Categories: French Culture, French History

572 Vincent Van Gogh with Elyse (Nov 16)

[00:00:15] Introduction

Annie Sargent: This is Join Us in France, episode 572.

Annie Sargent: Bonjour. I’m Annie Sargent and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.

[00:00:31] Today on the podcast

Annie Sargent: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about the tragic, brilliant life of Vincent van Gogh.

Annie Sargent: Discover the man behind the masterpieces, his struggles, his artistic breakthroughs, and the deep sadness that shaped his iconic works.

Annie Sargent: From dark beginnings to the vibrant colors of Arles, this episode reveals why Van Gogh’s art still moves us today. A must listen for art lovers and dreamers alike.

[00:01:03] Podcast supporters

Annie Sargent: This podcast is fueled by chocolatine, coffee, and the generosity of listeners like you.

Annie Sargent: You book itinerary consults, take my VoiceMap tours in Paris, hop in my electric car for a day trip around Toulouse, or chip in on Patreon. And I’m very grateful to have all of you helping me out.

Annie Sargent: Want to keep me going and skip the ads? There’s a link for that in the show notes. You’ll find everything at joinusinfrance.com/boutique and merci.

[00:01:33] Bootcamp 2026

Annie Sargent: Bootcamp 2026 is sold out. If you’d like to be put on the waiting list just in case some people drop out, email me, annie@joinusinfrance.com. The waiting list is also first come, first serve, so don’t wait.

[00:01:47] Magazine segment

Annie Sargent: There will not be a magazine part of the podcast today because this recording ran long, but I could not stop Elyse on such a beautiful story.

Annie Sargent: But I do want to send my thanks and a shout out to new patrons, Paula Ford and Dale B, and to all of my patrons, really. I’ll be posting quite a bit to Patreon in late November because I’ll be off on a long drive through France, but shh, I’ll tell you more about that next week.

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[00:02:25] Vincent Van Gogh with Elyse

Annie Sargent: Bonjour, Elyse.

Elyse Rivin: Bonjour, Annie.

Annie Sargent: What a fun topic we have today. We’re going to talk about Vincent van Gogh, or Van Gogh.

Annie Sargent: Van Gogh, yeah. So I will say it once correctly, van Gogh. I’m done saying it correctly.

Elyse Rivin: And so Van Gogh is the English way, van Gogh is the Dutch way, and the French van Gog.

Annie Sargent: Van Gog.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah. And when I said that to my husband, he went, "It’s van Gog." I said, "No gog to you. No, it’s not van Gog."

Elyse Rivin: So we have our own ways of saying things. But I’ve had a couple of people actually email me to tell me that I’m usually very careful about language, and how careless of me not to say Van Gogh properly every single time. And it’s just because I’d have to think about it, and sometimes when I’m talking, I’m talking about what I want to say and not how I want to say it. Anyway.But I think it’s also, honestly, there are certain sounds that come from other languages. I don’t know if we’re always required to be able to pronounce them the way they would be pronounced in that language, you know? I mean-

Annie Sargent: That is a good point.

Annie Sargent: It’s not that easy, you know? I allow you to say it the way you want, you know?

[00:03:38] Van Gogh’s Life in France

Annie Sargent: And also, he spent a lot of time in France, you know? The man was honorary French, I guess.

Elyse Rivin: He was honorary French, yes. In fact, on the notes, you know, that’s why I put down, "French artist?" Question mark. "Dutch artist?" No. Universal artist, I think.

Annie Sargent: You’re right. He was beloved everywhere.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah. But it is true, and I think that’s what makes it sort of interesting on one level, is that people do associate him with France even though almost everyone who knows anything about him knows that in fact he was Dutch.

Annie Sargent: Right.

Elyse Rivin: And in his very sadly short life, since he died at the age of 37, he spent, what? He spent a total of not quite five years in France. But he was very mucha traveler in the sense that he never stayed in one place for very long. And one of the things that I hadn’t realized until I was doing background information on him, was how much he was restless and he spent part of his life in Holland, of course, and part in England, which he loved, part in Belgium, and then, of course, the last part of his life in France, you know?

Annie Sargent: Right. He died in France.

Elyse Rivin: He died in France, and of course, he’s buried in France. And we’ll mention a little bit of some of the things you can go to visit that are in connection with him.

[00:04:57] The Universal Appeal of Van Gogh’s Art

Elyse Rivin: So, my first question to you, Annie, is, why do you think he’s so famous?

Annie Sargent: You know, I’m not sure, but I think his paintings, especially the ones that have,later years and that are very famous, such as Starry Night, are just a universal image. Like, everybody knows the paintings he did of sunflowers, which I don’t even know the names of some of those, but you know, that’s the picture you have in your head, is either the Starry Night with all the deep blue and the … or his sunflowers. And I think he, it speaks to us. Like, it just… I don’t know… it’s universally beautiful.

Elyse Rivin: Okay. I mean, those are, this is really the kinds of questions that I find really fascinating to ask. And you know, of course, I spend time doing visits to museums with people, and I’m always just curious to see how people react to different works of art and why.

[00:05:53] Why do people love his work?

Elyse Rivin: And it is one of the things. That’s the reason I put down that list of questions, is because he is an artist who is loved by, I would say, 90% of the people who look at his work. There are always a few who don’t appreciate it.

Elyse Rivin: And I was thinking about it, because of course, I do know his work really well, but I was curious, thinking, "What is it about his work that people adore him so much?"

Annie Sargent: Because people flood the section of the Orsay Museum where he is. If you go to Amsterdam, you have to buy tickets well in advance to get into this museum that is just devoted to him alone. And I had the privilege years and years ago when I was still living back in New York, there was a huge retrospective of his work, and I was, at the time, temporarily working in one of the sections of the museum, and so I got the privilege, which will never happen again in my life, of walking through the exhibit after hours when nobody was there, and it was just one of the most remarkable experiences, just standing there all by myself, looking at some of these paintings. You know? He used such striking colors.

Annie Sargent: And they haven’t aged. It’s like, you know when you do photography, you can retouch your pictures, right? And sometimes, you fix the white balance or something like that, and it makes a tremendous difference. On some photos, it doesn’t help that much, but on some, it really, really helps. And I think he had a knack for finding the right tone of yellow, the right tone of blue, the right tone of green, I think especially in his later years.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

Annie Sargent: There were times when his paintings looked kind of dull and dreary.

Elyse Rivin: Mm-hmm.

Annie Sargent: And there were times when they looked very happy and just contemplative of the beauty around him.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah, well, it is a fact that, of course, that, you know, he did switch, literally switch to bright colors in the last, just the last few years of his life. What’s fascinating is that most of the world knows his last works, the last few years, the last two, three years of his life, whereas it’s only a part of what was a huge production. I mean, this is someone who died at the age of 37 and left over 2,000 works, drawings, watercolors and paintings, because he… in his mental state, which was largely in a frenzy, unfortunately, a good part of his adult life, he produced at least one painting a day.

Annie Sargent: That is unbelievable.

Elyse Rivin: It’s unbelievable. What was so amazing about him was that whatever was going on, unfortunately for him, inside his brain in terms of his angst and his depressions, he was clearly lucid and very, very sure of what he wanted to do about the painting.

Elyse Rivin: But it took him forever. It took him till over the age of 30 to really decide that that was what he wanted to do, and that was what makes his life so fascinating, because he condensed into what is basically an incredibly short life. There are only two or three other artists in the history of painting who are that famous for having lived such a short time. He did so many different things, and all of those things got incorporated into his brain and came out in the paintings that he did in the last few years.

Elyse Rivin: So, I thought maybe we could start by talking a little bit about this, the beginning of his life, and then talk about what happened that made him the artist that we all know.

Annie Sargent: Very good. Very good.

[00:09:30] Early Life and Family Background

Elyse Rivin: So, of course, he was born in Holland in 1853. He was, in fact, the first child… he was actually the second child born. He was the first child to survive of an upper middle class family that was a very famous family for several centuries, that was really part of the high bourgeoisie of Holland, that had art merchants in the family.

