The great nineteenth-century Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh was a deeply spiritual man. His portraits, on display in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts until September 24th, reveal a man passionately interested in the character and soul of the people whom he drew and painted.
The son of a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, van Gogh himself did theological studies as a young man. For a time, he served as an evangelist reaching out to poor coal miners in Belgium. When, in the last ten years of his life, 1880 to 1990, he devoted himself entirely to art, he brought to this vocation the spiritual concerns that he had long felt.
What one critic has described as van Gogh’s “deep moral earnestness” comes across memorably in the portraits of a postmaster, Joseph Roulin, and his family, residents of Arles in southern France, whom he painted in his last years. Similarly, the haunting self- portraits of this period bring sensitive viewers into the artist’s soul.
Of this kind of art, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “The painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love or respect for the human being that is portrayed.” And to his brother again: “I always feel confident when I am doing portraits, knowing that this work has much more depth – it isn’t the right word perhaps, but it is what makes me cultivate whatever is best and deepest in me.”
For these reasons, Vincent preferred to paint ordinary people rather than the rich and powerful. “I often think the servant girls so much more beautiful than the ladies, the workmen more interesting than the gentlemen; and in those common girls and fellows I find a power and vitality which, if one wants to express them in their peculiar character ought to be painted with a firm brushstroke, with a simple technique.”
For me, van Gogh has special fascination because of the feeling that a friend, Henri Nouwen, had for the man and his work. Henri, also Dutch by birth and upbringing, was a priest who, two years after his death, still has a large and devoted following as a spiritual writer and director.
From 1971 to 1981, Henri was a professor at Yale Divinity School where he taught a course that featured the art of van Gogh. Seven volumes of lecture notes, student papers, and articles survive Father Nouwen and witness to the powerful attraction he felt toward the artist.
In the words of Netannis Arnett, a writer in a newsletter issuing from the Henri Nouwen Literary Center near Toronto, “Van Gogh’s ability to see light in darkness, to see beauty in the struggle, brought Henri to a keener awareness of brokenness and God’s love for all Creation.”
And further: “Henri appreciated van Gogh’s relentless efforts to see the divine in everyone, and to live compassionately with the most disenfranchised. He thought of van Gogh as radical in his convictions in wanting to become part of others’ misery faithfully, and noticed the vocation of a monk in van Gogh’s zeal and action.”
Van Gogh, sensitive and passionate, suffered greatly. After a break in his relationship with a friend and fellow painter Paul Gaugin, Vincent slashed his own ear. And his death, in 1890, came about after he mortally wounded himself with a gunshot. Father Nouwen was also painfully conscious of his own brokenness and could identify with the artist in his suffering.
Netannis Arnett draws the parallel: “Both Henri and van Gogh had a great capacity to capture in words or images the depth of human experience – the pain and the ecstasy of the human creature in relation to the universe. Inspired by van Gogh’s brilliant palette, Henri found a new way of understanding the belovedness of every creature.”
In his notes Father Nouwen wrote about the spiritual kinship that he felt with van Gogh. Relying on this testimony, the newsletter writer says that Henri considered van Gogh his saint and a kind of spiritual companion.
Knowing my own limited capacity for contemplation, I can only envy my friend Henri’s habit of sitting for hours before a painting or sculpture. He was able to enter into world of van Gogh and appreciate its deep spiritual meaning.
Richard Griffin