On my previous status I quoted a paragraph from a letter Vincent wrote to his mother in which he referred to The red vineyard, a painting he had made eight months earlier in Arles, before his hospitalization in Saint-Rémy. By that time, Vincent had been living with Gauguin in the Yellow House for a couple of weeks and this is how the idea of depicting a vineyard at sunset ocurred to Vincent. Paul Gauguin had a lot to do with it. On the first Sunday of November, 1888, on a walk to Montmajour, passing the empty vineyards at the bottom of the mount, Vincent described to Gauguin the scene he had witnessed a month before when the grapes were harvested: the workers, mostly women, swarming over the flat purpling vines, sweating in the still-intense southern sky. Moved by this vivid description, Gauguin challenged his host to paint the scene from MEMORY. Gauguin offered to paint the same scene himself, based on nothing else than Vincents telling - that is, from IMAGINATION. For Vincent, their intimacy of their wandering walk and the splendor of the sunset over the vineyards, proved an irresistible inducement. He accepted the challenge. Gauguin gives me the courage to imagine things, he wrote. Over the next week, confined to the studio by a spell of rain, both artists constructed their competing visions. Chapter: 35 La Lutte, from Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith #vangogh #theredvineyard #vangoghthelife vangoghbiography/
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 09:17:23 +0000
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