Elyse Rivin: So, art was basically part of their existence, but also, and this is typical, of course, the Protestant countries of the north, there were pastors in the family. There was a family that was very involved in both the church, which was… I’m not quite sure because it… I think it was Calvinistic, it’s kind of complicated. But so, in his family, there was a part of the family that was very much involved in the church and in being preachers and part that was very successful as art merchants. And his uncles had, there was one branch in London and there was one branch of this family business in Paris, and they were really very, very famous.

Elyse Rivin: He wound up being the oldest of six surviving children, and of course, the one that he was closest to was his youngest brother, Theo, Theodore, who he called Theo, who became his best friend, and basically gave him psychological and financial support all during his life.

Annie Sargent: Right.

Elyse Rivin: But what happened, it’s… apparently, nobody to this day really knows. You know, I went online to look at all these things about what was wrong with him, what was his problem, you know. He was depressive. He had some kind of what most people would say is now some kind of bipolarity. Nobody really knows, but unfortunately for him, even at the age of six or seven, he was showing signs of having a behavior that was not exactly normal, like whatever that is.

Elyse Rivin: He was very silent, very withdrawn. He did not like being around other children. They tried to send him to a local school, and apparently, it went so badly that his parents decided that they would do homeschooling. They hired a woman who was apparently a very good, young teacher, and he and his sister, who was the next one after him, were homeschooled for several years. So he was in school school for a couple of years, and then between the ages of 7 and 11 and a half, 12, he was simply homeschooled.

Elyse Rivin: And he apparently couldn’t relate to other children. He was really not very good at the social contact.

Elyse Rivin: One of the things that happened though in his schooling was that they discovered he had a talent for languages because he learned English, which probably is easy to learn, honestly, if you’re Dutch, and German and French. So, he started learning all those languages as a little kid, and he had a lot of classes in drawing. And drawing was in fact something he did his entire life.

Annie Sargent: Hmm. So in a way, a brilliant child that had difficulties coping with the real world?

Elyse Rivin: Exactly.

Annie Sargent: There are a lot of kids like that, you know?

Elyse Rivin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, to this day, you know, who knows what label we would put on it today, but that’s exactly the perfect description of him. He was brilliant, he was highly oversensitive to a lot of things, but he could not cope with the real world.

Elyse Rivin: And any kind of emotional rejection, which is something that happened recurrently several times in his life in terms of dealing with women, set him spinning off into a major depression, major crisis. He just… it was like he was probably autistic, I would say, you know? He was one of these people who did not know how to relate to people, you know?

Annie Sargent: It’s true that… well, I mean, we know it in our own lives. We know people who go through a breakup and like, "Oh, who cares?" And, you know?

Elyse Rivin: Right.

Annie Sargent: They move on.

Elyse Rivin: Right.

Annie Sargent: And you have people, it seems they never get over it. There are some people, they just can’t get over the heartbreak that might have happened when they were 15 or when they were 20 or, you know? There’s stories in my family of women who never married because their fiance died…. tragically. And that she just never married after that.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

Annie Sargent: Crazy.

Elyse Rivin: It is crazy, but I guess that, that it’s hard to… Well, let’s just say that…

Annie Sargent: It’s just, that’s how these people are. You can’t, you know, you don’t choose that. It’s just how you came out, you know?

Elyse Rivin: That’s, it’s exactly, exactly.

[00:13:49] Struggles with Mental Health and Career Choices

Elyse Rivin: So poor Vincent, okay, at the age of 11 and a half, they decided to send him to overnight school. You can imagine what a catastrophe that was.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, because if you can’t cope with regular school, overnight school is going to be very hard.

Elyse Rivin: It’s going to be very hard. He was apparently, you know, picked on, I mean, you can just imagine the scenario. So at 13, he was, he went home, and he stayed home between the ages of 13 and 16. I have no idea, other than continuing his studies, whether he did anything.

[00:14:20] Moving to The Hague

Elyse Rivin: But at the age of 16, his parents forced him to leave. They actually forced him to leave, and they said, "Okay, since you know how to draw and you speak some English, we’re going to send you to one of your uncles." The company was Goupil & Company, that was the name of the art merchants business that they had. And they sent him to The Hague, which of course, you know, Holland being so small, I can’t even, I’ve got no idea how close it was to actually where he lived because he was in Brabant, which is a southern part of Holland. So The Hague is in the southern part of Holland, The Hague. Now, you know, we say The Hague. And he went to work for his uncle, and he actually enjoyed it. And he discovered painting. He had been drawing all of his childhood, but it was working with one of his uncles there that he actually discovered painting, and of course, learned a lot about Dutch painters, which of course was, there was certainly lots of them to look at. And he started doing some copying, which is a traditional old-fashioned way for artists to learn.

Elyse Rivin: He never actually went to a formal art school at that time. And he learned about color and mixing colors, and he really seemed to enjoy what he was doing, and he began writing. And one of the things that’s interesting is that this is the beginning of his writing. So we have this young guy who’s between the ages of 16 and 20, works with members of the family in an art merchants situation, who is learning about painting, about mixing colors, about artists, and who begins writing in his diaries, very intimate diaries, which are, actually some of which are available to be read. And then begins talking about something that is the essence of who he is. That is, art for him is a spiritual activity.

Annie Sargent: Interesting. Hm.

[00:16:09] Moving to London

Elyse Rivin: And this is what happens. At the age of 20, because he’s been so good working with his uncle in The Hague, his parents decide that it’s time for him to go to another part of the company, and they sent him to London.

Annie Sargent: Wow, that’s a big step.

Elyse Rivin: It’s a big step, and he’s 20 years old. His English is very, very good. In fact, he’s really, he was trilingual his, pretty much his whole life with French and Dutch. And various people described him as being happy for the first time in his life.

Annie Sargent: Oh, that’s good.

Elyse Rivin: He loved London. He loved England. He loved working in this other uncle’sbranch of the Goupil & Company. And everything would’ve been fine. At this point, he hasn’t really any particular ambition to be an artist. He’s just surrounded by art.

Elyse Rivin: But, and this is where we begin to see the fragility of his being, he falls in love.

Annie Sargent: Okay, that seems normal at age 20.

Elyse Rivin: Exactly, except that he falls in love with his… He’s staying in a boarding house, which was apparently something very normal to do, you know, in London. And he fell in love with the daughter of the people who had the boarding house.

Annie Sargent: Okay, that happened a lot I’m sure, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: That, which is perfectly classical. It would, if it was an English novel, it would be a wonderful story from their point. But she was not in love with him, and when he announced that he was in love with her, she basically told him that she was in love with somebody else, and it went and sent him off into a deep depression.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, that’s not good.

Elyse Rivin: It’s not good. And so unfortunately, it is the thing that tilts him into this situation where every time there’s some kind of rejection from the outside world, he stops basically functioning.

Elyse Rivin: So what happens is, it sends him into a situation which is very interesting, because I didn’t know this, but it’s a big chunk of what happened for the next few years of his life. He decides to seek solace in religion.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah, and I know a little bit about this, because wasn’t his father a preacher?

Elyse Rivin: Was, it was a preacher part-time.

Annie Sargent: Ah, okay.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah. And so what happens is, he, because he’s involved, I guess, with various, what would be evangelical churches in England, not the Church of England, which is very much close to Catholicism, he decides that he’s going to stop working as an art merchant and become a preacher.

Annie Sargent: Well, that’s a big change.

Elyse Rivin: And he becomes obsessed with the Bible, which he reads over and over and over again. And he decides that he’s going to study in one of the evangelical churches in England when there was lots of different ones that were, you know, pretty much all over the place. But he loses his job because he’s now not focusing on the work anymore. And he basically is sent by his family back to Holland.

Annie Sargent: Mm. Mm.

Elyse Rivin: And he is now 21.

Annie Sargent: So in the course of a year, he went from being extremely happy to making a very abrupt decision to completely change his path in life.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

Annie Sargent: And that doesn’t go well, and so he goes home.

