Japan in Van Gogh's heart

That time, when Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo lived in Paris, he was passionate about the Japanese fine art. Though, his acquaintance with Japanese wood prints, which he began obsessively collecting, had happened a little bit earlier. A few people studied the Oriental Art that time in Holland on the contrary to France, where it was at the peak of popularity. For the first time Vincent van Gogh saw the Japanese wood prints in Antwerp. In one of his letters to his brother Vincent mentioned that his studio looked rather livable mainly due to some Japanese wood prints he pinned on the wall. Some of them he found funny. He liked small women’s figures in orchards or on the bank of the river, horsemen, flowers and twisted thorny limbs of trees.

The winter of 1887 he spent in copying with enthusiasm. The process included two stages. First the artist crossed the sheet of paper with squares and copied the image of some wood print. After he crossed with squares the canvas and squared down the picture contours square by square. Then he started playing with colors. Van Gogh filled the space between the contours with bright paints he put on the canvas directly from tubes. He enframed the paintings with bright colors and hieroglyphs. Only three such copies by Vincent survived (being aware of his frenetic ability to work, we could suspect dozens of them to be produced by the artist); one of them is the Flowering Plum Orchard and the other is the Bridge in the Rain after Utagawa Hiroshige and the Courtesan after Keisai Eisen.

The new platform of Vincent van Gogh impacted all his artworks and portraits in particular. The same winter he produced the Portrait of Père Tanguy lacked of depth and shades; he placed the figure of the paint merchant looking like Buddha against the varicolored background of Japanese prints. About the same time he painted a new portrait of Agostina Segatori. The artist dressed his former lover in gorgeous Italian clothes against the bright brushstrokes, the colors of which resonated the ornament on the character’s skirt. Some months later Vincent van Gogh painted self portrait as a Japanese monk.

On the way to Arles Vincent wrote to his brother Theo and to Paul Gauguin (the other admirer of the primitive art) that he was leaving to Japan. Even his dream about the artists commune was grounded in some way on that imagination. Van Gogh intended to found in Arles a community of artists something like a community of Buddha monks who lived in isolated communities. Moreover, Vincent sought in the South a peace, purity of the atmosphere and light color effects like in the oriental prints. All his collection he left at Theo’s claiming that he saw the world with the "Japanese eyes" and he did not need the prints anymore.

In Arles Vincent van Gogh forgot for a while his bright planes and lost himself in his "Japanese" spring producing more and more snow of blossom.

Though, later he came back to the pure hues and applanate representation (one of his most "Japanese" works in this regard could be the first version of the Bedroom in Arles). At the same time the Nature was still a keystone in the Vincent’s oeuvre, however, his painting technique had been changed. Van Gogh circled the details with dense contours of dark colors, lowered the line of the horizon or removed it beyond the canvases.

Alas, the dream about "the art of future" appeared to be too ambitious for Vincent. After he had left Arles he mentioned Japan in his letters to Theo rarer and rarer. Though, clear dark contours and flats of bright colors still appeared in his late artworks. The artist likely kept his seeing of the world with "the Japanese eyes" till the end of his life.