Episode 33: Van Gogh & Starry Night

Art history nerds, lend me your… ear? Because there’s a new episode in town! This episode is a one-and-a-half-hour deep dive into the life of Vincent Van Gogh and one of his most famous works: The Starry Night! Come for the bashing of Paul “Googy” Gauguin, stay in spite of the ear-severing and alleged paint-eating. Edit 8/9 - Small corrections made to the episode. Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde is at the Musée d'Orsay, not the Louvre; Van Gogh died at an inn attended by doctors, not a local hospital; and Van Gogh: A Life was written by both Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Thanks to Gary F. for pointing these out.

Transcript

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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Alright, let's bango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay, hello, and I have my PhD in art history, which I put to good use on this podcast. I select a topic, a thing, if you will, and then I tell you stuff about it. Hence the podcast's cheesy but very descriptive name. Thank you very much for joining me for this, the podcast's 33rd episode, and to the people who listen regularly for waiting so patiently as I got this episode out. The hiatus has mostly been due to the fact that I am currently job searching, which is taking up way more time and energy and emotion than my dissertation ever did. Riddle me that one. And then also just the fact that I've been living my life, you know, hanging out with friends and family. I got sick for the entire month of March. Bronchitis, not fun. But I'm back, and I'm ready to van Gogh. Which, if you have looked at the subject of the podcast's episode, that stupid pun will make more sense than ever. Because we're talking about Van Gogh. But first, before I get into the episode, I wanted to revisit and re-plug a book that I mentioned about 10 episodes ago, which quite frankly feels like a lifetime ago, by friend of the podcast Lillianne Milgram. That book is called Lochine, The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece. And the reason I am re-plugging it is because it was just re-released under a new publisher. The book revolves around Gustave Corbet's painting, Lo Régine du Monde, or The Origin of the World, which is very famous, infamous, if you will, uh, because it shows a close-up view of the female genitalia. You turn a corner at the Musée du Orsey in Paris, and bam, it's right there. It's one of those paintings that never quite loses its shock value, and quite often succeeds in bringing a blush to some viewers' cheeks. It's basically the art history equivalent of watching the first season of Bridgerton with your parents. It really shouldn't be that shocking, but it is. Lillian Milgram's book is historical fiction, but it's historical fiction that is very thoroughly researched. It's like a docudrama of the painting's biography, and it's a very entertaining read. But you don't have to just take my word for it. It has won all kinds of awards, especially with the indie crowd, and it has gotten great reviews online, including a 4.1 out of 5 on Goodreads, which really speaks for itself because Goodreads readers can be a tough crowd. And I should know because I'm part of that crowd. Getting a rating above 4 is pretty damn impressive. So if you're looking for something to read or you just happen to be feeling a little art historically frisky, go grab yourself a copy. Once again, for the people in the back, that is Lochine, the secret life of the world's most erotic masterpiece by Friend of the Pod, Lillianne Milgram. There is also a new exhibition and digital resource that I was recently made aware of that I wanted to mention in case anyone is interested. That exhibition is called Antiquity in America: The Ancient Mediterranean in the United States, which is on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Arts on the Bowdoin College campus in Maine. The exhibition is on view until February, but for those of us with no plans on traveling to Maine in the meantime, the exhibition also has this incredible digital resource with all kinds of information and pictures of the artifacts in the show, information about the people who collected them, and even a couple of 3D models. It's very cool for anyone interested in antiquity and collecting in America, but also anyone interested in the sort of sexy topic right now of quote unquote digital art history. This is a really excellent example about how you can put some of those principles to use and make your exhibitions, even if they're being held in person, more accessible to the public who doesn't happen to be in Maine. Once again, that is Antiquity in America, the ancient Mediterranean in the United States, which is on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. I will provide links to both that exhibition and Miss Lillian Milgram's book on the podcast's website, which is stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. Much like a chance encounter with a painting of the female genitalia in Paris, today's episode is a little bit unexpected. I had originally planned on doing a completely different topic, a listener-requested topic, no less, shout out to Dot, which is still on the docket for a future episode. Instead, I am going to talk about one of my favorite artists and works of art of all time. Inspired by the fact that I actually got to see this painting for what must have been the third or fourth time when I was back in New York in March, before all of my other plans got canceled when I became hotel-bound with bronchitis. It's an artist in a painting that often get romanticized and even mythicized. I'm not sure that's a word, but whatever. To the point where I think that a lot of us, including myself, have lost perspective on the fact that yes, this is now one of the world's most famous paintings by one of the world's most famous artists. But, you know, once upon a time, it wasn't this world-renowned treasure. It was just a painting made by a man. That's all it was. There was a guy and he put paint on a canvas. I wanted to return to those basics to tell you about that man, this painting, and how we, as a culture, as a popular culture, have launched them into the stars to a level of adoration and fame that that man could have never imagined. So without further ado, this is it. The part where I tell you stuff about a man who happens to be one of the world's most famous artists, and about a painting that he painted, which just so happens to be one of the world's most famous paintings. Vincent