Elyse Rivin: And he goes home.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, that’s sad.

Elyse Rivin: And he spends a good part of the next year trying to translate the Bible he had, and I don’t know what it is because it’s interesting, it doesn’t mention of it, which version it is, but he decides that whatever the version is that he has, that that’s the version he wants to translate into French and into German, and he becomes obsessed with this, and he’s really obsessed with the religion, and he decides, so he tries to enroll in theology school in Holland. And he does enroll, but what happens is, he can’t deal with structure. So he fails the classes even in the theology school.

Annie Sargent: Well, and also there is a million translation of the Bible, like, why do we need another one?

Elyse Rivin: Well, you know, I mean, you’re talking about rationality, right? All right. So, he fails, he goes to another theological school…

Annie Sargent: To see if that one was going to…

Elyse Rivin: And he fails that again. And so, he decides he’s going to be a lay preacher, going around proselytizing, and his family starts to worry about him.

Annie Sargent: Well, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: And he becomes so depressed, that his family, still trying to take care of him, and of course he’s now in his 20s, all right?

Annie Sargent: Which is good because some families would have said, "Oh, forget you," like, you know? No, they keep trying to…

Elyse Rivin: They keep trying, although his father is really starting to worry seriously about his mental state, you know, and wondering if there is something else that they need to do.

Elyse Rivin: Now, we’re talking about the 1870s into the 1880s. So, how much knowledge is there of psychiatry? I have no idea, you know?

Annie Sargent: Well, yeah, and even today, what do you do with a kid like that? I don’t know. It’s… It would be difficult, wouldn’t it?

[00:21:06] Moving to Paris

Elyse Rivin: So his father decides, "We’re going to try something new." So they send him to Paris. This is his first time going to Paris. And he goes to Paris in 1875, he’s 22 years old, to one of the other branches of this art merchant family, and he hates it.

Elyse Rivin: He hates the French, he hates Paris, and he hates the work there. Why? Because unlike in Holland and in England, he says… Now, this is pretty much almost quoting him. He says that, "The French consider art to be a commodity. It’s just speculation for investment. They don’t understand the spiritual aspect of art". And he gets fired even though he’s working for his uncle because he starts lecturing the clients who come there to buy art that, "You’re not supposed to buy art just because it’s an investment in money. How can you understand anything if you don’t understand the spirituality? Art is a connection to the cosmos," and I can just imagine this… I can just imagine the scene, you know.

Annie Sargent: It would be hard, yeah. This is a time in France where there were a lot of very famous artists.

Elyse Rivin: Oh, yeah.

Annie Sargent: This is, like, high time for The Salon.

Annie Sargent: Monet, Manet, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: Right, exactly, but he hasn’t met any of these people yet. The irony is that, of course, a few years later he does, and it changes everything for him.

Annie Sargent: And a lot of these guys were struggling at the time to, you know, you had to be in the Salon to be sold and you know, to be bought. It was the start of the development of the business of art in France, and he didn’t agree with it.

Elyse Rivin: Well, he didn’t agree with it, but also, I suspect that the art that was being sold by his family was more conservative and old-fashioned.

Annie Sargent: Well, I mean, I’m just listening to a book right now called Paris Is Burning…

Elyse Rivin: Uh-huh.

Annie Sargent: … about the story of the artist who thought that, that it was way too conservative, and that they couldn’t do anything to please the Salon people who were too stuck in their way.

Elyse Rivin: Absolutely.

Annie Sargent: In their ways, in their ways.

Elyse Rivin: So we have the repetition. He gets fired. He gets fired because they discover him basically discouraging these people from buying works because they’re…

Annie Sargent: Yeah, that is not going to work. Yeah.

[00:23:26] Back to England

Elyse Rivin: Exactly. And guess what? He goes back to England.

Annie Sargent: Okay. Of his own accord? He makes a decision?

Elyse Rivin: I… It’s hard to know, but he loved England so much that he decides, and he goes back to England, not with the idea of working again in the art business, but of being a lay preacher.

Annie Sargent: Okay, okay.

Elyse Rivin: Okay? So he’s back to his religious obsession. And this time…

Annie Sargent: Bringing Christianity to England, okay.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah, but this is what… This is why I find this part interesting is because he has a social conscience, and what happens is he goes to the very poor industrial parts of England where there are the miners, the people working in the factories, and these are the people he wants to be with.

Elyse Rivin: And not only does he start working, of course, as a preacher. I mean, you could just imagine him with a sack on his back, walking around, kind of like somebody going on the, the pilgrimage, going to these towns. But what he does is he develops an incredibly acute sense of the political situation and the misery of these people. But because this is Vincent Van Gogh, who is not right in his head.

Elyse Rivin: Instead of simply doing something constructive to help them. His empathy is enormous. But what he does is, he decides he’s going to live like them. So, he stops pretty much eating, and he sleeps on a dirty floor in these houses with these miserable, very poor miners. And so the aspect of being a preacher is basically, gets dissolved into this enormous bubble of empathy for the miserable on the earth, basically. That’s what happens, so.

Annie Sargent: Wow. Yeah. I mean, that’s a big jump, because you told us at the beginning that he was from a well-off family.

Elyse Rivin: Yes, yes.

Annie Sargent: And to get down into that sort of lifestyle through empathy, I mean, that’s great, but I don’t know that it helps anyone?

Elyse Rivin: No.

Annie Sargent: Like, it doesn’t help him, but it doesn’t help them either to have this guy just lying there.

Elyse Rivin: You’re right. And in fact, that’s when he writes, "My family doesn’t understand the true values of the world." He puts all this down on paper, which is what’s so fascinating that he… the writing is more lucid than, I guess, he was basically somewhere in his spirit.

Elyse Rivin: So, yes, the miners understood that he had a lot of empathy, but you’re absolutely right. He wasn’t doing anything to help them really. He was just…

Annie Sargent: Well, he couldn’t. Other than bringing them salvation, which I’m sure he tried.

Elyse Rivin: He tried. You know, he tried.

Annie Sargent: But what else can you, like-

Elyse Rivin: You know, and just lying there and not eating. And every time from this point on that he goes into a crisis, he stops eating. He becomes … It’s like an aesthetic, you know? It’s like Saint Martin in the desert or something, you know? It’s like he’s punishing himself. It’s very, it’s very disturbing, all of this, you know? It really is very, very disturbing.

Annie Sargent: Because it doesn’t help you much if you don’t, I mean … I will admit, I eat too much, but if you eat too little, you’re not well either.

Elyse Rivin: No. So, here is Vincent Van Gogh. His family finds a way of getting him to go back to Holland.

Annie Sargent: Again, they intervene, yeah?

Elyse Rivin: They intervene. He’s 23 and a half years old. He goes to work in a bookstore and starts drawing again.

Annie Sargent: Okay. That … Okay.

Elyse Rivin: He’s still concerned with the Bible. He still does not eat. He decides he’s going to be a vegetarian. He’s not going to eat a lot. He eats one meal a day, all this kind of stuff.

Elyse Rivin: Well, there you are. He tries going back to another theological school. That does not work.

Annie Sargent: They probably find him too extreme perhaps.

Elyse Rivin: I’m sure that they do, and who knows if he’s actually even coherent or not? It’s hard to know, you know? I mean, it’s really hard to know. He knows his Bible backwards and forwards, but that doesn’t mean that he’s able to be a coherent person, because obviously part of being a preacher is to help other people, you know? And I’m not sure if he’s able to really help anybody but himself, you know? This is part of …

Annie Sargent: Ah, he need to help himself a little more even.

Elyse Rivin: So, all of this, we go through this in cycles. Poor Vincent. At the age of 27, he has not come out of this terrible cycle, this spiral of preacher, art merchant, bookstore, lost, he doesn’t know what he wants to do. The only thing that is consistent…

Annie Sargent: And any more,like… love interest?

Elyse Rivin: Not yet. That’s going to come next.

Annie Sargent: Okay. So the first one really hit him hard.

Elyse Rivin: The first one hit him hard.

[00:28:04] Returning home

Elyse Rivin: And so at the age of 27, it’s already coming up, you know? He goes back home to live in his parents’ house. They give him a room. He says, "I’m going to start doing some serious drawing and looking at painting." I can just imagine his parents going, "Okay, whatever, you know? Let’s find you something that’s kind of normal to do, whatever." And so he starts to work, but he hasn’t yet really developed a painting style or anything like that. His father really discusses whether they should put him in a mental hospital for a while so that he can get some help. But they don’t. So there he is, and he’s home. (Mid-roll ad spot) And then he announces, makes an announcement at the age of 27 back home, in 1880. You have to imagine that we’re talking about, oh, he’s only going to live another 10 years, right?

[00:28:55] The Decision to Become an Artist

Elyse Rivin: "I’m going to be an artist."

Annie Sargent: Okay. All right.

Elyse Rivin: This is what he does. He actually makes this as a formal announcement, "I am going to be an artist."

Annie Sargent: Which I’m sure his family thought, "Uh-oh. Here we go again."

Elyse Rivin: Because he hadn’t been successful at any of the last things he said he was going to do, so… Yeah. And then again, I’m sure they were worried that it’s going to be like, "I’m going to be a preacher. I’m going to be this." You know? It’s going to be like this obsessive thing that’s going to last a year or two.

[00:29:24] Early Artistic Endeavors and Family Support

Elyse Rivin: He enrolls in the art school in Brussels.

Annie Sargent: Very good.

Elyse Rivin: He does a lot of drawing. In fact, he did thousands and thousands and thousands of drawings all his life. He actually started off in his, you know, life by really doing a lot of drawing. And he learns a lot of different techniques. And for the very first time, he tries his hand at painting.

Annie Sargent: Okay.

Elyse Rivin: And he shares a studio with a Flemish artist, and that seems to be the great beginning of his new life. But … and you know with Vincent Van Gogh, there’s always a but … he falls in love a second time.

Annie Sargent: Ah, okay. Here’s the girl, okay?

Elyse Rivin: And he’s rejected again. You know, he wasn’t bad-looking. He was just weird, unfortunately for him, you know? I mean, just, you know, what do you do when you’re…

Annie Sargent: And especially at that age. By then, a lot of the women his age are married already.

Elyse Rivin: Exactly.

Annie Sargent: You know, and the ones who are not, they might be a bit wary of who they hook up with.

Elyse Rivin: I know.

Annie Sargent: Yeah.

Elyse Rivin: So, he gets rejected again, and he starts drinking.

Annie Sargent: Oh, that’s going to solve everything. Mm-hmm.

Elyse Rivin: And particularly a lot of absinthe.

Annie Sargent: Okay, even worse.

Elyse Rivin: Which puts holes in your brain.

Annie Sargent: I’m told, yes.

Elyse Rivin: And this is the beginning of his starting to drink, and he does in fact spend the next years of his life, I mean, doing an enormous amount of drinking, which is all contradictory with everything else.

Elyse Rivin: So this is like self-medication type of drinking?

Elyse Rivin: I think that kind of drinking is going through oblivion, to forget things, you know? I mean, to feel sorry for yourself. That’s the way I think about it. It’s hard to know. I mean, it’s not just drinking a glass of wine or two. I mean, if I understand it, absinthe really, it’s like taking a drug, you know? I mean, it just puts you into a sort of secondary state, you know?

Annie Sargent: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Elyse Rivin: So his father doesn’t know what to do with him. They basically tell him, "You can’t stay here anymore." I mean, it’s a sort of horribly pathetic story, this whole thing.

Elyse Rivin: And so his brother, Theo, who by this time has gone to work for the family art merchant business and is in Paris.

Annie Sargent: So he’s much younger, right? Theo?

Elyse Rivin: He’s younger, but there were, like one, two, like there was a child a year for six years. So I guess he’s like six years younger than him, right? So I guess he’s just 21, you know, really when he does it, you know.

Annie Sargent: And he’s very together, and he’s very good at being a manager of an art merchant store, you know, that kind of thing. No mental illness, clearly, with Theo.

Elyse Rivin: No.

Elyse Rivin: He’s got his other problem, but we’ll save that for a little bit later on, you know. So Theo, who goes to Paris, and who’s really attached to this older brother, he says, "Okay, I’m going to take care of you. If you want to be an artist, this is what we’re going to do. I’m going to give you enough money."

Elyse Rivin: This is his first idea. "I’m going to give you enough money so that you can have some little place to live, not a whole lot, but enough place to live, have a little studio, and you don’t have to worry about whether you work. Just do your art." It’s like his brother is encouraging him to focus on being an artist, hoping that this will give him the strength to deal with the rest of life and the world.

Annie Sargent: That’s really, really brilliant, because a person like that, maybe that will work? Like, give him total freedom, and just a safety net.

Elyse Rivin: And just a safety net, right?

Annie Sargent: Do you, but don’t go too low.

Elyse Rivin: Don’t go too low. And this is when it’s interesting, because we don’t associate this, but you mentioned it earlier. At this time, all of his work is about the poor people, the miners, all of the people he spent several years with. And so his work is very dark, very sober, very sad. And he produces an enormous amount of work. He really does. But it’s nothing like what you see at the end of his life.

Annie Sargent: Right. I saw some, and it was like some farm workers, and it’s all in the grays and greens and browns, and just really, like, ooph.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah, he has, one of the famous ones is The Potato Eaters, you know, these people scrounging around for food. And he produces. He really produces.

Annie Sargent: So the themes were also, not just the colors were sad, but also the themes were very sad, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And he’s taking out all of this in the work, and Theo takes all of his paintings and he says, "Okay." And he tries to start selling some of them. And he actually does sell a few of these paintings, but they are very traditional in style. You know, there’s nothing experimental in the painting. There’s certainly no color in them, other than these dark, kind of, you know, sad colors.

Elyse Rivin: But they are actually good paintings. It’s just that they are really, you know, I mean…

Annie Sargent: Now, did that come from Van Gogh himself, from within his soul that he was depressed, and so that’s, these are the colors he wanted to use? Or is this what was done at the time?

Elyse Rivin: It was not what was done at the time, specifically, certainly not what was done at the time in France. But I think it shows the state of his soul, as you say, or his mind, and it reflects… He wanted… Two of the artists he really admired were Millet, who is French, and Daumier, who is French, both of whom were going against the new style because they did very social painting about poor people, farmers, the people working the wheat in the fields. Their work is not quite as dim and dark. I think that comes from Van Gogh in his brain. But those, he writes that these are two artists that, at this time, he really admires.

Annie Sargent: Okay.

Elyse Rivin: Because their work is social, and it’s about the condition of people, the poor people, and he wants people to pay attention to that, and he considers that the painting is going to be a way for people to pay attention.

Elyse Rivin: Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way. I mean, you don’t get empathy by just looking at a painting particularly, you know?

Annie Sargent: No, probably not. No.

Elyse Rivin: So what happens is, he actually has one of his uncles, maybe because the family’s kind of supportive, I mean, and globally, they were trying to be. One of his uncles commissions him to do a couple of works.

Elyse Rivin: But apparently, I don’t, I couldn’t find any of the details, but apparently, the uncle was very specific what he wanted, and so Van Gogh did a few paintings, and the uncle went, "Nuh-uh, this is not what I want," which is not going to help Vincent Van Gogh in his head.

Elyse Rivin: So he tries again, he goes second round with a few more paintings. The uncle says, "Okay, okay, nevermind, I’ll take them, but it’s not really what I want." So he stops. He says, "I’m going to…" Theo decides that he’s going to take on these works and he’s going to try and sell them.

Elyse Rivin: But what it does, ironically, is it encourages Van Gogh to paint because he’s getting what he thinks is a commission.

Annie Sargent: Uh-huh.

