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Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Lew Jones' paper

Lewton Thomas Jones

19th Century European Art

Lee Stewart

Graduate Paper      May 22,2011

 

 

                                               The Sower—From Millet to Van Gogh

            Vincent Van Gogh had a childlike respect for the work of Jean Francais Millet, particularly the painting The Sower. Van Gogh’s own poverty and Dutch religious background helped him identify with farming subjects as in the metaphorical image of a sower. Specifically, he identified with Millet’s striding boy intent on doing God’s harvesting in his painting, The Sower. The influence Millet had upon Van Gogh that can’t be ignored. The great compassion Millet felt for peasants working the soil is the main connection that Millet and Van Gogh shared. Both painters came from religious working class backgrounds but their beliefs in artistic expression were very different. Millet chose to paint in the style of the Barbizon school while Van Gogh was largely self-taught with some training in the Netherlands. It was in Paris where Van Gogh met the Impressionists who influenced him to go beyond his Dutch background and his mimetic connection to Millet. However, it is the radical transformation evidenced in Van Gogh’s version of The Sower that clearly defines their differences. Although Van Gogh copied Millet’s The Sower several times, it was in sunny Arles that Van Gogh’s theories about color and expression truly manifested a shift in consciousness.

            The Biblical Sower in Matthew was an influence to both artists with its religious identification with peasantry—by virtue of their position socially they appear virtuous and godly in their connection to the fertility of the Earth. It is here that they shared a commonality. The parable of the sower is a parable of Jesus’ found in the Bible. In Matthew 13:1-23,Jesus tells of sowing the earth: “Some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds devoured them, Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth, But when the sun came up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears let them hear.” This is allegorically infusing the connection that man has with God through the fertility of spiritual growth.

             Millet celebrated the movement of raw life visually transforming the fields into one moment of man communing with nature. Millet gave nobility to the peasant. Van Gogh was fond of Millet mostly because of his strong symbolism showing man in the midst of nature and his task of bringing life to the soil. Millet is famous for saying, ”I was born a peasant and shall die a peasant.” Van Gogh consistently identified with the peasant class and similar to Millay ascribed to the notion that laborers and farmers were noble and godly. In 1885 Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “Millet is father Millet, counselor and mentor in everything for young artists.” Van Gogh’s real father was an evangelistic preacher who never supported Van Gogh’s art and one of the catalysts for Van Gogh’s liberation of color, which can be seen in his 1888 The Sower.

             There is a mimetic message that both Millet and Van Gogh adhered to, and though both were inspired, they painted the parable very differently. Van Gogh loved Millet and copied The Sower and many other paintings by Millet. There was a primary difference between them, which was Van Gogh’s radiant individualism, and his break from the academic figurative rules, which, unlike Millet, he no longer continued to follow.  The symbolic focus on a solitary figure without high social ranking was a driving force in both of the paintings. Millet painted The Sower in 1850 while Van Gogh painted his in 1888. Millet was a Realist painter whereas Van Gogh was an Expressionist with a connection to Impressionism. Van Gogh used Millet’s metaphor of The Sower as a catalyst for a new vision in painting where color triumphs over form and message). ”Ultimately, it was the sun of Arles that for Van Gogh was a life-giving force. The Sower, a work executed in the blaze of the Arles summer, reflects a quantum leap in artistic self-revelation.  Its theme was a hallowed one in nineteenth-century painting-- the cyclical motif of harvesting and reseeding the earth, and, the sower, himself. It is a figure transformed by Van Gogh from copying one of his idols, Millet.” (Rosenblum-Janson Pg.429)

            Van Gogh’s painting of The Sower depends entirely on colors/perspective. It was painted in Provence, where he had gone in search of stronger light and more vivid colors. He saw the south as an unspoiled paradise. The canvas is dominated by two complimentary tints: the violet of the field and man and the yellow of the sky and corn. The sower’s clothes have the same tones as the nature that surrounds him. He is identifiable as nature without being separate or as a counterpoint... It is all God. The figure in Van Gogh is not centralized--instead, the sun is central, as if the bright, yellow eye of God (yellow is the most visible of all colors, and the color of Van Gogh’s house in Arles). The dazzling array of sunlight and the grass are the brushstrokes of a new creator-Van Gogh, himself. “The sun is a symbol of beneficial life that permeates everything the eye sees”. (Argan Pg. 94 )  In Arles, Van Gogh further pursued his stated belief that “color expresses something in itself.” (Wallace, Robert Pg. 102 ). Millet’s The Sower is drab in contrast and was railed by the critics as being violent and brutal. It is a vision of a proud, striding peasant in an arduous work pose. There is no grand light or vegetation. It is as barren as the parable in the bible. It is a story with a narrative of truth and little more. Van Gogh’s The Sower is, on the other hand, exuberant in artistic revelation and transcends the figurative. The reason for this departure from his traditional Dutch artistic sensibilities (He admired Rembrandt’s portraits of the poor, and this may account for the darkness of his Dutch years palette (i.e., The Potato Eaters) began when Van Gogh went to Paris and began to socialize with members of the art community such as Gauguin, Pissarro, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec.

            Van Gogh’s The Sower was completed in 1888. Millet died in 1875, Van Gogh’s well-appreciated “art father figure” was no longer there, and after over twenty copies of Millay’s work Vincent was now his own man. Van Gogh’s electric and mise-en-scene vision of The Sower is different that Millet’s rigid, striding hero placed in a natural setting. Van Gogh’s The Sower is subsumed in color radiating chromatically in an earth world engaging him. “The Sower pits the powerful violet of a freshly plowed field against the bright yellows of standing wheat and a sun-filled sky. The sower himself seems a bridge between these strong colors; his body blends with the field while his eyes are at the level of the yellow horizon. The short, almost harsh brush strokes heighten the tensions created by the colors.” (Wallace PG. 102)

            Van Gogh’s intentions and ideas in painting a copy of Millet’s The Sower can be best understood and interpreted in his revealing letters to his brother and confidante, Theo. The difference in the two ‘Sowers’ is very distinct. Although Van Gogh praises Millet as a basis for sound poetry; ”Ce qui ne passe pas dans ce qui passé” (it exists) Van Gogh writes to Theo “And what Michelangelo said in a splendid metaphor, I think Millet has said without metaphor, and Millet can perhaps teach us to see, and get “a faith.” If I do better work later on, I certainly shall not work differently than now, I mean it will be the same apple, though riper.” (Roskill- pg.223 ) The Sower that Van Gogh painted is a riper apple than Millet and it blossoms into an entire new direction for painting. The catalyst for The Sower, while biblical, is Van Gogh’s response to Millet and the random fractal impulses that emerged from Van Gogh’s hand. In his letter to Theo Van Gogh explains this seemingly randomness; I must warn you that everyone will think I work too fast. Don’t you believe a word of it. Is it not emotion, the sincerity one’s feeling for nature that drives us?” (Wallace Pg. 91 )

            Van Gogh depicted birds descending to feast on the seeds as The Sower casts the new seeds that vibrate in dabs of blue and yellow. This refers to the sower parable of Jesus—yet, Van Gogh’s burning sun dominates the yellow sky, suggesting a warm pantheistic god. The vertical impasto strokes draw the stalks of grain, as thickly brushed sunrays spear through the background. In contrast, Millet’s The Sower is kinetic in posture but static in its realism. Realism (often used to mean naturalism) implies a desire to depict things accurately and objectively .Its message could be interpreted as an academic response to academic rules. Van Gogh was working outside of these rules. Peasants were much closer to how Van Gogh saw himself, and how people responded to his somewhat motley presence. Millet identified himself as a peasant, but in fact was financially comfortable in his later life. Vincent was a peasant literally and figuratively-- with painting his way of augmenting the nobility of a simpler life. The active images in Van Gogh’s The Sower shows a painter parodying nature. This was the painter’s decision to imitate reality or reject it all together.

            Van Gogh insisted he painted intrinsically what he saw and abstraction was not his goal. His goal was to tell the truth about life’s energy. Van Gogh’s perceptions were a true reflection of who he was, which was an individual, an expressionist and an artist.  He wrote Theo stating; “If I have to *paint in the abstract I would rather not paint at all”. (Roskill Pg.336) Van Gogh was a Dutch painter and Millet was French, and the Dutch painted dark and the French lighter. Van Gogh’s reaction to sunny Arles was to illuminate the very nature of his own being and that, which was in front of him. Mllet sought to focus on only one subject as a figurative composition. Van Gogh’s The Sower was a daring departure from Millet but also from Jules Bastien-Lepage .The peasantry Lepage identified with was connected to his having been raised in a farming town, as well. These same agricultural themes inspired Millet, which led to Van Gogh’s inspiration from both painters.  Lepage, like Millet expressed the bleakness in hard work even with all of its virtue and honesty. The man carrying sticks on his back by Lepage is akin to the stylized model that Millet used is his version of The Sower. Van Gogh, like Lepage and Millet, chose to lend compassion to the pathetic, weary features of man as a beast of burden. These are just three of the artists who were influenced by the biblical parable of the sower.

            The Sower by Van Gogh was executed in the blazing Arles sunshine, a life-giving force. This was a quantum leap in artistic revelation. The previous cyclic harvesting theme has miraculously become the emotional property of the artist. Vincent’s The Sower re-seeds the earth but is absorbed in a color play that now transcends art that is beyond God and nature. The artist is the total revealer of phenomena while the figurative academic rules are swallowed up by the power of Futuristic-Expressionism right on the edge of the Symbolist movement.

The yellow bountiful sun of Van Gogh’s design is centralized like a religious altar-- glowing in a thick paint of artistic genesis. The conventions of perspectives are further challenged with an impressionistic pigment of purple counterpointing yellow. The moral and socialist image of Millet’s The Sower is absorbed into a new vision of painting-- one that is psychological and compresses images into a continuous weave of paint intending to collide courageously with the past. In a letter to Theo,  “ And I should not be surprised if The Impressionists soon find fault with my way of working, for it has been fertilized by the eyes of Delacroix rather than by theirs. Because, instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly.” (Roskill Pg.277)

 

            In Millet’s The Sower, the figure of the sower is moving but he sky and the land are flat dull colors. It is a symbol of an animated figure with the social responsibility to work. The private collectors would regard the painting as “dark” and “ugly.”” Millet’s The Sower is an invented sower who is burdened with the artist’s thoughts; but he is a creeping shadow on a ploughed field, which is only a field of subjective memory. Clad in the costume of the proletariat he casts the seeds on to an ambiguous dark hill with a soft, looming sky suggesting hope. These are not his seeds, nor his fields—but, probably God’s sky (Millet unwittingly created a poster child for Socialism!). In Vincent Van Gogh, A Biography, Julius Meire Graefe observes,“ Another peasant ploughs near the horizon with his oxen, or rather there is a silhouette plough with motionless animal silhouettes, in front of a sky canvas in which birds cut out of paper attempt to flap their immoveable wings.” (Graefe Pg 125) In Van Gogh’s’s The Sower a peasant strides across a field of kinetic soil and a yellow, pulsating sky with a power of movement carrying the viewer. “Hundreds of Sowers were embodied in one figure. He strides along, not for you, not for art, not for Van Gogh, but for his work, with every nerve stretched to its purpose and every limb and every rag on his body forming part of the action.” (Graefe Pg.25) The field is all radiant and plowed in Van Gogh’s Sower and the seeds are thrown symbolically unto life itself. The Sower has become a historical everyman tilling in a linear cyclical ebb and flow.

            The lines and colour in Van Gogh’s The Sower have an ephemeral value created as solid structure. “Millet’s The Sower belongs to the other days, to the days of Millet’s bourgeois symbolism. Van Gogh’s matter-of-factness and his heroic simplicity are such that in a few centuries his copies will be regarded as the originals, and Millet’s originals as weak imitations.” (Graefe Pg. 26). Vincent would write to Theo;” The little house in which Millet lived, I have never seen it, seen it, but I imagine that those four little human nests are of the same kind.” (Roskill Pg. 230). The motif of the sowing countryman came about early in Van Gogh’s Dutch period (Potato Eaters) and was bolstered by Millet’s example. In Arles 1888 we can see how Van Gogh was influenced by Gauguin and Japanese painting with its diagonal tree similar to Gauguin’s Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888)—however, the broken-off branch is typical of the trees Van Gogh developed in Holland. (Hammacher Pg.99) The move to Arles brought a fresh perspective, as we have seen. The Sower contrasts loud violet tilled soil counterpointed by warm yellow wheat and sunburst. Van Gogh’s The Sower is at the right corner of the painting-- unlike Millet’s which dominates the entire canvas. Millet’s The Sower seems like a socialist strut compared to Van Gogh’s similarity to an eidetic phenomenological reduction as described by the philosopher, Husserl 1859). Millet is mimetically inspired while Van Gogh is an inventor of a new mimesis, while still maintaining the original epistemology.