Van Gogh, his life, and the Starry Night. First things first. Yes, I do know that the proper pronunciation of Van Gogh is Van Gogh. However, I am neither British nor Dutch and sound like a pretentious idiot when I say it like that, so I'm just gonna go with Van Gogh. Second thing second, it's no secret that Van Gogh did not have a terribly happy or healthy life. He suffered greatly uh in terms of his mental health, and there were times in which he engaged in self-harm to various degrees. I don't go into that too much in the episode, but if uh that's not something that you want to hear about or you have young listeners around, maybe, I am letting you know, and you can make the decision of whether or not you choose to keep listening. Finally, this is a fair warning that this episode clocks in at about an hour and a half. It's gonna be a long one. But in my defense, I've received a lot of emails lately from listeners saying that you don't care how long the episodes are. So, um, yeah, here you go. Oh boy. I did record it over the course of about five or six days, so you might occasionally hear slight changes in the audio quality, which unfortunately just can't be helped. You know, sometimes things get a little echoey or my voice gets raspy. That just happens when you're recording for that long. So we'll have to make do. Alright, with those things said, let's get started. I would be floored, like genuinely amazed, if there was someone listening who doesn't know Van Gogh and at least one or two of his works. I would even gander that most people in the developed world have some vague knowledge of the guy, whether they know it or not. That is because Van Gogh is what I like to call a one name or a brand-named artist, alongside the likes of Michelangelo, Raphael, Monet, Da Vinci, etc. As so often happens with brand-named artists, though, we as art lovers tend to fall into the trap of making these people into more than men. The way that we think and talk about these artists is very similar to how we treat and talk about celebrities and royals these days. And it's a fitting comparison because we've made these artists into the rock stars and royalty of art history. We idolize them, we vilify some of them, we think that we know them and can speak for them, even you know, hundreds of years after their deaths. As a result, it gets really easy to forget that these artists were just people. Geniuses, sure. Talented, definitely, but ultimately, they're just people. Van Gogh might be the most idolized artist of all. I mean, he's basically the poster child for the trope or the archetype of the artistic tormented genius, the man who has to create, otherwise he'll go mad and he channels all his suffering into his art. And can there be art without suffering? I'm not a fan of that kind of that kind of thinking, as you can probably tell. I have actively attempted to avoid that kind of thinking in writing this episode, attempted being the key term. Let's start where most stories do. The beginning, with a biographical stroll through the life of Vincent Van Gogh. Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Zundert, which is a small town in the Lower Netherlands. He was the first surviving child of Anna and Theodoris Van Gogh. Eventually, the Van Gogh family would expand to include five other children, including Theo Van Gogh, who was four years younger than Vincent, and who would play an absolutely essential role in Vincent's life and career. In fact, we owe much of our knowledge about Vincent Van Gogh and his life to the letters he exchanged with his brother. They were writing back and forth constantly, and we today still have hundreds of those letters. As a kid, Van Gogh was a bit of an odd duck. His neighbors literally called him, quote unquote, a strange boy. That was like his nickname around town. He was quick-tempered, he was stubborn, withdrawn, a bit of a loner, and as the years went on, he became increasingly difficult to manage in the household. Because of that, his parents decided to send him to boarding school, which began a pattern that would persist for Van Gogh's entire life, one of displacement, of people not really knowing what to do with him, and all of the loneliness that comes with that. This first displacement, though, to boarding school was particularly traumatic, as he was very, very close with his family and he was deeply hurt by his parents' decision to send him away. He did eventually finish school. Now you might be thinking, well, didn't he become an artist? And the answer is no, at least not for a very long time. His first job out of school, though, was in the arts. He was hired by his uncle, who was a partner at an art dealership. However, as the pattern of his life goes, Van Gogh's time at his uncle's business was not a terribly happy or productive one, and he got shuffled around between different branches of the company every couple of years, including stints in London and Paris. No one knows for sure why he got moved around so much, but it was likely for the same reason that he was really never able to hold down a job or even a dream. He was difficult to work with, stubborn, and he was absolutely definitely not a people person. In fact, he tended to make people feel pretty uncomfortable. He was eventually fired from the company, which is pretty amazing given that he was the nephew of a very important partner. In the late 19th century in the Netherlands, that should have made him basically untouchable. But he got fired, which brought great shame on the Van Gogh family. For the next few years, Van Gogh lives on and off with his family as he cycles through a number of different professional identities, including a couple of years in which his burning ambition was to become a Protestant reverend like his father. Ultimately, though, he failed out of theology school and had to settle for becoming a missionary. He was then fired from that, fired from being a missionary, for quote, undermining the dignity of the priesthood. End quote. I don't know what that means. I don't know that I want to know what that means, but I think we can all agree that it's nothing good. As these series of unfortunate events attest, our honey bunch, Van Gogh, was really struggling. Struggling to find a job, struggling to find his place in the world, and struggling with family dynamics, which will become very clear in just a little bit. It wasn't until after this series of professional failures that Van Gogh decides to pursue art, not as an interest, but as a craft. This was all happening in his late 20s, which isn't old, or, you