Elyse Rivin: You know? It’s like, "Oh, even my uncle wants me to do some paintings for him," and Theo was able to sell a few paintings. "So, okay, I guess I’m starting to be an artist," you know?

Annie Sargent: Right, right. Well, because I suppose, you are an author once you start selling enough to sustain yourself, and you are a painter once you start selling enough to sustain yourself. A podcaster, same. Like, you know?

Elyse Rivin: Yeah. So this is… it’s helping him. So this is what happens. Theo says, "From now on, I’m not going to just give you a stipend. Consider that every work you do, I am buying. So you are ‘successful’ in quotes, because you’re selling your work, even if it’s to me." And this, of course, is exactly what happens, for the rest of his life. Except for a few exceptions, Theo is the one who buys all of his work.

Annie Sargent: But didn’t you say he made one piece a day sometimes?

Elyse Rivin: Oh, that was the last two years of his life. And, if I remember, in the last two years of his life yeah, he becomes like a… an obsessive robot, in terms of turning.

Annie Sargent: A maniac, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: A maniac.

[00:37:18] Van Gogh’s Time in Paris

Elyse Rivin: Yeah, I mean, he is, you know, at that point, basically, unfortunately, that…

Elyse Rivin: So, basically what happens is, this is the beginning of Vincent Van Gogh’s life more or less in connection to France. He becomes familiar, because he spends some time in Paris, he hasn’t yet established himself permanently in France, but because he’s in Paris, first he hangs out with his brother. His brother doesn’t really want him living with him. But he winds up getting him a room in Montmartre.

Annie Sargent: Ah, it was cheap back then, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: It was certainly cheap, and Van Gogh is very, very comfortable in grungy, you know, the Bohemian kind of atmosphere that existed, yeah.

Annie Sargent: Well, if you want absinthe and you want cheap, that’s it.

Elyse Rivin: He starts to see the work of all of the people that we know about, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet. He doesn’t meet them at that point yet, he hasn’t really met them, but he sees their work, which gives him some new ideas, you know?

Annie Sargent: In museums or…

Elyse Rivin: Well, I think there were galleries, and then, they hang out in cafes, and I think they, at that time, you know, this is before these works became millions of dollars, you know? I mean, so they’d put their work up on the walls, you know.

Annie Sargent: Well, we do, we still see artists do that. Like you go to restaurants sometimes, and they are featuring the work by someone…

Elyse Rivin: Right.

Annie Sargent: … that you can buy.

Elyse Rivin: Exactly.

[00:38:38] Van Gogh’s Literary Influences

Elyse Rivin: And, fascinating to me, and you will, of course, on top of everything else, appreciate this, remember, he’s fluent in French. He reads vociferously, it’s hard for me to pronounce that word even in English, and he reads Balzac and Zola and Hugo, why?, and Dickens, because their work is about the miserable of the earth.

Annie Sargent: Right, yeah, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: About the poor people.

Annie Sargent: Well, a lot of literature at the time, that’s what they were, you know?

Elyse Rivin: And so he’s extremely well-read. He’s really very, very intellectual in that way, and it helps reinforce his interest in doing work that rejects, in his words, "bourgeois values."

Annie Sargent: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:39:23] Return to Holland and Artistic Evolution

Elyse Rivin: But he goes back to Holland. He’s not yet the… it’s only really the last four years that he’s really French, French in that sense. He goes back to Holland, he gets a kind of studio, and this is where he does well over 200 paintings that include some of the darkest ones that are famous, like The Weavers, The Peasants in the Fields. This is a body of work that is basically all about this. But because he’s had more artistic training, he starts changing, little by little, the strokes of the paint, the perspective, he’s trying new perspectives, and one of the things that influences him enormously, like some of the other artists, is that he also discovers Japanese art.

Annie Sargent: Uh-huh. Yeah.

Elyse Rivin: Like with Toulouse-Lautrec, the Japaneseery, is what he calls it, gives him an idea of how to show perspective in a different way. So little by little, these outside things are coming to an influence in his work, even though, for the moment, he hasn’t moved into the bright colors.

Annie Sargent: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elyse Rivin: Guess what happens?

[00:40:28] Personal Struggles and Relationships

Annie Sargent: Another woman?

Elyse Rivin: Another woman.

Annie Sargent: Oh, dear.

Elyse Rivin: 1884.

Annie Sargent: Okay. Did that go better?

Elyse Rivin: No. This one, sadly enough, looks like it was reciprocal.

Annie Sargent: Oh.

Elyse Rivin: He fell in love with the daughter of a neighbor, and both parents forced them to separate because they said he was crazy.

Annie Sargent: Well, you know.

Elyse Rivin: She tried to commit suicide.

Annie Sargent: Uh-oh.

Elyse Rivin: So clearly, there was a problem. And then what happens is, his father suddenly dies.

Annie Sargent: Oh, that’s not going to help anything, is it?

Elyse Rivin: … and his oldest sister tells him to leave.

Annie Sargent: Oh, because… Yeah, but at that point, he was in Holland.

Elyse Rivin: He was in Holland, and it was like, you know, "we can’t deal with you." So this is the really last of these major events in terms of women that is really a problem, because in the meantime, he’s taken up with prostitutes at different moments, I mean, he has relationships with women, but a little bit the kind that are weird and edgy, you know?

Annie Sargent: Look, if you are a itinerant preacher at some point in your life, taking up with prostitutes later, it doesn’t agree. There’s going to be some problems in your head.

Elyse Rivin: Dissonance, huh?

Annie Sargent: Dissonance, yes, yes.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah, well, we’re in major dissonance here, you know? So he gets kicked out of his house.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, and there were probably a lot of family dynamics that we haven’t even touched on, but if your father keeps rescuing you, the other kids are going to not enjoy that.

Elyse Rivin: And then this is when he finally goes back to France.

Annie Sargent: Well, he doesn’t have a choice, does he?

Elyse Rivin: No.

Annie Sargent: Yeah.

Elyse Rivin: Has no choice.

[00:42:06] Paris and Artistic Friendships

Elyse Rivin: Théo says, "You can’t stay with me. I will set you up in a studio in Montmartre." And that is what happens. And this is when he meets and makes friends with, and some of them really do become his friends, with Monet, withan artist named Émile Bernard, with Pissarro, who winds up being one of his closest friend. Now, Pissarro’s older than him, he’s 20 years older, and he’s the father of Impressionism. He takes Vincent Van Gogh under his wing and helps him enormously. He meets Toulouse-Lautrec, and Toulouse-Lautrec here becomes a friend of his. Toulouse-Lautrec, I imagine, knowing as much as I do about him, identifies with his misery in a different kind of way, you see? He knows Seurat, who’s the one who invented pointillism. He eventually meets Paul Gauguin. It’s a little bit later, but he meets and becomes friends with and hangs out with all of these artists.

Elyse Rivin: And several of them really encourage him. Émile Bernard is an artist you probably don’t know well, but he’s an artist who did what is called divisionism, which is when he painted, it wasn’t really impressionism, but he did a lot of work that’s kind of interesting, and he would put these black outlines around the figures. It’s kind of cute. It’s not my favorite style, but they all were developing new techniques and styles, and he actually enjoys it. He enjoys being with them. He is learning a huge amount, and this is when he decides that it’s possible to try new techniques, to try using brighter colors. He spends two years in Paris.

Annie Sargent: Did the other artists kind of help him try new things?

Elyse Rivin: Toulouse-Lautrec did.

Annie Sargent: Okay.

Elyse Rivin: And Pissarro did, and Pissarro, who really becomes like another father figure to him. He has him come out to live with him in Auvers-sur-Oise, which is where eventually he winds up.

Elyse Rivin: Pissarro has a son who becomes his best friend for a while. He shows him how to lighten up the palette of his paint, of painting outside, which he had never really done before. He’d always gone back into the studio to paint. So he has a huge influence on him. And even though Van Gogh has a distinctive style of his own and his paint is thicker than Pissarro’s, who’s very light and almost translucent, Pissarro is really one of the major figures in helping him figure out a style of his own and how he can lighten up his palette, use some different strokes, be a little bit less dense in the work.

Elyse Rivin: And between him, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Émile Bernard, these are the three artists who really are the closest to him at the time. Monet knows him, but he’s not… he actually enjoys his work, but he’s not, I think, one of the closest people to him.

Elyse Rivin: But all of these people help open him up to new ideas and new techniques, and he produces a huge amount of work in these two years. He does watercolor. He does drawing. He does a lot of painting, but he hates Paris.

Annie Sargent: Still, he hates Paris.

Elyse Rivin: He hates Paris.

[00:45:02] The Move to Arles

Elyse Rivin: He loves these artists, and his dream, absolute dream, is to go someplace, number one, where the light is different, which is, of course, what brings him to the south of France. But the other thing he wants, because he still has this social idea in his head, what he wants more than anything else is to create an artist colony and have many artists come and live in the same place and work together in helping each other by looking at each other’s work. So after two years, he says, and this is his term, he’s going to follow his Mediterranean dream.

Annie Sargent: Okay. I didn’t realize he had one.

Elyse Rivin: He had one.

Annie Sargent: Okay.

Elyse Rivin: I didn’t realize he had one either. I didn’t know that that was actually what got him to go to Arles.

Annie Sargent: Hmm.

Elyse Rivin: He was told by a lot of these artists that this was where the light was incredible, where there was a brilliance to the sun. And actually, he was right. The light and everything in the south means you use bright colors. You’re not going to use dark, sad colors. You’re just going to be involved in this brightness and lightness, you know? I mean, the artists that came well after him, like Matisse, are people who were inspired by all of this as well. So, he makes a bunch of these artists promise, of course, this includes Paul Gauguin, that they will come down and visit him and spend time painting with him in the south.

Annie Sargent: Okay, sounds good.

Elyse Rivin: And so, he leaves Paris.

Annie Sargent: And at this point, he has money because, I mean, to establish a colony of painters, you need some money, right, for renting a place or something?

Elyse Rivin: Well, he doesn’t really. He has enough to sustain him, you know, but Theo… I don’t know how much actually Theo gave him.

Annie Sargent: He’s on the edge all the time.

Elyse Rivin: He’s on the edge. He’s on the edge. And the other problem is, it’s also his… I was going to say his taste, but it’s not even that. When he, for instance, he gets to Arles. Arles, I know a little, I don’t know it super well, but I know a little. Okay, so he goes into the oldest, grungiest part of Arles where the hookers are. He doesn’t, you know, he doesn’t go to the nice part of Arles. He goes into the old walled part, which is fine. I mean, we’re talking about 150 year, almost 150 years ago.

Elyse Rivin: But even so, I mean, he doesn’t go to a part which is nice and quiet and whatever. He goes to the equivalent of a grungy part of Montmartre in Paris. He feels comfortable there.

[00:47:24] The Yellow House and Artistic Breakthrough

Elyse Rivin: He feels comfortable with the people sitting around drinking absinthe, with the people smoking opium and pipes, with the hookers on the street, and this is where he rents this famous yellow house, which becomes one of the most iconic of his paintings, because these are a whole series of paintings. And he rents a series of rooms in this house called The Yellow House, and he decides that that’s where the artist colony is going to be. I mean, he’s delusional, basically.

Annie Sargent: Well, yeah. Grandeur. Like, he has big vision of, again, one of these projects, like, I want to be a preacher,you know, like… yeah.

Elyse Rivin: But it is literally where Van Gogh becomes the brilliant Van Gogh that we all know. Okay?

Annie Sargent: Yeah.

Elyse Rivin: It is here, with the light and with this fabulous palette of pure color, pure color, no longer mixing with black, no longer making grays and browns, you know. He has beautiful cerulean blues, he has beautiful yellows, he has mauves, he has all these pure colors right out of the tube that he begins to paint, and he paints, and paints, and paints, and paints. And he does drawings, and he paints.

Elyse Rivin: And what does he paint? He paints the house, the yellow house. There’s paintings of it on- from every angle you can imagine on the outside. His idea is that some of these paintings he’d go give to Theo to sell, and some of them he’s going to use to decorate the house to inspire other artists when they come. He paints the shoes, you know. He did this whole series of his shoes. The famous painting of his bedroom with, you know, all of these… I mean, basically, the subject matter is the most mundane imaginable, but he makes these brilliant paintings, and he does this… the beginning of The Sunflowers there as well, you know.

Elyse Rivin: And one night, he goes out, and he does the very first of his Starry Nights Over the Rhone. This is the one, this is a gorgeous one. He did a whole series of Starry Nights, but this one is the first one, and you see the reflection of the swirls, these beginning as swirls over the Rhone River, and he produces probably a painting a day the whole time that he’s there, and just absolutely…

Annie Sargent: That is amazing because, I mean, there’s a lot of paint on this canvas, just applying that much paint.

Elyse Rivin: And he had, luckily had the money to buy the paints, you see, because at this time, nobody’s really making their own paints anymore. People are actually buying paint.

Annie Sargent: In tubes, right? The tubes have come out. Yeah.

Elyse Rivin: Right. Oil paint is really in tubes, you know. And he really has this incredible artistic breakthrough. This is the Van Gogh that we all are baba in front of, you know.

Annie Sargent: And was he happy?

Elyse Rivin: No. He was never happy. That’s the saddest thing for me about this whole story, is that this man was never ever happy.

Elyse Rivin: So, he does all of this, and then he keeps writing back to all of his friends in Paris, "When are you coming down? When are you coming to Arles?" And for some reason, he has a fixation on Paul Gauguin, who is an arrogant son of a bitch, even though I like some of his painting, you know? And who actually kind of hung out with him, but didn’t really like him, and why he decides to go down to join him, I don’t know. Was it because he was just getting all these letters because he was,you know, harassing him?

Annie Sargent: Maybe he was curious.

Elyse Rivin: Maybe he was curious, but the problem is, is that Van Gogh, who, of course, is still hanging out with hookers and is still drinking all this absinthe all the time, he thinks that Gauguin is going to come down and stay and help him create this artist colony. And so, after a while, Gauguin shows up. They start to paint together, and they immediately start to fight with each other.

Annie Sargent: Mm.

Elyse Rivin: Now, are they fighting with each other because they’re both drinking a lot? I can’t even say. I have no idea. The number of works that Van Gogh did while he was in Arles are just absolutely astounding. I mean, I just put it in the note some of them, because these are the ones that everybody can picture in their minds, The Bedroom, The Night Cafe, The Starry Nights, The Sunflowers, The Shoe series, The Yellow House series, I mean, The Chair series. All of these things he produced like a maniac the whole time that he was there.

Annie Sargent: And really, really significant, like, different, very personal kind of… By that point, that’s all him. Like, nobody else paints like that.

Elyse Rivin: Nobody. Nobody did before, and nobody has literally since. And the swirls begin, this thick impasto of paint, but with the swirls, with the touches. I’ve spent so many years of my life painting. When I look at the paintings, I can feel his hand movement, you know? It’s like I can almost imagine him with this gesture with his arms and his hands moving around. But of course, the euphoria kind of dissipates after a while. He drinks a lot. He’s not eating much. He’s into this total-… you know, up period of this euphoria. His brother starts really worrying about him.

Elyse Rivin: And then,Paul Gauguin shows up in September. This is in 1888. Okay? He spends three months with him. The witnesses said that they basically fought all the time. They would get drunk, they would fight with each other. Eventually, I think Gauguin probably told him what he really thought about him and the situation. I don’t know why Gauguin actually ever went there, because he apparently didn’t like him particularly as a human being. It’s just pretty awful, the whole thing, considering how fragile Van Gogh was. And so, he left. He announces one day in December of 1888 that he’s leaving. That’s all, yeah.

Annie Sargent: Right, right.

Elyse Rivin: They have one huge drunken fight, and Gauguin picks up his stuff and leaves. Never sees him again, of course.

