“If Cézanne, Gauguin, and VanGogh were charlatans, they were like no other charlatans that ever lived. If their aim was notoriety, it is strange that they should have spent solitary lives of penury and toil. If they were incompetents, they were curiously intent upon the most difficult problems of their art. The kind of simplification which they attempted is not easy, nor, if accomplished, does it make a picture look better than it is. The better their pictures are, the more they look as if any one could have painted them; in fact, they look just as easy as the lyrical poems of Wordsworth or Blake.”[19]
For a glimpse of VanGogh’s life and aspirations, see his letters published in English under the title, “Letters of a Post-Impressionist,” written mostly to his brother—simple, pathetic documents, showing the eager, earnest striving of a man who finally went insane and shot himself. Critics and opponents of his work have seized upon his madness as proof of lack of sanity in what he painted—perhaps, but then is dullness the only proof positive of sanity?
Gauguin, half Breton, half Peruvian Creole, was a restless spirit.
“More than once he circumnavigated the globe, and all his life he was at recurring intervals a victim to wander-thirst. In early manhood he returned to Paris and made an heroic attempt to settle down. He entered a bank, and got on there very well.
“One day he saw in a dealer’s shop some paintings which brought back memories of the light and color he had seen in the tropics. He sought out the painters Pissarro and Guillaumin, and began painting at the age of thirty. Two years later, in 1880, he exhibited two landscapes in the manner of Pissarro.
“Degas made the decisive impression on him, by his systematic division of large planes of color, and above all, by his strong drawing.”[20]
VAN GOGH
Portrait of Self