             In Van Gogh’s painting, the body of the The Sower appears to be a connection between the two complementary colors. The boy in Van Gogh’s painting blends into the field, but his eyes are fixed into the horizontal sky. There is a tension in Van Gogh’s painting that Millet might not have used. The tension for Millet was the bourgeois response to his lionizing a peasant in a tense political atmosphere of power protectionism. Van Gogh’s brush strokes do seem harsh and quick. The cold French hill in which Millet placed his sower is very different from the heated, flat heaven within Van Gogh’s sower strides. When Van Gogh arrived from Paris to Arles in February, everything was blossoming. Gone were the grays of The Netherlands.

 Van Gogh wrote to Theo from Arles;” Those who don’t believe in this sun are infidels.” (Rosskill August 1888). The excitement of the countryside is expressed in as if the fields were alive with its growing crops, cobalt skies and the land shimmering, glowing and vibrating. Van Gogh celebrated and loved the drama of nature while Millet used it as a backdrop for his narratives. Millet’s The Sower trods a proud burden mandated by the inevitability of nature and the necessity of work. “Vincent probably led a double existence in Arles. Perhaps everybody in similar circumstances would have done the same. His painting was a sensuous surrender to a strange form of nature, really a wild orgy. ”(Graefe Pg.66) Paris was a different mind-set where art was its own subject with schools and salons Millet and Van Gogh were privy to (as well as their colleagues). “In Arles there were Arlesian men and women, mountains, the sky and colors—things that had to be accepted in silence. In Arles everything was still shapeless and unpainted.” (Graefe Pg.66)

            Although it is true that Van Gogh was also a disciple of Rembrandt and Delacroix, his drawings are organized and mechanical yet coaxed by creativity. His was a responsibility of moral intrigue and the human condition. Unlike Millet, Van Gogh’s color dominated his feelings and emotions. “His was the result of profound self-intuition and experience, he was a naturalist of the first water.” (Graefe Pg.68) The Sower was in many ways Van Gogh himself projected onto the canvas-- guiltless and happy as the paint around him. He once said he could live without God but not without creativity. The biblical sower is a sublimated symbol of that statement and one that consumed Van Gogh until his death. “He possessed a number of undeveloped intellectual aspirations, which might have stood him in great stead, but he put them on one side because he considered them unpure.” (Graefe Pg.68)

            The individual was Emile Zola’s claim to artistry, but one that Van Gogh would personify past the Impressionist and Expressionist timeline. In a letter to Theo Van Gogh wrote; “Zola says,” Moi artist, je veut vivre tout haut-veut vivre” (I as an artist want to live as vigorously as possible-I want to live) without mental reservation-naïve as a child. No, not as a child, as an artist-with good will, however my life presents itself. Now look at all those studied little mannerisms, all that convention, how exceedingly conceited it really is, how fundamentally wrong is the man who doesn’t feel himself small, who does not realize he is but an atom.” (Holt Pg.474) Van Gogh’s The Sower is as vigorous as any peasant could be illustrated. He has taken the viewer from a grain of sand into the infinite universe.

            The Sower could very well be an individual creation inspired by God, life, and art, or Van Gogh’s creation alone. Van Gogh created a reality that sublimated his feeling of being a failure at life. In 1880 after failing at teaching, gallery work and preaching he had decided to channel his passion for humanity. He had already studied and copied Rembrandt and the dark Dutch style. He needed the freedom to personalize a painting like The Sower. He no longer followed the Masters—instead he gravitated to a radical and different way to paint. In Paris, he was influenced by Seurat’s pointillism/divisionism. Before Paris, Japanese prints and its lines and colors influenced him. He had dabbled in Impressionism but it wasn’t enough. He wanted the pure force of emotion with powerful color and thick swirls.