know, at least that's what I told myself at night to keep the tears away. But for someone who didn't live to see the age of 40, Van Gogh is entering the final third of his life. The fact that he was able to pursue a full-time career as a painter, or really, I don't know if you can call it a career if he didn't make any money, but it was all made possible by his brother Theo, who, despite being Vincent's younger brother, had become his older brother's primary source of financial and emotional support, and he would continue to be so for the rest of Vincent Van Gogh's life. Theo was able to do so because he was employed by the company owned by his uncle, the very same one that had fired Van Gogh just a few years earlier. That is where Theo is getting the money that he funnels into supporting his brother, both in terms of his artistic ambitions, but also just his general well-being. To say the very, very least, like the least of the least, Theo Van Gogh was an absolutely wonderful brother. It was Theo who encouraged Van Gogh to study art and even found him a teacher, who in turn convinced Van Gogh to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. He sticks that out for about a year, which is a lot longer than I would have anticipated, given Van Gogh's general lack of enthusiasm and even downright disdain for formal schooling. He does eventually, however, drop out and moves back home with his parents, which, you know, quite relatable, at least, unfortunately, to me. What comes next, however, is not so relatable, or at least, I hope not, because ew. Within a short time of moving back with his parents, Van Gogh fell in love with his newly widowed cousin and proposed marriage. I'll repeat that just in case you missed it. He falls in love with his newly widowed cousin and proposes marriage. Vincent, really, like, no, buddy, just no. And that was basically her response. She responded to his marriage proposal by saying, quote, no, nay, never. End quote. She literally said no three different ways, and quite frankly, I don't blame her. And it is easy to poke fun at this situation because it's just weird. Not only are you hitting on your cousin, which even in the late 19th century was not normal. It was not normal to marry your first cousin. Your second cousin? Your third cousin, like maybe. But it's not like the 16th and 17th centuries when everyone's just marrying their cousins willy-nilly. So that's weird. And on top of that, you're not just hitting on your cousin. You are proposing marriage to her while she is still in mourning after recently losing her husband. Dude, you like, you just think you should have read the room on that one. But he definitely thought that he loved her, and I'm sure that he was crushed when she said no three times over. Now that we've gotten the whole fell-in-love with his cousin subplot out of the way, let's switch gears slightly. Because before talking about Van Gogh's career in general and Starry Knight in specific, I want to give you a sense of the artistic atmosphere in which he was emerging and operating. First things first, in the mid to late 19th century, so the 1800s, the be-all end-all of the artistic scene in Europe and America was Paris. And in the 1860s and 1870s, there was a battle going down in Art Town between very traditional approaches to painting, which are often referred to as the academic style, given that that was the style taught at fine art academies or universities, basically at the time, and an emerging style that we now know as impressionism. As the ism suggests, impressionism was about capturing both the visual and experiential quality of fleeting moments in time. Impressions of a moment. That meant moving away from the need to be overly exact or realistic, in favor of looser brushwork, brighter colors, and more of a focus on atmosphere and the effects of lighting. It's obviously a bit more complicated than that, everything always is, but that's the gist of it. The most famous impressionist painter that even people outside of art history probably know is Claude Monet, who very famously painted things like gardens, um landscapes of cities like Venice and London, and of course, ponds covered in lily pads. It's kind of his MO. Other notable and, you know, quote-unquote famous Impressionist painters include Renoir, Manet, Degas, as well as painters like Bert Morissot and Mary Cassat. Two women who gave those boys a run for their money. Today, Impressionism is probably one of the most broadly appealing and least offensive of the art movements. No one is going to get mad if they see a poster of a Monet painting on the wall at the dentist's office. However, in 1870s Paris, Impressionism was absolutely wreaking havoc on the city, sometimes literally. One art critic even accused Monet, Claude Monet, a man famous for painting ponds and gardens, of waging a war on beauty. That's a quote, quote unquote, a war on beauty. aka, this guy thought that Monet's paintings were hideous and an insult to art everywhere. To which I say, Things started to get really out of hand in March of 1875 when a group of Impressionist painters got together to hold an exhibition and sale of their art. They did that because academic exhibitions were not allowing them to participate. They were like, your art sucks, you can't sit with us. And so, in basically an FU to those exhibitions that had denied them, these impressionist painters decided to put on a show and a sale of their own. And who boy did that put underpants in Paris in a big old twist? And I'm not talking, well, I am talking figuratively, hopefully. I don't think any wedgies were thrown into the mix. But people were showing up to this exhibition in droves, and eventually someone started throwing punches, and the police ended up getting called and shutting things down. Oh, how times have changed. Van Gogh was living in Paris when a lot of this stuff was going down, back when he worked for his uncle's company. He even lived in the neighborhood of Montmartre, where many of these artists, these Impressionist artists, were living and working at the time. What might surprise you though is that Van Gogh didn't have a terribly high estimation of Impressionist painting. He didn't really seem to get what they were trying to do, which is odd to me because, as his later art shows, his own practice, his own painting style really embraced a lot of the same concepts and general techniques that people like Monet and Renoir and Degas were using. But at that time in 1870s Paris, Impressionism was not Van Gogh's thing. I don't think he was like throwing