first name (Rena) that I rarely ever had to use my full name when turning in work for my grade school art projects for everyone to know who did the work.

Van Gogh was not the first artist to just use his first name as his artistic signature.  Matthew Howard, author of Van Gogh: His Life and Works in 500 Images (Lorenz Books; 2009) points out that Rembrandt (1606 - 1669) just used his first name.  (His full name was a whopper -- Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.)  Van Gogh greatly admired Rembrandt and wanted to be like Rembrandt.

Also, there was the problem of how to pronounce Van Gogh.  The Dutch didn't have a problem with it, but Van Gogh spent a large part of his life in other countries -- countries where the natives had great difficulty trying to pronounce Van Gogh.  Even today in this age of international air travel and the Internet, on both sides of the Pond, you'll find art historians and collectors saying "van GO"  or "van GOCK."  That constant mangling of his name had to have gotten on Vincent's notoriously taunt nerves.

Howard also noted in his impressive book that Vincent didn't want to be a Van Gogh anymore after his traumatic experiences as a minister at the Borinage.  He got into constant heated arguments with his family, especially his father, and so felt that he wasn't a "real" Van Gogh anymore.  Ironically, Vincent became the most famous Van Gogh of them all.

Where Was Vincent Van Gogh Born?

Vincent Willem Van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 at the parsonage in the Dutch town of Goot-Zundert (which means "Big Zundert"), in the vicarage of Zundert.  There was a nearby town called Klein-Zundert (meaning "Little Zundert").  The parsonage, (pictured at left) built sometime in the 1600s, was directly across the street from the busiest place in town, the Markt ("Market").

Vincent's birth happened exactly one year (to the day) that Anna Van Gogh gave birth to a stillborn son -- named Vincent Willem Van Gogh.  Anna's second son and first living baby both bore the same name.  It was Vincent's father that decided on the names, according to Jp. A. Calosse, author of Van Gogh (Parkstone International; 2011).

Zundert was (and still is) in the provence of North Brabant, located in the south of country, near the border with Belgium.  At the time of Van Gogh's childhood, it was a predominately rural area.  To this day, some of the area is still used for farmland, particularly for growing strawberries.  Back then, the big crops were potatoes and a very fine white sand used for sanding wood smooth.  While Vincent lived in Groot-Zundert, the population was around 1200.

The village itself only consisted of a few buildings while the rest of the population lived on farms miles away from each other.  the village had one main road called the Napoleonsweg, after Napoleon, who had ordered the road's construction around 1810.  The area was mostly devoid of trees, except for the oak and beech trees lining the Napoleonsweg.

Groot-Zundert harbored strongly conventional ideas that were opposed to the more liberal attitudes along the Dutch coasts.  Most of the inhabitants were very poor were exploited by the higher classes.  Back then, citizens had to pay a stiff poll tax in order to vote, ensuring that the poor never could go to the polls.  Van Gogh's family was one of the wealthier families in the town. 

What Was Vincent Van Gogh's Middle Name?

Vincent Van Gogh's middle name was NOT Van but Willem.  He was named after three people: 

• his uncle, Vincent Van Gogh, known often in the family correspondence as "Uncle Cent", but I do not know what his particular middle name 
•  his brother Vincent Van Gogh, who would have been Vincent's older brother had the baby survived, but alas, the first Vincent Willem was a stillborn.  He was born and pronounced dead on arrival on 30 March 1852, a year to the day before our Vincent Willem was born.  The gravestone is pictured above.
• his paternal grandfather, Vincent Van Gogh (1780 - 1874) a minister who is thought to have been named after his uncle, a sculptor named (you guessed it ) Vincent Van Gogh (1729 - 1802.) 

The name Willem and the feminine version Willemina pop up frequently in Dutch names, but I have not been able to determine if the Willem part of Van Gogh's name is after any particular relative.

Willem (English equivalent William) is a two-part name. The "Wil" part means "desire" while the "lem" part means "helmet" or other protective  headgear.  So, putting it all together, "Willem" means "desire helmet."  Not a particularly apt name for our lad Vincent.