“Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would for a long walk to refresh oneself,” wrote Vincent van Gogh in 1882, “and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.”
Van Gogh took comfort in nature, from his boyhood to the last weeks of his short life (he died at 37, in 1890). Going for long walks, painting outdoors, and making studies of ordinary insects, nourished his soul.
“Van Gogh in Nature,” the summer’s beacon of an art exhibition opening June 14 at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, is the first exhibit to consider in depth the artist’s passionate relationship with the natural world.
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Richard Kendall, the Clark’s curator at large, was struck by van Gogh’s thinking about nature as he reread the six-volume compendium of the artist’s letters.
“I realized van Gogh uses the word ‘nature’ frankly rather obsessively,” he says over the phone from his home in Nyack, N.Y.
Van Gogh grew up in the Dutch countryside, the son of a pastor. He was a well-educated young man, and in the wake of Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication of “The Origin of Species,” he was immersed in a cultural fervor for natural history.
“This was the age of taxonomy,” Kendall says. “Naturalists were cataloging the world. Nature was God’s handiwork — but what is it all about? How do we understand it? Draw it. Give names to everything.”
That’s what young van Gogh did. “He knew all the places where rare flowers grew,” his sister Elisabeth later wrote in her memoir, and “all the names of the beetles.” In his early 20s, he sent his brother Theo a rough sketch of a sprig of seaweed.
To mount a worthwhile van Gogh show, first seek the blessing of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Kendall went there, and left with more than loaned artworks. Van Gogh scholars Chris Stolwijk and Sjraar van Heugten, both affiliated with that museum, joined him as co-curators.
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“It pushed us up to another level,” says Kendall. The team gathered loans from museums in North America and Europe, including stellar paintings such as “A Wheatfield, with Cypresses” from the National Gallery, London, “The Olive Trees,” from the Museum of Modern Art, and “The Sower,” from the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.
The exhibition features 50 paintings and drawings by van Gogh, supplemented with works by such artists as Monet, Millet, and Hiroshige. Organized chronologically, it traces van Gogh’s development from his early sketches to his final residence in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, where the artist, who had long suffered from mental illness and epilepsy, took his own life.
Despite his personal anguish, van Gogh grew increasingly daring and inventive in his work. He hadn’t encountered Impressionism until he moved to Paris in 1886. The wild colors and breathtaking brushwork confronted him. Captivated by the glowing effect of tiny strokes of brilliant color all in a cluster, he began to experiment.
Living in Montmartre with Theo in 1887, he made a series of small paintings depicting pockets of dense woods, filling the frame, with little or no sky in view. “Undergrowth,” one of these paintings, places us eye-deep in the verdure, regarding the gnarly trunk of an old tree.
“It’s a very strange thing to paint when you’re living in the middle of a modern city,” Kendall says. “We’re left to speculate. My theory: Having arrived in Paris as an excited, youngish artist, he realized he was homesick for Holland’s simple countryside. . . . This is an antidote to Paris.”
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The next year, he set off for Provence. Like many artists, van Gogh had been ignited by Japanese prints, and he was seeking the kind of light he might find in Japan.
“He was a great imaginer,” says Kendall. “Arles was a rather crummy little town, but within hours, he persuades himself it is Japanese.” Van Gogh immediately set to painting orchards in blossom.
Provence may not have been Japan — or Africa, where van Gogh also dreamed of traveling — but its generous Mediterranean light set the artist on a new path, with bold color and thick paint applied straight from the tube.
“It threw the switch on,” says Kendall.
It’s also the place where an argument with his friend Paul Gauguin led him to take a knife to his ear. In time, van Gogh voluntarily checked himself into an asylum in Saint-Remy. There, he painted burgeoning gardens, glowing wheat fields, and dark, towering cypress trees. He stayed for a year, continuing to suffer from anxiety, depression, and what he called his “attacks.” He threw himself into his art as if it was his salvation.
In May of 1890, van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to be closer to Theo and to Paul Gachet, a doctor he thought might help. He avidly continued to paint nature.
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“He painted to within days or even hours of his suicide,” reports Kendall. One painting, made just weeks before his death, “Rain — Auvers,” slashes the soft yellow hills and blue-green trees with slanting rain. The painting, a prize of the National Museum of Wales, is not often loaned. Does the sluicing summer rain, which fractures the canvas, speak to van Gogh’s state of mind, or is it more a shrewd, even excited, response to Hiroshige prints, which also depict relentless showers?
We can’t know.
“How do you paint rain? It is unpaintable,” says Kendall. “But then he saw those prints. ‘Ah, I can paint rain!’ ”
The curator does know this about “Rain — Auvers”: “To use a hoary old phrase, it does look a bit abstract,” he says. “I can imagine a Barnett Newman, a Richard Diebenkorn looking at it and saying, ‘This man was on to it.’ ”
Van Gogh and Nature
At: Clark Art Institute, 225 South St., Williamstown, June 14-Sept. 13,
413-458-2303, www.clarkart.edu
Cate McQuaid can be reached at cate
mcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @cmcq.