Colour and the Impressionists II, Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh took a lot from the Impressionists.  If you look back at the example of Van Gogh’s early works, you will see a colour palette dominated by the earthy reds, blacks and browns of the Dutch masters.

After his experiences with the Impressionists, his palette became lighter: he took on light blues, greens and, of course bright yellows.  He stops painting shadows simply through dark shading and instead uses short, broken strokes of blues and greens.  Finally, he also shares a love of everyday scenes, following them in a tendency to depict people’s social and working lives, cafes, crowds and gentle French landscapes.

Van Gogh is generally categorized today as a post-impressionist painter; his work was close to that of Impressionist artists such as Claude Money, Alfred Sisley or Berthe Morisot, but he departed from them in several key ways.

Firstly, he was dissatisfied with the decorative nature of their work and criticized them for a lack of spiritual and symbolic depth.  Van Gogh believed in the power of using colour expressionistically (emphasizing emotional experience over realistic depiction), using his signature impasto technique to create thick, 3-D brushwork that intensifies the colours, adding a strong emotional charge (unfortunately, this is something that your phone screen won’t reproduce so if you’re lucky enough to live near one of Vincent’s paintings, I’d advise taking the trip).  

He also tends to add colours that aren’t really there to suggest and symbolize the feelings a subject evoked in him, take for example the dominance of reds and greens in The Night Café, which work to evoke a looming sense of ruin and possible violence.  

Or in his self-portraits, where the flecks of green might suggest decay or renewal, and the strokes of ember-like reds may symbolize his life and vitality, all reflecting Vincent’s inner turmoil.  This, combined with the emotive arcs and textures of his brushstrokes, again introduces an expressionist character into his work, a flourish which will inspire countless later artists.

The Impressionists were an essential influence on Van Gogh.  Their innovations in the treatment of colour are fundamental to his work, but he pushed further, taking up the loving care and attention they gave color, but adding his own twists to make his canvases personal and emotive.  Vincent could never help being anything but Vincent, and the same applied to his paintings, where he captured colour not just to depict naturalism, but to express beliefs and feelings about the world and his turbulent mind.