punches about it, but you know, not his cup of tea. When he started painting in earnest in the late 1870s and 1880s, though, Van Gogh hadn't yet developed that signature style that he later would. He wasn't using those sweeping brush strokes and bright colors for which he would later become so famous. He was much more academic early in his career, which makes sense given that he attended an academy. Now you don't hear much about Van Gogh's early work, and probably for that exact reason, it doesn't look like a quote-unquote Van Gogh. Those of you who follow uh the art scene and subscribe to various art-related newsletters might remember that one of Van Gogh's earliest paintings made the news a few years ago when the parsonage garden at Noyen, basically a landscape of a church garden, was stolen from a museum in the Netherlands during the early COVID lockdowns. Thieves took advantage of people not being around, and Snickety snatched that painting right up. To add insult to injury, the museum that it was stolen from didn't own the painting. It was on loan to them from a different museum. So I hope everyone involved had insurance because woof. And I bring this up really for the sole point that I loved what the director of that museum said during a press conference, which was quote, I am extremely pissed off that this happened. End quote. Which made me laugh. I mean, there's nothing funny about the theft, but I just love that that was his sound bite, because how many of us have wanted to say something like that in a professional setting? Guilty. To be clear, I'm guilty of thinking that in professional settings, not of carrying out an international art heist. I'm not smart enough for that. The more that Van Gogh paints, the more his style begins to develop, which for him meant that his painting style became increasingly more stylized and less realistic. He really hit his stride in 1885 when he painted what is undoubtedly his most famous early work called The Potato Eaters, which, as the title suggests, shows people eating potatoes and drinking what looks like coffee. Yum. It is a very dark painting, like color-wise, it's very dark, presumably showing a family or a group of people sharing an evening meal in the glow of a single oil lamp. It's a pretty depressing painting. It's also dark in that respect. It's not my cup of tea, but it shows that Van Gogh was moving towards a less realistic mode of painting. The peasants depicted are, uh, to put it in a very professional art historical way, they ain't cute. They are almost cartoon-like in their appearance, uh, though I'm sure my former professors would have my head on a stake for calling them cartoon-like. That is to say, that Van Gogh puts more emphasis on capturing their nature than their likeness. They aren't portraits of specific people, but rather portraits of peasants and peasant life in general. Van Gogh even writes about how he deliberately painted their flesh to resemble the color and texture of an unpeeled potato, which is a phrase that I am totally going to use as a new insult. Oh yeah? At least I don't have skin the color and texture of an unpeeled potato. And then you throw a potato at their face.

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Kow pow!

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The Potato Eaters is a characteristic work of Van Gogh's quote-unquote early career. And I keep putting emphasis on the word early because that's what people call it, but in reality, 1885 was more like the midpoint of his painting career, which remember only lasted about 10 years. But by 1885, he has really hit his stride and develops a more expressive personal style, as demonstrated by the potato eaters. Another huge development comes in his career in 1886 when Van Gogh moves to Paris to live with his brother Theo. As I mentioned earlier, Van Gogh had lived in Paris during the 1870s. But these two years spent with Theo over the course of 1886 and 1887 marked the time period in which he really became enmeshed in the artistic scene happening around town. This was helped by the fact that Theo still worked as an art dealer, meaning that Van Gogh had access to all kinds of inspiration coming in and out of Theo's dealership, including works by old masters like Rembrandt, as well as contemporary artists like Claude Monet. Van Gogh was also forming something like friendships with other artists milling about Paris at the same time, including Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard, and of course Paul Gauguin, who we will talk more about shortly. Van Gogh and his peers were broadly known as post-impressionists. Now, to describe post-impressionism in its most basic of terms, post-impressionist painting tends to be more abstract, using things like color and line and form to render not just what a scene looked like, but also what it felt like. So it still engages aspects of impressionism, but it pushes beyond the visual to take into consideration the things felt, the senses engaged, and works to give those invisible factors visual form. That is exactly what Vincent van Gogh and his peers were attempting to do, though each did so in his or her own unique way. At this same time, Van Gogh was developing a fascination for Japanese woodblock prints, which had become very popular in Paris following the 1850s, which is when Japan opened its border to the West and began trading again, which resulted in the influx of these prints, which were mass-produced and very easy to move, into places like Paris. The most famous of these prints, the one that your average person might know, is Hokusai's the Great Wave, which is a print of a very large wave about to crash down on some longboats in the ocean. And then you know it's near Japan because Mount Fuji is sort of lingering menacingly in the background. Prints like Hokusai's the Great Wave injected Europe and American artistic circles with a completely new visual approach to art, and they inspired many works in the so-called Japanisma style, which is basically European and American artists evoking, and one could definitely say appropriating, aspects of Japanese art and culture into their work. And Van Gogh was all about it. During these two years, Van Gogh was painting things like still lives, including vases of flowers, plates of food, things you'd find around the house, as well as landscapes of the city and nearby countryside, and then of course portraits, both self-portraits, meaning he painted himself, and then those of friends and colleagues. And when I say that he was painting these things, I mean this dude was