            Millet, with his choice of muddy/earthy tones, portrayed the sower as a stocky, well-built young man –implying a certain working-class nobility and this characterization came to be associated with the Social Realist movement. This nobility if viewed from the perspective of Social Realism creates even more meaning. The peasant can be viewed as a sower of social justice or a voice for the lower classes yearning for social mobility and expressing this is social protest and descent. The bright sun of Millet’s The Sower could indicate that he has the forces of social justice on his side.

            Van Gogh displayed a kinship of anger and ruthless reality that was different than Millet’s. Van Gogh tried to be artistically obsequious by signing his name Atelier Vincent, and even signed some of his drawings with the new name. He came to the conclusion that there was not a market for pictures of peasants unless he said,”they were--perfumed.” In another letter to Theo Van Gogh writes:

             I can see that even Millet, just because he was so serious, couldn’t help keeping good    

            courage. That is something peculiar, not in all styles of painting. Those who seek real                   simplicity are themselves so simple and their view of life is so full of willingness and         courage, even in hard times. It must be-“une revolution qui est, puisqu’il faut qu’elle          soit.”

(Roskill 1888) Van Gogh further purified the work of Millet-- taking it from a static painting to a living color field.

            Millet once wrote; ”Art began to decline from the moment that the artist did not learn directly and naively upon the impressions made by nature. Cleverness naturally and rapidly took the place of nature, and decadence then began…at the bottom of it always comes this; a man must be moved himself in order to move others.”(Ruskinp124-129). Van Gogh’s The Sower was his first attempt to make an original contribution to Modern Art since his art studies in Paris. What made it original and unlike Millet was the violent juxtaposition of bold colors—which were yellow and violet. He was clearly moved by Millet’s subject and the effect on its time. It was the message that drove him to imitate but he was approaching it from a very apprehensive place. He wrote to Theo in 1888, “The sketch keeps tormenting me…and I wonder whether I should tackle it seriously and make a terrific painting of it. My God! How I should like that.” (Roskill 1888)

            The solitary man in both paintings has new meaning in Van Gogh’s Sower he as taken epistemology back to the cave paintings and then to the future. This work appears unimpeded, without pretense and suddenly freed art from academic perspective and appropriate color. It is a new language. Van Gogh had imagined the ultimate masterpiece as speaking  “a symbolic language through colour alone”. And in this sense, it would truly be a modern piece. He wrote in a letter to Theo in 1888, “ Could The Sower be painted in color, contrasting violet and yellow together, for example—Yes or no? Yes, of course. Well do it then! Yes—that’s what Pere’ Martin said, too: “Il faut faire le chef-d’ouevre”. (Roskill 1888)

             Millet’s The Sower has now been transformed into a fractal mirage of thick paint animating textures and de-constructing the figurative. 1888 was a time of change in the world. An inflorescence of new ideas and paradigms were constantly being introduced. Darwin, Marx, the Industrial Revolution as well as the advent of photography (which was supposedly infinitely reproducible) changed the way people looked at the world and art. Van Gogh was compelled to stay informed of these shifts, but was foremost a painter. The world’s progress was not as important to him as his own artistic progress. He saw cities as being unclean and superficial. He wrote to Theo; “It is curious that my painted studies seem darker in town than in the country.” (Roskill, Antwerp, end of Dec. 1885). In the country he could create using light itself as a pallet. It was life giving and the light gave to him joy and inspiration and so it was Arles that became his muse. His world was a world of pure creativity and he had no peers that could follow him.

 In a letter to Theo he writes;” “Oh, my dear boy, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can very well do without God both in life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life-the power to create.” (Roskill-Arles, early September 1888). Van Gogh was seriously concerned how other artists viewed and criticized his work-- and it must have hurt deeply when Cezanne told him “you paint like a mad man.” It is good that Millet never saw Van Gogh’s version of The Sower for he might have had a hard time understanding the translucent energy of Van Gogh’s work as well.

 

*Van Gogh referred to his own painting The Sower as “a failure and a glorified study”. (Roskill June 24,1888) Although it is said that imitation is the highest form of flattery, Van Gogh deconstructed Millet’s balanced figurative statement into a radical experiment of color and emotional intelligence whose departure from convention still resonates and documents a quantum leap towards Modern Art (i.e., Symbolism. Cubism). The student has become the master. Van Gogh however was unsure of his direction like most visionaries and carried doubt with him always. In a letter to Theo, Van Gogh asks; “Did Pissarro say anything about The Sower? Afterwards, when I have gone further in these experiments, The Sower will still be the first attempt in that style.” (Roskill 289-Arles, September 8, 1888). That style Van Gogh differentiated him not only from Millet but the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. The direction was his and his alone and one that created great quarrel with Gauguin.  He writes, “I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a billiard table in the middle there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash of the most alien reds and greens, in violet and blue”.  (Roskill,Arles September 8, 1888) Van Gogh changed the previous narratives of composition and nature into a language of color theory.