[00:52:53] Mental Health Struggles and Saint-Rémy

Elyse Rivin: And it’s the next day that Van Gogh cuts his ear. Now, the story is he cut his ear off. He didn’t cut his entire ear off, but of course, he did a self-mutilation. He cut off a part of his ear. He actually cut it off, put it in a handkerchief, you know? And he was probably delirious at this point between the, whatever mental state he was in and having so much to drink, that he literally sat there with this piece of his ear wrapped up until they found him the next day and he was bleeding. You know, of course, you know, it’s… So he was treated by the doctors, and they contacted his brother, and his brother said, "No, we, you know, this can’t continue."

Elyse Rivin: And it’s at this point,the very beginning of 1889, that they decide that he has to go into a psychiatric hospital, and they sent him to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Annie Sargent: Right, I mean, if you cut your ear off… I mean, he’s already done quite a bit of self-harm, like with his not eating…

Elyse Rivin: Right.

Annie Sargent: … his drinking excessively. That’s all self-harm as well.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah. And what’s interesting is that he accepts it, see? So he’s really delusional. They said he was having hallucinations, he was incoherent. I mean, he was really… it’s a major, major, major mental breakdown that he has. The fact that Gauguin did him more, more damage than anybody else that ever happened in his life, you know? It was just a terrible situation.

Annie Sargent: Well, it was just another hard, another hard breakup.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

Annie Sargent: It was with a man, it was not a, you know, a romantic thing, but he lived through it like a breakup.

Elyse Rivin: Absolutely. It was a total rejection, you know? And of course, an artistic rejection as well, you know, in a sense, right?

Annie Sargent: That’s true. That’s even worse.

Elyse Rivin: It’s even worse. So they take him to Saint-Rémy and they lock him up.

Annie Sargent: Sure. I mean, if he’s going to hurt himself, that’s what you need to do.

Elyse Rivin: So he’s given two rooms. This is the part I really didn’t know that much about in terms of detail. It made me cry literally reading it. Now, they give him two rooms. One, he uses as a studio, but he’s really locked up. They allow him to walk out, there are gardens that are basically gated gardens, and he spends a year, yeah, in Saint-Rémy.

Annie Sargent: And he’s working, right?

Elyse Rivin: And he’s working every single day. And he does more of the series of Starry Nights. They get swirlier and swirlier and swirlier. He paints what he can see out of the windows that are barred. He paints what he can see from the gardens, and he doesn’t even complain. He’s just there, and he paints, and he paints and he draws and he paints, and he produces some of the works that are the most beautiful and the most famous that we will ever see.

Annie Sargent: But at this point, hopefully, he is sober mostly?

Elyse Rivin: He’s mostly sober, and I don’t know what kind of treatment, but he calms down.

Annie Sargent: Right, right. If he’s sober and maybe they put some food into him at times?

Elyse Rivin: Probably, and they probably gave him some kind of, whatever drugs you can give to somebody to calm them down. This is when he also starts doing the beautiful bouquets. He did hundreds and hundreds of paintings of bouquets, of irises, of all these flowers. He paints the wheat fields.

Annie Sargent: They are gorgeous.

Elyse Rivin: They’re gorgeous, right? The wheat fields. He can see the wheat fields surrounding Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He paints nature, and he does a little bit of work from memory of the, going back a little bit to the miners and the earlier work. It’s interesting.

Annie Sargent: Oh, really?

Elyse Rivin: Yeah. It’s like he has a nostalgia for that period of his life.

Elyse Rivin: But of course, like in Arles, he produces, nobody knows exactly how many works. I mean, probably more than one a day. I mean, just, you know, an enormous amount of work.

Annie Sargent: None of these canvases are huge, right?

Elyse Rivin: No.

Annie Sargent: He works on maybe, what?

Elyse Rivin: It’s what would the French would call a format raisin, which is basically a, not even quite a meter in width. It’s probably about, well, I don’t even know anymore because I’m confusing my brain between inches and meters, but it’s portable, let’s put it that way.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: It’s portable, you know? So he can actually take the easel into the garden. He doesn’t have to be in the room. He does get allowed to go out, but always accompanied by somebody.

Annie Sargent: And it’s interesting that as far as I know, he never painted the Roman ruins which are pretty much across the street, at the Glanum.

Elyse Rivin: No, never.

Annie Sargent: And that would be interesting to paint, wouldn’t it?

Elyse Rivin: It would be very interesting to paint, yes.

Annie Sargent: Maybe for some reason, he wasn’t allowed in there?

Elyse Rivin: I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. It’s also possible that, that they were in such bad condition at the time. Now it’s of course this tourist attraction.

Annie Sargent: Well, that’s true.

Elyse Rivin: It’s, you know, we… Who knows?

Annie Sargent: Or like, he didn’t paint the market of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence which is famous by now?

Elyse Rivin: No.

Elyse Rivin: I don’t think they let him go.

Annie Sargent: Perhaps not.

Elyse Rivin: I don’t think so. You know, I mean, he did a lot of that in Arles.

Annie Sargent: Because that is kind of a two, three kilometers away. Yeah, it’s not right there.

Elyse Rivin: It’s not right there.

Annie Sargent: Because at the time, the asylum was outside of the town. Not a far, far outside of the town, but outside a bit. And by now it’s overgrown, you know, the town has-

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

Elyse Rivin:

Annie Sargent: But I don’t, I don’t know that he painted the market, or…

Elyse Rivin: I don’t think so. He did Wheat Fields. This is when he starts doing of course, again, a lot of the paintings that are, I think are so beautiful. The Wheat Fields. He does lots and lots of the sky, Starry Sky series, Flowers, you know.

Annie Sargent: Which are the, to me, the Sunflowers and the Starry Night are the striking ones. When you see Starry Night for real life, it’s almost a spiritual experience. It’s almost like, you have never looked at the sky that way, and yet the sky is always there.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

Annie Sargent: And then it shows you a facet of nature that you hadn’t ever thought of like that. And so it’s, it’s like it opens up a new reality, it makes you look in a direction where you wouldn’t have yourself.

Elyse Rivin: It’s interesting. It’s the swirls that get to me in those paintings, and I think of it as the spiritual… It’s like connecting to some spirit up in the sky. To me, that’s what happens when I look at those paintings. I see them as just this… The movement of his hand, it’s not just the sky that he’s painting, he’s painting some connection to something cosmic, basically.

Annie Sargent: It is very cosmic, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: It’s very, very cosmic, you know?

[00:59:11] Final Days in Auvers-sur-Oise

Elyse Rivin: So, our dear Vincent Van Gogh, he spends exactly one year in Saint-Rémy, and in May of 1890, he is released.

Annie Sargent: Okay, so hopefully he’s healthier now.

Elyse Rivin: They say he’s healthier, he’s more lucid, he’s calmer, and his brother arranges for him to go to Auvers-sur-Oise.

Annie Sargent: Which is quite a distance. It’s a little bit west of Paris.

Elyse Rivin: It’s west of Paris, right? And the reason he wants him to go there is because number one, that’s where Pissarro lives and they are very close. Really, very close.

Annie Sargent: Ah, yes, yes.

Elyse Rivin: And there’s a man named Doctor Gachet.

Annie Sargent: Right, which he painted, actually. Yeah.

Elyse Rivin: Who he painted, exactly. And Doctor Gachet is a doctor who has treated several artists. He’s not a psychiatrist, but he’s a doctor who has treated several artists who have mental problems, let’s put it that way, and is an amateur painter.

Elyse Rivin: And so, he has a lot of friends who are painters, and Theo decides that this is the man who can communicate with Vincent because he knows how to talk to a painter. He knows how to talk about art and about painting, and he’s sensitive to the spirit of an artist.

Annie Sargent: They can talk shop.