painting these things. He was prolific in his output. In the nine or ten years that he dedicated to painting, he produced something like 900 works, which is a lot. Homeboy was really churning out those canvases. Which isn't to say that he was successful because uh he wasn't. I mean, I guess that depends on your definition of success, but the general consensus of the 1880s art scene was that Van Gogh's work wasn't the best. Even his brother Theo didn't really like or get what Van Gogh was doing, even if he encouraged his brother to keep doing it and keep producing, because he was a very good and supportive brother. And that's basically how things went for all of Van Gogh's career. Very few people appreciated his work, and he sold maybe a handful of paintings during his life. You sometimes hear the myth that he only ever sold one painting during his lifetime. But I do think that that is a myth, especially if you consider that he was often trading his works in return for other goods. But he certainly did not sell many, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the hundreds that he made. That bears the question of if he's not making any money, if he's not selling like very many paintings at all, how can he afford to keep doing this full time? That was all thanks to Theo, who was continuing to bankroll this entire endeavor. Van Gogh spent all of the money that Theo sent him on materials and models and, I'm sure, adult beverages, rather than on keeping himself healthy and well fed. He never really learned to take care of himself, if he was really even capable of that at all. And that wasn't helped by the fact that in the mid-1880s, Van Gogh starts to have some serious trouble with his mental and physical health, which, let's be real, was never great. But by the mid-1880s, things had really, really escalated. So let's let's talk about it. As we have established, between the years of 1886 and early 1888, Van Gogh is living with Theo in Paris. But over the course of these two years, Van Gogh really starts to tire and become disenchanted with city life. And he gets it in his mind that art and life and beauty are just waiting for him in the countryside. And he convinces Theo to pay for him to go on a prolonged stay to southern France, to Provence. And let's be real, this is also probably a vacation for Theo. Because can you imagine, as much as he loved Vincent, can you imagine having Vincent van Gogh as a house guest for two years? I wouldn't last 15 minutes with this guy. So when Vincent's like, hey dude, I want to go to the countryside, I'm assuming Theo whipped out his wallet so fast and was like, absolutely, where can I send you? I'm sure that's not actually how it went, but that's how I like to imagine it happening in my head. After visiting Provence for a few weeks, Van Gogh decides that he wants to start a kind of artist's colony in the south of France that he refers to as the studio of the south. In his mind, this was going to be an idyllic place where artists would come and stay to be around other artists, to take inspiration from each other and from the countryside, to debate arts and artists and beauty, and probably to drink copiously. All of that, that was the dream. In service to that dream, Van Gogh, bankrolled by Theo, moves to the town of Arle in February of 1888 and rents what is now known as the Yellow House. Because, spoiler alert, it was yellow and a house. Van Gogh then starts to turn the Yellow House into this envisioned studio of the South in the hopes that all of his fellow artists in Paris would eventually come down and stay and work there for a time. It took eight months for Van Gogh to get his first visitor, who unfortunately would also be his only visitor, at least long term. That man was none other than Paul Gauguin, or as my mother once called him, Paul Googie, which personally I prefer. I'm not the biggest Gauguin fan. Let me just say that right off the top. The man gives me the ick. Paul Gauguin is nevertheless an undoubtedly famous artist. And he's someone who Van Gogh in particular really idolized and respected, even if he was kind of a jerk. However, even as his works sell for like a stupid amount of money, we're talking tens of millions of dollars, Gauguin is not necessarily an artist that I would expect your average person to know. But, but but but I would say that anyone with any kind of knowledge of Van Gogh knows of at least one story involving Paul Gauguin. And if Paul Gauguin knew that that's how people knew him these days, they knew him through a story about Van Gogh, he would be absolutely furious, and that brings me great joy. And that is the incident involving Vincent Van Gogh's left ear. Yes, ear. Long story short, Gogan had gone to stay with Van Gogh and Arl, where he planned to remain for something like five months. I'm not exactly sure on the time frame, but he had planned to stay for a long time. Things had started out fine. Van Gogh was super pumped that Gogan was there. I'm not sure whether Van Gogh knew that Theo was paying Gogan to be there, but still, he was excited. And they did all of the things that Van Gogh had envisioned when he started the quote-unquote studio of the South. They painted, they talked about painting, they drank a lot, all of that stuff. Things, however, went downhill very fast. The straw that broke the camel's back came on Christmas Eve Eve in 1888. The events leading up to this day are not super clear, but the basic situation was this. Gauguin had decided that he had had enough and wanted to go back to Paris after just two months. This greatly upset Van Gogh, who, despite the mounting tension between the two artists, really wanted Gauguin to stay. But Gogan was set on leaving, which really upset Van Gogh. And this whole situation comes to a head on December 23rd, 1888. According to Gogan, who was the only witness to this besides Van Gogh himself, who was not in a fit state to recall what happened, according to Gauguin, Van Gogh had become increasingly erratic and odd over the course of the previous few weeks. And it finally got to the point where Gauguin no longer felt safe at the house with him. So Gauguin removes himself from the situation, books the hotel for the night, and he pieces out. When he comes back the next day, the yellow house is full of policemen and absolutely covered in blood. It turns out that after Gauguin left, Van Gogh had a breakdown or an episode of some kind. I think people in his time called it a quote-unquote nervous attack, and that culminated in self-harm. Specifically, he cut off parts or all of his left ear. He