            Van Gogh’s father was a minister and clashed with the young Van Gogh’s passionate artistic temperament. He wrote Theo that his father’s righteousness turns everything that is light into darkness. The Dutch influence was replaced at the end of his life with a new art and a self-exiled determinism. “ He longed for the world of men. Life without them was blank. Vincent demonstrated this theme in three of four professions .He will appear in his relations to his parents, his brother, the women he loved, his teacher and his friend. These relationships, apart from the one to his brother, all alike ended in failure.” (Graefe  Pg.1)

 

            If we psychoanalyze Van Gogh’s The Sower we see a boy. He is planting seeds playfully absorbed in abstract color. This separation from the Bible is an important difference in Millet’ The Sower which was meant to be biblical. This can be observed in a letter to Theo stating,” I have worked in the olive groves, because they have (Bernard and Gauguin) maddened me with their Christs in the Garden, with nothing really observed. Of course with me there is really no question of doing anything from the Bible.” (Roskill Arles 1889)  The boy called Vincent is free at last. Free to express his soul as only he knows how it experiences life.

In conclusion, The Sower by Van Gogh is not a copy of Millet but rather an extension of purpose and therefore a transformation. The bold stance of Millet’s The Sower was meant be held up in the salons and exhibitions as the triumph of noble peasantry via biblical imitation and association. Van Gogh’s The Sower is a smile of light that resonates with the sun. It is a clarion call to freedom of expression. It is art for art’s sake to the tenth power. It is free from the pin- point accuracy and approval of his critics.

 

 If being an artist is to be representative and concise, Millet is the victor. If an artist is one who sacrifices his soul for purpose it is Van Gogh. The laughing sun in Van Gogh’s The Sower is the laughter in Van Gogh’s heart in which he could create a world where creativity exists for its own sake and can therefore be the bread of life and the creator of new consciousness. Van Gogh transformed the fertile seed of Millet’s ground and grew a new hybrid of visual art in motion.

Unfortunately, Van Gogh did not live to see his extraordinary contribution to art, but he intuitively understood the consequences of originality. In his last letter to Theo he writes;

“ Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half-foundered owning to it—That’s all right, but you are not among the dealers in men so far as I know, and you can choose your side. I think, acting with true humanity, but what’s the use?”(Roskill Pg.340,July 1890)

 

…And now we are left to marvel at the colors of his brave, exquisite and elegant humanity.

Je sais ou’ se tou’ve Paris-Dans le coueur de Vincent.

 

 

 

Bibliography

Argan, Carlo, Art Classics, Van Gogh Rizzoli, International Public, Inc., 2004, New York City, NY  (Pg. 94)Print

 

Bolton, Roy A Brief History of Painting Magpie Books, Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2006, London Print

 

Graefe, Julius Meier, Vincent Van Gogh, A Biography, 1987,Dover Publications, Inc.,

New York City, London (Pg 1,25,26,66,68,125) Print

 

Hammacher, A.M., Vincent Van Gogh, Genius and Disaster, 1968, Abradale Press/Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, NY (Pg.99) Print

 

 

Janson, H.W., Rosenblum, Robert, 19th Century Art, 1984, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, NY and Great Britain (Pg.429)

 

Holt, Elizabeth G., From The Classicists to the Impressionists, Vol lll,

1966, Anchor Books, Garden City, NY (Pg. 474) Print

 

 

Roskill, Mark, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh 1927, Constable and Co., New York, NY (Pg.230, 277,289,340…others by date of letter) Print

 

Wallace, Robert, The World of Van Gogh, 1969, Time-Life Books, Inc., Alexandria, VA

Pg 91, 102) Print

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Personal Essay by Rick Fordyce in the Seattle Times

3/9/24, 10:22 AM The Seattle Times https://replica.seattletimes.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&pubid=84d463e0-c035-4...