Soon after van Gogh came to study informally with his cousin Anton Mauve, he wrote to his brother, "Mauve has taught me to see so many things that I used not to see." Mauve was van Gogh's mentor and protector when the young artist first lived in The Hague, where Mauve was one of the most important working artists. But Vincent's liaison with a homeless prostitute turned Mauve against him, and the artists parted company.
Tags: Mauve Anton Mauve painting dipinti pintura MFA Boston museum musée museu museo art arte oil canvas
© All Rights Reserved
In May 1890, van Gogh moved from the south of France to Auvers, northwest of Paris, painting many of his finest pictures there in a feverish spurt of activity before his suicide in July. Houses at Auvers shows the landscape of early summer. The view from above creates a flattened tapestry of shapes in which the tiled and thatched roofs of the houses form a mesmerizing patchwork of color.
Tags: Vincent Van Gogh Van Gogh Boston MFA Museum Musée Museu Museo Fine Arts Museum of Fine Arts Painting Pintura dipinti
© All Rights Reserved
In June 1889, shortly after his arrival at an asylum in the southern French town of Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted an oil sketch of a hillside in bloom. In October, finding himself short of materials, he sacrificed that earlier composition, reusing the same canvas for another painting. Recent collaborative research has revealed the lost picture beneath surface layers of paint in this view of a ravine near the asylum. For more on this discovery, see: www.mfa.org/collections/europe/missing-van-gogh-discovered
Tags: Vincent Van Gogh Van Gogh Boston MFA Museum Musée Museu Museo Fine Arts Museum of Fine Arts Painting Pintura dipinti
© All Rights Reserved
Van Gogh painted Augustine Roulin, the wife of Joseph Roulin, in bold, exaggerated colors against a vividly patterned background; the rope in her hands leads to a cradle. At right, the painter inscribed the title "La Berceuse," which means both "lullaby" and "she who rocks the cradle." Van Gogh once wrote, "I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring."
Tags: Vincent Van Gogh Van Gogh Boston MFA Museum Musée Museu Museo Fine Arts Museum of Fine Arts Painting Pintura dipinti
© All Rights Reserved
In May 1889 van Gogh checked into an insane asylum. This landscape belongs to a series of pictures based on the view from his barred window there. The scene is much as the artist described it in a letter to his brother, Theo, on August 30th: “…a field of yellow stubble that they are ploughing, the cut part of the ploughed earth with the strips of yellow stubble, background of hills.” The distant windmills, however, were an addition from van Gogh’s imagination, an indication that he painted the scene from memory several months later.
Tags: Vincent Van Gogh Van Gogh Boston MFA Museum Musée Museu Museo Fine Arts Museum of Fine Arts Painting Pintura dipinti
© All Rights Reserved