Personal Recollections of Vincent van Gogh (1913)
Elisabeth Duquesne van Gogh (1859-1936)
58 pages
The paintings of Vincent van Gogh have a distinctive style that is instantly recognizable, and a brilliance of color and richness of theme that has made him arguably one of the most well-known and popular painters in history. Typical portrayals of van Gogh’s life and personality, however, have often seemed narrowly drawn – caricatures of a troubled, obsessive, and perhaps slightly mad, artist.
Van Gogh’s sister, Elisabeth Duquesne van Gogh strove to change that view of her brother in her memoir Personal Recollections of Vincent van Gogh, by providing a more nuanced and intimate portrait. Written some two decades after his death, her essay describes her memories of growing up with her mercurial brother, from their time together as children in rural Netherlands to his repeated retreating back home after yet another attempt at a career or studies that he in the end couldn’t abide.
As the title makes evident, her book does not represent a full biography of her brother – she focuses mostly on the periods when he lived at home, as well as what she learned from the letters he sent to his family while away. Once he became fully engaged in painting – “Art was his first and only love” (37) – she saw little of him, and in the final chapters summarizes his development as an artist based largely on his now famous correspondence with his brother Theo, and what she finds revealed in the evolution of his paintings.
Elisabeth does not sugar-coat her brother’s struggles, acknowledging a shyness that made him appear aloof, an anguish at the misery and poverty he witnessed among peasants that led him to extreme self-sacrifice, and a constant bridling against the constraints and limitations of the various vocations he tried that left him constantly dependent on familial support. But, for the most part, she has written a paean to a brother she clearly adored, while lamenting what she sees as his misunderstood genius, particularly from her perspective of watching his fame finally blossom in the years after his death, after he had sold but one painting during his lifetime.
Through surely biased by her love for her brother, her remembrances paint a much more human portrait of him than exists in the popular imagination. We discover a young man who after long searching for direction finally found an outlet for his energy and vision, leading to works that were critically – and at times violently – panned during his lifetime, but that would eventually come to be recognized for a profound brilliance still admired today.
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