45 pages • 1-hour read
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Van Gogh’s Relationship with the Arts
Although Van Gogh led a mostly solitary life, the letters still offer deep insights into the revolutionary arts scene that was flourishing in Western Europe during his lifetime, especially in France, the Low Countries, and England. Through Van Gogh’s travels and inspirations, the letters reveal Van Gogh’s relationship with the arts.
Van Gogh’s descriptions of metropolises like London, Paris, The Hague, Amsterdam, and Antwerp give a sense of the artistic vibrancy and innovation that defined the era. His description of Antwerp, a city often overlooked in favor of Paris and Amsterdam, is particularly rich in this regard. He related to Theo his experiences people-watching in the city, noting, “there are always figures in motion there, one sees them in the strangest setting, everything looks fantastic, with interesting contrasts at every turn” (433). Paris was a city at the epicenter of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements, but although his residence there coincided with a particularly important stage of his own artistic development, Van Gogh’s letters are unfortunately the sparsest during this time.
There are brief moments, however, where Van Gogh offers glimpses into his interactions with his contemporaries in Paris. In a letter to Horace M. Livens, an English painter, he explained that these interactions were revelatory to him: “In Antwerp I did not even know what the impressionists were, now I have seen them and though not being one of the club yet I have much admired certain impressionists’ pictures—Degas nude figure—Claude Monet landscape” (452). In 1886, the same year, the Impressionists put on their eighth and final collective exhibit, making room for the Post-Impressionists to dominate the French art scene. This significant change did not, however, correspond to Van Gogh receiving any new recognition or traction amongst the art-consuming public, and he left for Arles shortly thereafter.
Van Gogh’s wavering proximity to all of these goings-on is its own revelation, since he is very frequently presented as a key figure of the post-impressionist cohort in modern portrayals. In actuality, Van Gogh did not view himself as being particularly aligned with any of his contemporaries. His most consistent artistic relationships (albeit one-sided ones) were with artists of past generations, such as Millet and Rembrandt, whose artistic spirit he sought to revive in some way. He described this aspiration as “the regeneration of the old ideas that have been corrupted and diminished by wear and tear” (35). His relationship with the arts of his own time was thus somewhat ambivalent, but nevertheless of crucial importance in helping him forge his own identity as a painter.
The Links Between Religious and Artistic Life
Van Gogh often viewed his religious and artistic lives as one and the same, even after his early break with organized religion. Throughout his letters that recount his spiritual and artistic experiences, the links between religious and artistic life for Van Gogh become apparent.
The seeds of the connection between religious and artistic life can be seen in his first sermon, recorded in full for Theo, in which Van Gogh compared his religious experience to a painting by George Henry Boughton:
Our life is a pilgrim’s progress. I once saw a very beautiful picture, it was a landscape at evening…Through the landscape a road leads to a high mountain, far, far away. On the top of that mountain a city whereon the setting sun casts a glory. On the road walks a pilgrim, staff in hand. He has been walking for a good long while already and he is very tired. And now he meets a woman, a figure in black that makes one think of St. Paul’s word: ‘As being sorrowful yet always rejoicing.’ (87-88)
This resemblance between the religious imagery of the literature and art that Van Gogh consumed and his own artistic sensibilities would eventually guide his artistic decisions for years. As De Leeuw summarizes, “Whether his particular concern was religious or artistic, he invariably cultivated his inner universe and confidently sought the eternal in the temporal” (16-17). This quest for the eternal can be seen in his desire to paint rural communities that had been relatively unchanged for centuries, communities that he also perceived as more connected to God than their urban counterparts. He made this connection clear in a description of his 1885 painting, Country Churchyard and the Old Church Tower, “The ruins tell me how faith and religion moulder away… but that the lives & deaths of the peasants are always the same, steadily sprouting and withering like the grass and the little flowers that grow in that churchyard there. ‘Les religions passent, Dieu demeure [Religions pass, God remains]’” (408).
Following his estrangement from his father, Van Gogh’s religious life became separate from church life. As the Country Churchyard description illustrates, he grew to view to concerns of organized religion as petty and material, rather than religious. Making and viewing paintings came to fill the void that his defunct devotion to the church had left behind, allowing him to connect with his spirituality. He told Theo, “I can well do without God in both my life and also in my painting, but, suffering as I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something which is my life—the power to create” (540). This creative force, which drove him forward even in the most difficult periods of his illness, was the primary higher power in his life by the end.
Tension Between Personal Ambition and Familial Duty
Throughout his life, Van Gogh was torn between the expectations of his family and his own plans and desires. He often used his letters to Theo as an opportunity to vent about this conflict, illustrating the ongoing tension between personal ambition and familial duty that Van Gogh experienced.
Van Gogh cycled through a wide variety of emotions in response to his parents’ persistent disapproval: Frustration, anger, indifference, and sometimes acceptance. Sometimes, in the most vulnerable moments of the letters, he even was willing to be vulnerable and express the sadness that underpinned all these secondary emotions. Despite the emotional turmoil caused by his parents’ expectations, however, he never caved in to them in his adult life, always prioritizing his own ambitions over those of his family.
In his late-teens and early 20s, Van Gogh demonstrated a deep desire to live up to the expectations of his family, primarily through his commitment to religious life. As he explained to Theo, “It is my prayer and fervent desire that the spirit of my Father and Grandfather may rest upon me, and that it may be granted me to become a Christian and a Christian labourer, that my life may come to resemble […] those of the people I have mentioned above” (95-96). Through emulation of other men in his family who had become ministers, Van Gogh hoped to gain their approval. In his first sermon, too, this longing for paternal approval appears, this time with God as a stand-in for his literal father: “We want a Father, a Father’s love and a Father’s approval” (85). Van Gogh’s attempt at clerical life, therefore, can be interpreted as his honest attempt to select a personal ambition that would simultaneously fulfill his familial duty.
Although Van Gogh’s struggle against his familial duties was aimed primarily against his father and other members of the older generation, he sometimes viewed Theo as an extension of that generation, and aimed his frustration at his younger brother too. In a particularly heated letter dated March 1st, 1884, his anger over Theo’s paternalistic attitudes jumps off the page, “I don’t want to get embroiled in a second series of quarrels, of the kind I had with Father I, with Father II—Father II being yourself. One is enough” (374). By this later stage of his life, Van Gogh had given up all pretenses of hoping to achieve familial approval, and his personal ambitions were solidly winning out in the fight between the two.
Theo’s subsequent agreement to sign a contract formalizing their relationship, and the sudden death of their father the next year, would bring to a conclusion Van Gogh’s most turbulent period of struggling against familial expectations. However, his anxieties surrounding this issue never fully left, as he expressed his concerns about being a financial burden to Theo up until the very final days of his life.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence