Grade Two - Art and Observation

Lesson 1 – Art Helps Us to See - Point of View

MATERIALS

1. Farmer in the Field, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch, (1853-1890), oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduction print

Vincent van Gogh grew up in an educated Dutch family; his father was a minister and his uncle an art dealer. He pursued many careers such as teacher, art dealer, and missionary preacher. His generosity, compassion and deep desire to understand his fellow men were misunderstood by the Belgian coal miners with whom he lived and to whom he preached until his dismissal in 1880. Around this time he began to sketch copies of Jean Francois Millet's somber peasants and later to take anatomy and perspective lessons in Brussels. Van Gogh's early self-training showed intense visual perception which developed into a sinuous, flame-like style with brilliant colors. At the age of 33 he moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo. There he was influenced by the Impressionists, Pointiallists, and by the flat planes and vigorous outlines of Japanese prints. After moving to St. Remy and in Auvers, where he died, he painted vivid passionate works, expressive of his tormented life.

Van Gogh's Farmer in the Field reflects his use of brilliant colors and the influence of the "flat planes and vigorous outlines" of Japanese prints. His brush strokes, though somewhat larger and thicker than the Impressionists and Pointiallists, still demonstrate their influence upon his style. It is obvious that Farmer in the Field is his perception of the scene. He places little emphasis on figures; the two workers in the center are merely blue outlines, dwarfed by the landscape. The right-hand figure, also blue, is a whole person, although its sex is not easily determined. The figure is balanced precariously on the lurching, rushing landscape which is divided horizontally into four bands of color (red, green, yellow and blue).

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Note: Van Gogh's Farmer in the Field and Millet's The Gleaners are included in this lesson for comparison.

2. The Gleaners, 1857, Jean Francois Millet, French, (1814-1875), oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris. Reproduction print

Jean Francois Millet was the son of a French peasant. For a brief time he trained under a local Cherbourg artist and then under Delaroche in Paris where he was also influenced by Daumier. In 1849 he settled in Barbizon and painted genre subjects of peasants at work and prayer. The Gleaners and The Angelus are among his most representative works. Both are sentimental and romantic scenes executed in a realistic style.

These quotes may help you enjoy the prints by Millet and Van Gogh. They are from The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.:

"The wood is becoming quite autumnal - there are effects of colour which I rarely find painted in Dutch pictures."

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  "Yesterday towards evening I was busy painting a rather sloping ground in the wood, covered with mouldered and dry beech leaves. That ground was light and dark reddish brown, made more so by the shadows of trees which threw more or less dark streaks over it, sometimes half blotted out. The question was, and I found it very difficult to get the depth of colour, the enormous force and solidness of that ground - and while painting it I perceived only for the first time how much light there still was in that dusk - to keep that light, and to keep at the same time the glow and depth of that rich colour."

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 "For you cannot imagine any carpet so splendid as the deep brownish-red, in the glow of an autumn evening sun, tempered by the trees."

"From that ground young beech trees spring up which catch light on one side and are sparkling gleen there, and the shadowy side of those stems are a warm deep black-green."

"Behind those saplings, behind that brownish-red soil is a sky very delicate, bluish grey, warm, hardly blue, all aglow - and against it is a hazy border of green and a network of little stems and yellowish leaves. a few figures of wood gatherers are wandering around like dark masses of mysterious shadows. The white cap of a woman, who is bending to reach a dry branch, stands out all of a sudden against the deep red-brown of the ground. A skirt catches the light - a shadow fails - a dark silhouette of a man appears above the underbrush. A white bonnet, a cap, a shoulder, the bust of a woman moulds itself against the sky. Those figures, they are large and full of poetry - in the twilight of that deep shadowy tone they appear as enormous clay figureines being shaped in a studio."

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"While painting it I said to myself: 'I must not go away before there is something of an autumn evening air about it, something mysterious, something serious." 

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Van Gogh admired Millet tremendously. Speaking of the developement of art : 
"Up to Millet and Jules Breton... there was always in my opinion progress, but to surpass these two - don't even mention it! I must have a a foundation in these artists." 

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Van Gogh wanted his figures to live, not to be academically correct. He believed that Millet painted figures as he felt them; he painted the truth of the laborer in action. Both Van Gogh and Millet painted the close connection of the peasant to the earth. How?