Vincent Van Gogh Netherlands (Holland)

¶ … Vincent Van Gogh

Netherlands (Holland)

Vincent van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland in 1853. He is most famous for his paintings like Starry Night, Sunflowers and the Potato Eaters. However he also drew over a thousand drawings with pencil and chalk. He was considered to be mentally ill, especially after he cut off his own ear, so he was put inside a mental institution. He even drew a portrait of himself after he did this called Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (Lubin 13). He died in 1890. According to Julius Meier-Graefe, his painting style is post-impressionism, which is an art movement that began in France in the late 19th century. This style is usually full of bright colors and sharp edges.

I chose to write about Vincent Van Gogh because I have always heard a lot about him but never really knew that much except that he cut off his ear. He seems like a very interesting artist so I chose him to write this paper about. I also chose three of his most famous drawings to write about because I found them to be very beautiful. These drawings are called: Young Man with a Pipe, Bent Figure of Woman and Cottages with a Woman Working in the Foreground. These drawings are all in black in white so they are not like the post-impressionist paintings that Van Gogh is famous for that are full of bright colors. But they are still very beautiful.

Young Man with a Pipe

This drawing is a portrait done with pencil and transparent watercolor on watercolor paper. Van Gogh drew this portrait in 1884 (Van Gogh Gallery, 1). He signed it in the bottom right corner with only his first name: Vincent. The picture is of a young man smoking a pipe, wearing a hat and a coat with buttons. He is facing to the side. He appears to be deep in thought about something but there is no way to tell what he is thinking about. But he definitely seems to be thinking about something important because he looks sort of sad. Van Gogh was able to make the young man look sad and deep in thought by the way he drew the expression on his face. His head is straight up but his eyes seem to be looking down. Also, he is not smiling, but that could be because he has a pipe in his mouth.

Van Gogh uses very thick lines and bold shapes in this drawing. The texture is fairly rough because he uses criss-cross lines on the coat and the hair. The hat is mostly straight lines but they are going in different directions. There are also some criss-cross lines on the man's face but they are lighter. I can see that even though there are no bright colors in this drawing, Van Gogh did show the part of post-impressionism that has dark outlines around the figure. Also, there is some light brown color in the chair and the man's hair, but other than that, it is all black pencil.

Bent Figure of Woman

This drawing is from 1882. It is a portrait done with "pencil, pen, brush, sepia, washed" (Van Gogh Gallery, 1). There is a woman sitting in a chair, bent forward and resting her face in her right hand. She is looking toward the ground and seems to be very unhappy. The chair is very tall which makes it so that we can see her long dress. She is resting her feet on some type of box, but her feet cannot be seen. This drawing does not appear to have been signed.

There is no color in the drawing at all. The lines are very dark and thick -- especially the lines in her dress. There are also many lines on the wall behind her and on the floor below her, to show the shadows. The woman's face is the lightest part of the drawing. She seems to be looking at something in her lap but it is too dark to tell what it is. It may just be part of her dress, but it may be something else -- it may be whatever is making her look so unhappy.

Cottages with a Woman Working in the Foreground

This drawing was done in 1890 with pencil and pen (Van Gogh Gallery, 1). This is the only drawing for the three that I am writing about that is not just a portrait of a person, but is a landscape with a person that is in it, but much smaller. This drawing does not appear to have been signed by the artist.