then wrapped his severed ear in newspaper, took it to the local brothel, and delivered it to a woman named Rachel, telling her to keep it safe. And then he just leaves. Van Gogh is rushed to the hospital, Theo is called down from Paris, and while at first it is not looking good, it's not looking like Van Gogh is going to make it, he does eventually recover, though he spends several weeks in the hospital. Now there are all kinds of theories about what actually happened with regards to Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the story of the severed ear. The fact of the matter is that no one knows what happened apart from those two people involved. What is clear, however, is that this event really marked the beginning of the end for Van Gogh, who went on to suffer several more such attacks and was eventually both involuntarily and voluntarily admitted to a number of mental institutions. There have been all kinds of attempts to diagnose Van Gogh and to speculate about what exactly he was suffering from. Possible diagnoses include chronic romantic depression, bipolar disorder, something related to epilepsy, schizophrenia, I mean, you name it, he's been quote-unquote diagnosed with it. The fact remains, however, that we don't know what he suffered from, and despite all attempts to do so, including by medical professionals who should know better, it is impossible to accurately diagnose someone 120 years after the fact. But people are absolutely fascinated with this aspect of Van Gogh's life, to the point where it's become romanticized and even fetiscized, which is to say that we've become obsessed with it. And before getting to Starry Night, which I swear it's coming, I want to get on a little soapbox and talk about Van Gogh and our cultural relationship to him. There has been a reductive or a grossly oversimplified relationship established between Van Gogh's mental health and his art. There are people who will even claim that if Van Gogh didn't have his mental health issues, that he would have never painted what he did. You often hear that about all kinds of artists, whether they're painters or musicians or actors. There's this pervasive idea that suffering is key to making great art. I talked a little bit about this sort of stance on mental health and creative output in the Nicky Days on Fall episode on the Tarot Gardens, in which I refer to this kind of logic as intellectually lazy. And I stand by that. There are no definitive studies, that I know of at least, that show that mental health issues somehow drive creative output or make us more creative. In Van Gogh's case, the opposite appears to be true. In his worst bouts of illness, his creative output was completely halted. Either because he was physically incapable of making art, or because the people around him were afraid that he would hurt himself if he was allowed access to his materials. There were a few instances, for example, in which he either did or threatened to do things like eat paint, which at the time would have been basically poisoning himself. Mental health absolutely has a hand in shaping our lives. It shapes how we think about ourselves and how we think about the world, which in turn shapes the things that we make and put into that world. But the idea that you have to suffer to produce good art isn't just a fundamentally flawed idea, it's also a very dangerous one, one that encourages not getting help for your mental health issues or not taking your proper medication because you think it's somehow going to stop the creative flow. It's also been proven time and time again that at least today, people who do creative jobs are far less likely to have access to adequate mental health resources. And that's primarily due to things like not having stable income or the fact that creative jobs often have either no health insurance policies or policies that don't provide a high level of coverage and care. As a result, people can't get the help that they might need. And if that's true today, I don't even want to know what it was like back in the late 1800s, though it's safe to say that with Theo looking over him, Van Gogh did have access to what for that time was a fairly high standard of care. And it's because he had such a high standard of care that he was able to continue to paint. To close out my little soapbox rant, uh, there is an article that Claudia Hammond wrote in 2016 for BBC Future. And you might be thinking, Lindsay, BBC Future is not a scientifically reviewed journal. I know that. Don't worry, I know that. But it is a really great article with links to various studies that are most often cited in conversations about the causality between mental health and creativity. I think it's a fantastic article. It's a very accessible and easy and quick to read, with again links to things that she cites. But I found the final paragraph particularly touching, and I wanted to read it in full here. In her final address as to the link between creativity and mental health, Hammond writes the following quote: Ultimately, I wonder whether the idea persists because it is comforting. Comforting if we have a mental health problem because it opens up the possibility of a positive side to it. And comforting if we don't because it makes us think that if we were a creative genius, there would be a price to pay. Perhaps the link between mental illness and creativity endures simply because we want it to. After he was released from the hospital following the ear incident, he continued to struggle with nervous attacks and episodes in the months that followed. By May of 1889, those attacks had gotten so bad that Van Gogh voluntarily checked himself into a psychiatric hospital. That was the asylum of Saint Paul du Mazul, located in the village of Saint-Remy in Provence. So still in southern France. These days, one associates a hospital with a place that is super sterile, both visually and one hopes, literally. But the asylum of Saint Paul in Saint-Remy was a bit different, or should I say, is a bit different, because the asylum is still very much in operation. The building housing the asylum was originally built as a monastery in something like the 12th century, with later renovations and additions to follow. But it's architecturally stunning. It's also in Provence, which I haven't been there, but it looks super dope and super pretty. From what I've read of Vincent's time at Saint Remy, the asylum was not your typical psychiatric hospital. It functioned more like Equal Parts Health Resort and Psychiatric facility, where patients, depending on their ailments, had quite a bit of freedom to move around the building and the surrounding countryside. It's not like it was paradise, I don't want to make it seem like that. It was a mental health institution, but as far as psychiatric facilities go, it was probably one of the better places to be. For the most part, Van Gogh lived a relatively comfortable life there, and he was even given a spare room at the asylum to use as a studio. And thank goodness for that, because this year-long stay at the asylum proved to be one of Van Gogh's most prolific periods of artistic production. He painted constantly. We are talking dozens and dozens and dozens of canvases, some of which are now considered among his masterpieces. One of those masterpieces was none other than the painting we know today as Starry Night. We're finally there. It only took an hour to get here, but now we're here. Ooh-oh. Starry Night. Alright, let's go. Van Gogh painted Starry Night or The Starry Night in the days leading up to June 19, 1889. We know that because on that day he wrote a letter to his brother Theo. The two were exchanging letters almost daily at this point. And in that letter, Van Gogh references a canvas that he just painted, one that he refers to as, quote, a new study of a starry sky, end quote. Today, of course, we know that painting not as a starry sky, but the starry night. And it is not only one of Van Gogh's most famous paintings, probably his most famous painting, it's also one of the most famous paintings in the entire world, period. For those who need a brief uh reminder of what this painting looks like, as its name suggests, it shows an expansive night sky filled with a crescent moon, glowing stars, and a swirling cosmos above a countryside of rolling hills and trees. A small town occupies that countryside. It's a collection of small houses and a single church, whose spire barely touches the heavens. And in the left foreground, there is a grove of cypress trees that form their own cathedral-like presence that stretch all of the way up until they touch the stars. The star-spangled night sky was a subject that Van Gogh had wanted to paint for a long time, years. He had even tried his hand at it a couple of times while living in Arle, before he finally painted Starry Night while at the asylum. These earlier canvases are also pretty well known and widely reproduced on, you know, Van Gogh merch. The first is known as Starry Sky over the Rhone, which some of you will have seen recently featured on the podcast's Instagram with a slight variation, that variation being my dog Gus. That was a little bit of an Easter egg for the topic of this episode, but of course I didn't say that. The second of those canvases is called the Cafe Terrace at Night, which, you guessed it, shows a night scene of a cafe on a street in Arle. Van Gogh painted both of those canvases in 1888, in the months before everything really went haywire with his life, resulting in institutionalization. Neither of those paintings, however, seemed to satisfy Van Gogh's fascination with painting the night sky, and he didn't consider either of them to be a quote-unquote true image of the night sky, because they were dominated by cityscapes that pull focus. While Starry Knight also has a city, the sky is the undoubted focus of this canvas. It absolutely dominates the image, which, for those of you who haven't seen it in person, it's not that big. It's not small, it's not like the Mona Lisa, but at 2.5 by 3 feet, it's a pretty average-sized painting, really no bigger than your average size poster. I've had one such poster of Starry Night on my wall for many, many years. It's not quite like having the real thing, but I digress. Because it's one of the most famous works of all time, there are a lot of misconceptions and myths that have cropped up over the years about Starry Night. In particular, the fact that Van Gogh painted it while at an asylum seems to have really tickled people's fancies. Let's debunk some of those assumptions. Contrary to what some may claim, Van Gogh did not paint Starry Night outside. He also did not paint it at night. It was a work of art that he made in his studio during daylight hours. We know this because one, patients at the asylum were not allowed on the grounds after dark, and two, Van Gogh only had access to his studio during daylight hours, and he wasn't allowed to keep painting materials in his bedroom. Ergo, therefore, Starry Night was painted during the day in his studio. Yet another myth is that Starry Night depicts the view from Van Gogh's bedroom window. That's also not true. We know what room he occupied at the asylum, which again is still in use, and the view from that window is not the one that appears in Starry Night. In fact, the landscape depicted in Starry Night is a composite, a mishmash, of various views of the countryside around the asylum. The exact view depicted does not exist. That said, Starry Night is a fascinating mix of observation and imagination. Even though Van Gogh painted Starry Knight in his studio during the day, he had clearly been studying the night sky, presumably from his bedroom window, before he put his paintbrush to canvas. Now it's not scientific in the literal sense. An actual starry sky looks very different from the one that Van Gogh rendered. But it's not like he just made the whole thing up. There have even been several studies about the quote-unquote accuracy of Starry Night that show that Van Gogh was indeed studying the night sky, even while he exercised a considerable amount of artistic independence. The most famous of those studies occurred in the 1990s, when an art historian by the name of Albert Boyme, who was a professor for many years at UCLA, collaborated with his colleagues in the astronomy department to determine that starry night, quote, shows us an eastern portion of a pre-dawn sky at approximately 4 a.m., end quote. Now I don't know how they came up with that or how accurate you can be when working from a rather abstract painting, but that's what they determined. Boym also worked with the Griffith Park Observatory to simulate what the night sky would have looked like in Saint-Remy on June 19, 1889, which again is the date of the letter in which Van Gogh writes about having finished a study of a starry sky. That simulation or projection showed a few interesting things. The first was that the planet Venus would have been extra bright around that time, and it would have appeared low on the horizon just below the constellation of Aries. My star sign, no big deal. Bohem argues that we can see this quite clearly