Sunflowers on fridge magnets, starry skies on coffee mugs, Café Terrace at Night on t-shirts… A commercial phenomenon, the art of Vincent van Gogh is perhaps more ubiquitous than anyone else’s in history. And yet he is known—to the extent he is known at all by his fashionable metropolitan admirers—chiefly as the madman who drank too much, cut off his ear, and shot himself.
This Vincent of the popular imagination is but a half truth, flattering to the romantic idea of the suffering artiste but neglectful of what really drove him: faith.
Not that you’d know it. I’ve been to many van Gogh exhibitions, some of them better than others. Yet even the ones that strive for the greatest fidelity to his rich inner life tend to omit his Christianity. It’s as though his faith were an embarrassment to the refined sensibilities of curators. Thus, gallery-goers are treated to luscious reproductions (or indeed originals) of Sunflowers, Starry Night, Wheatfield with Crows, Sorrowing Old Man; they may even be treated to a “retina-battering, virtual-reality post-Impressionist extravaganza”. What they will probably not see is Pietà, The Raising of Lazarus, or Parable of the Sower.
This makes no sense. Vincent’s letters are saturated in God-talk. “Hold on to what you have,” he wrote to Theo. “I long so fervently for the goal you know of. But how can I attain it? … It takes so much hard work to become a Christian labourer and a preacher of the Gospel and a sower of the Word.” He spoke from experience. Long before he became a painter, he was a preacher, sleeping rough in barns and subsisting on bread, water, and wine. He was a missionary to the coal miners in the Belgian Borinage, even selling his clothing to them. “I want to be bound to Christ with unbreakable bonds,” he wrote elsewhere…
to be sorrowful yet always rejoicing. To live in and for Christ, to be one of the poor in His Kingdom, steeped in the leaven, filled with His spirit, impelled by His Love, reposing in the Father… To become one who finds repose in Him alone, who desires nothing but Him on earth, and who abides in the Love of God and Christ, in whom we are fervently bound to one another.
These are not the words of an agnostic; they are the words of a fanatic. But van Gogh’s excess de zele soon brought him to the attention of the Evangelisation Council of the Dutch Reformed Church, who promptly expelled him from their hierarchy. Of course, this was not the first time he would be ostracised and scapegoated. The experience left him deeply wounded. He would never again trust organised religion, and his letters shift tonally from the religious to the secular, from the supernatural to the natural. I think this is why the contemporary secular world finds it so easy to overlook his faith: he himself chose to outwardly distance himself from it.
Not, however, inwardly. Without wishing to sound too speculative, I think van Gogh’s faith was too profound simply to vanish along with the religious subject matter of his youth. Rather, it moled its way into even his most famous paintings. Consider Café Terrace at Night.
I have seen this café—now rather a grotty tourist-trap—in Arles myself. Van Gogh’s painting appears to depict nothing more and nothing less than what is promised by its title. But look closer, and one sees that there are twelve people seated around an enigmatic thirteenth figure (the waiter); and to the left by the door, a shadowy figure all in black. It has been suggested that the waiter is Christ, the twelve His disciples, and the shadow Judas. The window behind the waiter even forms a cross. It is difficult to unsee this interpretation. Another example: I have always found Wheatfield with Crows, at once so dark and yet so hopeful, as a veiled depiction of the cross; of Christ crucified, and not Christ risen—hence the darkness of the sky and the murder of crows. The wheat, clearly, is being swept up in a strong wind, i.e. a moment of tremendous significance. The three paths suggest a cross or the Trinity; and the way the middle path peters out into a distant point under the light of the moon (or cloud?) suggests an ultimate peace.
Maybe this is so much wishful thinking. Even so, there can surely be no doubt that the fiery missionary of Borinage was at work in the painter’s hand. Faith informs a person in more ways than one, and certainly in more ways than the obvious. “Try,” he says, “to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting.” Van Gogh could never have known that he would rank among those masters; when he died, he had sold but one painting, and had no reason to suppose the future would resurrect him, much less celebrate him. But then, as he himself said: “The nature of every true son does indeed bear some resemblance to that of the son who was dead and came back to life.”
Though deeply flawed—he was an alcoholic, he did cut off his ear, and he could get very angry—there was, I feel, something of the saint in that red-headed Dutchman. He was like a child—indeed was frequently bullied by the children of whichever village he happened to be staying in—and thus closer to God. He saw things no one else saw, and rendered them in a way no one else could. And, like every saint, he helps us get a little closer to that mysterious beauty at the heart of human suffering.
I have the privilege of teaching art in a Christian school, and van Gogh is always my students’ favorite artist to learn about: they love the fact that he was both an artist and a missionary, and they love finding those little Christian symbols and themes in his work. Thank you for sharing this!