Sidewalk Café at Night
1886 marked the last Impressionist exhibition in Paris and the official birth of Neoimpressionism or “Post-impressionism”. One of the founders and great contributors to this movement was Vincent Van Gogh.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) was a Dutch painter whose tragic life and brilliant canvases have made him almost a legend. Intense, difficult, and unhappy, he spent his life searching for an emotional relief he never really found. From his deeply religious family, he inherited a desire to serve his fellow man. After disappointments in both love and religious ministry, he turned to art. His early work is dark and thickly painted, but has a massive solidity.
Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Zundert, The Netherlands. His devoted brother Theo, an art dealer, supported him for mast of his life. Under the influence of the brilliant coloring of Impressionism, Van Gogh’s palette soon grew light and even gay. His brush began to form thick linear strokes, which give an unusual animation to the surfaces of his pictures. Van Gogh moved to Arles in southern France. Here he collaborated with his friend and fellow post-impressionist painter, Paul Gauguin. Their friendship became strained however and Van Gogh had severe mental disturbances. After a few months he entered the sanitarium at St. Remy. His art, now expressionistic, expressed his inner reactions to the world through turning, swirling brush strokes, thick paint, and brilliant color.
In 1890 Van Gogh was placed in the care of Dr. Gachet, a friend of many leading painters. Van Gogh committed suicide in July.
A critic of the day summarized Van Gogh this way:
Vincent Van Gogh is not thus merely a great painter, he is also a dreamer, a fanatical believer, a devourer of beautiful Utopias, living on ideas and dreams.
Van Gogh said of his style:
Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself vigorously.
The key elements of the style he was developing were saturated evocative color and a vigorously calligraphic style of drawing. Hence the swirls of color Van Gogh is noted for. Sidewalk Café at Night, painted in 1888, demonstrates these qualities.
Oil on canvas, 1985