Works included in the exhibition are on loan from many of the most noted collections of the artist’s works, including the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; the Museé d’Orsay, Paris; the National Gallery, London; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The curators draw extensively from Van Gogh's letters and from research into the artist's deep interest in literature and science to explore the influences and themes that dominate much of his work.
From his earliest letters to his last great drawings and paintings, Van Gogh showed an extraordinary fascination with the natural world. Youthful studies of trees, flowers, and heath-land were accompanied by verbal descriptions of the changing seasons, while increasingly ambitious pictures showed many aspects of the Dutch landscape. In 1874 he wrote to his brother Theo: "Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that’s the real way to learn to understand art better and better. Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see."
In Van Gogh's earliest works he depicted Holland as a country with distinctive topography, weather, and flora and fauna. Well educated and with some knowledge of botany and natural history, the artist’s correspondence showed a precocious awareness of bird, flower, tree, and plant species from his immediate environment. The remarkable drawing Marsh with Water Lillies (1881, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond) reveals that many of these preoccupations were evident at an early stage.
His travels to England, Belgium, and France brought new encounters with nature and a shift from the biblical perspectives of his youth to modern attitudes influenced by contemporary authors and expanding scientific knowledge. Late in his life, most notably while in Arles and Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted elemental landscapes in snow, wind, rain, and sunshine, while making incisive images of insects, leaves, and rocks that reflect his knowledge of museums and illustrated publications.
Van Gogh moved to Paris in early 1886, not only putting Holland behind him but also confronting many of the values and preoccupations of modern Europe. Long familiar with the novels of Zola, Daudet, and the Goncourt brothers, he tackled their city in paint and responded to its curious conjunctions of new and old, the natural and the artificial. Paintings of cultivated flowers, such as Imperial Crown Fritillaries in a Copper Vase (1887, Musée d’Orsay), stood in contrast to depictions of modest blooms picked from parks and building sites. Rather than paint the grand boulevards of Paris, Van Gogh chose the village of Montmartre and other suburban areas, discovering dense thickets in urban parks where — as in Undergrowth (1887, Centraal Museum, Utrecht) — sunlight barely reached through the gloom. In his letters of this time, Van Gogh cited such radical thinkers as Jules Michelet and Ernest Renan, while as an artist he explored the daring new approaches to color and landscape pioneered landscape pioneered by George Seurat, Émile Bernard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Vincent van Gogh, Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon
The most dramatic shift in Van Gogh's engagement with nature undoubtedly occurred when he moved to Provence in 1888 where close contact with his surroundings inspired a new kind of sustained attention to natural form. Little noticed until now are a number of drawings and other studies from this period that record Van Gogh’s scrutiny of individual flowers, insects, and birds, reminding us of his early education and his enquiring mind.
At the other extreme, the artist often emphasized the dramatic rhythms of the landscape itself, in which fields and trees resonate in unison and entire hillsides seem animated. Olive Trees (1889, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), depicting a mountainous landscape, is dominated by such rhythms, its "savage" qualities contrasted with the decadent character of Paris that Van Gogh commented upon in his writings.