Elyse Rivin: They can talk shop, and he can communicate with him in terms of what the painting is for him. So, it’s therapeutic. Gachet rents him some rooms in his house in Auvers-sur-Oise, and Theo moves to Auvers-sur-Oise. He just, has just gotten married, by the way, Theo, to a woman who’d been his girlfriend for a long time. They got married a little bit before because he has a son,very soon after that. And so he’s surrounded by people that love him and that take care of him and are worried about him. But we never know what happens. We don’t know exactly what happened, because he seemed to be better. He seemed to be calm.

Elyse Rivin: He arrives in Auvers-sur-Oise in May. He paints, goes out in the fields, he paints a lot, this is where he does most of the big Wheat Fields. And I have to say, I discovered one that I don’t think I had seen before that I just think is just absolutely marvelous, and it’s this incredible saturated yellow on the bottom and these blues and greens of the sky on top, and it’s just with these strokes of paint. And he spends all his days out in the fields painting, and he paints Doctor Gachet and he paints the people sitting in the cafe. This is a big portrait period of his life as well as the Wheat Fields.

Elyse Rivin: And he paints one finished painting per day besides doing the watercolors and the drawings.

Annie Sargent: That’s manic. Like, it’s too much. You would exhaust yourself.

Elyse Rivin: On the 27th of July of the same year, 70 days after he arrives in Auvers-sur-Oise, he goes out into the field where he has been painting and he shoots himself in the chest.

Annie Sargent: I thought it was in the stomach.

Elyse Rivin: No, in the ches- well, chest. It says chest. I don’t know if you know exactly. Right?

Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: But it’s not… This is what’s so strange. The wound is not so bad that he is lying there. He literally… Where’d he get the gun? I have no idea. Nobody even knows. Why? Nobody knows. Nobody will ever know. He walks back to the house.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, I think it was a, I think it was a, like, a… Because if he had shot himself in the heart or something, he would be dead.

Elyse Rivin: He goes back to the house and he’s bleeding, and he tells Doctor Gachet, "I just shot myself." And so they call Theo and Pissarro and they get to try to treat him medically. But for whatever reason, whatever the injury is, it gets infected, and two days later he dies.

Annie Sargent: That is so sad. That is so sad.

Elyse Rivin: His last words to his brother are: "The sadness will last forever". I just got goosebumps. He was so profoundly, deeply sad as a human being, and yet he was so incredibly creative and so sensitive to other people. His funeral was attended by all the artists that knew him, by a whole bunch of other people, by his family. His brother, of course, had his paintings. A few of them have been sold.

Annie Sargent: The thing is, if you have a person like that in your family, which I don’t, but I can imagine, that it would be really, really hard to deal with. Like, how do you handle a person like that?

Elyse Rivin: You can only do so much. You can only do so much and afterwards… There’s nothing you can do, you know.

Annie Sargent: Yeah. Eventually, he’s going to take matters into his own hands. And unfortunately, that’s how it ended.

Elyse Rivin: No one will ever know why at that particular moment what was going wrong, because he wasn’t in love again. He was painting. It was as if everything was going smoothly.

Annie Sargent: But, you know, it must have been so painful to be in his head.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

Annie Sargent: You know, being that sensitive and with that sort of perception. Yeah. I don’t think he could take it anymore.

Elyse Rivin: No, I don’t think so.

Annie Sargent: And it was mostly because of his own, the way he perceived the world, the way he was.

Elyse Rivin: That’s mental illness, really.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

[01:04:27] Legacy and Impact

Elyse Rivin: So he’s buried in Auvers-sur-Oise and then what happens is that his brother Théo, strangely enough, dies within a year of syphilis.

Annie Sargent: Oh, so he also died very young.

Elyse Rivin: He died very young. He had a little son. His widow remarried, and she married another artist. And in 1914, she has Théo, who’s been buried elsewhere, transferred to be buried next to his brother in Auvers-sur-Oise. And so they are side by side in the little cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise. And she wrote later on and said, this was the way they both would have wanted it to be.

Annie Sargent: Yes. And she inherited a lot of these paintings, right?

Elyse Rivin: Yes. And she sold, I mean, she was fair and, but she did, of course, you know, she managedmost of the work. The estate, you know.

Annie Sargent: Was it immediate that he became a popular artist?

Elyse Rivin: It was soon after. Ah, yes, because one of the things I forgot to mention was that the year before he died, 10 of his works were shown in the independent show for painters in Paris.

Annie Sargent: Uh-huh.

Elyse Rivin: And who of all people said his work was best of show? Monet.

Annie Sargent: Well, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: So there you are.

Annie Sargent: He got recognition at last.

Elyse Rivin: Got recognition from Monet. He was defended ferociously by Toulouse-Lautrec and Pissarro, and Émile Bernard, and there was some Belgian painter who insulted his work and said it was crap.

Elyse Rivin: And Toulouse-Lautrec and Pissarro basically said, they wrote a piece in a newspaper, the Mercure de France, and they said that this guy didn’t know what he was doing and that Van Gogh’s work was brilliant and he was a genius, and they all agreed that this was the work of a genius. And this was within a year before he died.

Annie Sargent: Right, right. But I don’t know that it would have made any difference if he had been recognized to be a genius before he decided to take his own life. Well, of course he didn’t know he was taking his own life when he was doing it. That’s the crazy thing, is, yeah…

Elyse Rivin: Probably not. Well, who knows? I mean, he was into self- you know, it’s like self-punishment. Cutting your ear is self-punishment, you know.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Self-harm, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: Who knows what possessed him to go out there. I mean, we will never know. But it was beginning to have recognition. And within a generation, he was recognized as a genius, because he influenced a whole bunch of the artists that came pretty much just right after that, you know, the artists that went into pointillism, that went into fauvism and all of these things.

Annie Sargent: Oh, everybody, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: Everybody, you know.

Annie Sargent: Well, and the crazy thing is he wasn’t happy with the art, the business of art, and then his work became the essence of business of art, like…

Elyse Rivin: 50, 60 million per painting. I mean, you know, this is the, you’re absolutely right. This is the absolute irony of it all. His heritage in terms of production, these are numbers that are even hard for me to grasp.

Elyse Rivin: He left over 2,000 works. 2,000, painting, drawing. He drew his entire life, he never stopped drawing. I don’t know a lot of his drawings. I don’t, would love to know where they are actually, except in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam which has everything, you know. Yeah. Watercolors. In 10 years, he produced over 1,000 works.

Elyse Rivin: And his heritage is absolutely enormous. The Japanese have huge amount of his work. The Americans have a huge number of his works in all of the museums. Of course Amsterdam has the beautiful Van Gogh Museum, which is devoted exclusively to him, how ironic of all things, you know. The wing in the Orsay Museum. I mean, you recognize his work. It’s not like anybody else’s.

Annie Sargent: Yeah. He’s really, really unique, and he’s left a big imprint on the art world, and on a lot of people. I really think he’s touched a lot of people. You cannot be…

Elyse Rivin: Indifferent.

Annie Sargent: …indifferent to what he did. Like you cannot. And as a young person, back when I put up posters in my bedroom, I often had a Van Gogh poster.

Elyse Rivin: You did?

Annie Sargent: Yes, yes, yes. And then you changed bedrooms and you tried to take it down and it rips.

Elyse Rivin: Ah.

Elyse Rivin: You know what? For this podcast, I would love to have people not only just comment about the podcast itself, but I’d love to find out what people like about his work and have everybody out there, when you listen to this, write back to us and tell us which of his works you like and how do you react to his painting. I would love to hear that from people.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Elyse, this is probably the longest episode we’ve ever recorded, we have to stop.

Elyse Rivin: We have to stop. This has just been so moving.

Annie Sargent: But it’s, yeah. He’s a genius like nobody else before, maybe someday, but… amazing, an amazing artist. So thank you very much, Elyse, for bringing him into our reality.

Elyse Rivin: Well, thank you, Annie, for suggesting Van Gogh.

Annie Sargent: Merci beaucoup. Au revoir.

Elyse Rivin: Au revoir.

[01:09:40] Copyright

Annie: The Join Us in France travel podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent, and Copyright 2025 by AddictedToFrance. It is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.

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Categories: French Culture, French History