in Starry Night, and it's a convincing argument. When you're looking at the painting, there is one star that has a glow that's more white than the rest. The rest are more yellow in tone. It's the one to the immediate right of the cypress trees. If Boime and his astronomer friends are correct, that was not a star, but it was the planet Venus. He also then identifies an arrangement of three stars in the sky that form the constellation Ares, meaning that Van Gogh had replicated the star patterns that he could see in the night sky on those nights leading up to June 19th. Interestingly, though, the observatory simulation showed that the moon would not have been a crescent at that point. It would have instead been a Gibbis moon, which is when the moon is more than half but less than full. Technically, I think it's a quarter, but you know, you know what I mean. The fact that Van Gogh painted certain things, quote unquote, accurately, like the positioning of Venus and the arrangement of Aries, but not others, like the moon phase, has struck some people as being very strange. But I think the reality of the matter is quite simple. Yes, the Starry Night was meant to be and is a study of the night sky, but it's first and foremost a painting, something that's meant to be visually and emotionally compelling. It's not a scientific document by any stretch of the imagination. In all likelihood, Van Gogh thought that the crescent moon would be a more interesting shape to include, that overall results in a much more interesting composition. The fact of the matter is that Van Gogh saw the night sky through the lens of an artist, not an astronomer. I mean, he was a man of many talents and interests, but ultimately, even in his letters, when he talks about the night sky and wanting to paint the night sky, there's always an emphasis on color and the challenge of capturing those colors on canvas. Just under a year before he painted Starry Night, Van Gogh wrote about the challenges of painting stars to his sister. He writes, quote, certain stars are citron yellow, others have a pink glow, or a green, blue, and forget me not brilliance. Putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough. End quote. After reading this, I couldn't help but think about what Van Gogh's reaction would be to seeing something like the images released from the web telescope. With all of those colors and formations and whatever the heck else they show, I mean, those would have blown his mind. The comment that he writes in the letter to his sister affirms that Van Gogh's fascination with the sky is intimately related to his fascination with color. Now, he's an artist who is known for painting in really bold, often contrasting colors, but Starry Knight really demonstrates just how powerful those contrasts can be. The theory of contrasting colors is simple, or it can be simplified. Most of us will have seen something called a color wheel, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a circle that's been divided into equal slices, each of which features a color. Those colors are arranged in relationship to one another, forming a wheel that ends up looking a lot like a rainbow. Your basic color wheel usually has red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. And it's arranged so that red goes to orange, goes to yellow, goes to green, goes to blue, goes to purple, goes back to red. Ta-da! Color wheel. And that arrangement is important because the colors on the opposite sides of the wheel are considered contrasting, or another word for that is complementary. For example, red and green are on opposite sides of the wheel. So to make a long story short, if you had two paint swatches, one red and one green, the swatches would look more vibrant side by side than they would alone, because they're contrasting. The use of contrasting colors in art has always been a thing, all the way back to Greek and Roman times and probably before that. But the use of contrasting colors was especially popular during post-impressionism, which is the ism to which Van Gogh belonged. Those painters used contrasting colors to make their paintings even more vibrant, and Van Gogh was no exception, as demonstrated by Starry Night, which is dominated by the contrasting colors of blue and yellow. As a result, the yellow stars really stand out against the blue night sky. There's a luminosity, a luminous quality to them, and to the painting more broadly, especially when you are privileged enough to see it in person. In addition to this luminosity created by using contrasting colors, Starry Night also has a certain sculptural quality about it. Van Gogh really builds up the layers of paint in a technique known as imposto. He is rather famous for doing that, and sometimes his canvases are quite thick with paint buildup. However, when I first saw Starry Night, and every time I see it, I'm always astounded by the fact that when you get close to the canvas, you know, close, not too close, but close, there are areas of the painting that are not covered in paint. Instead, there are some areas where you can very clearly see bare or primed canvas poking through. Before seeing the work in person, when I would see just pictures of it, I would always assume that those white areas were just paint. Instead, that's just primed canvas peeking through. And when you consider that, it really does make it look like a study, like something done fairly quickly, probably over the course of just a couple of days, if that. Stunning. If you ever have the opportunity to see it in person, absolutely do it. I know that tickets to the Museum of Modern Art in New York are very expensive, very spendy. $25, I think I paid when I went in March. Absolutely insane. But if it means seeing this work in person, it's worth every single penny. Now that we know a bit more about how and when Van Gogh painted Starry Night, let's switch gears to talk about what Starry Night means. I'm putting means in quotations that you can't hear, because there's really no one interpretation that's right or wrong. And let me tell you, these interpretations really run the gamut. Though I've identified three broad strokes, pun intended, that many of the more popular interpretations fall into. First, you've got the people who interpret Starry Night as a product of Van Gogh's deteriorating mental health in the final year of his life. There are even some scholars and medical professionals who have used Starry Night as a kind of diagnostic tool in their quest to determine what mental or physical condition Van Gogh may have suffered from. Which, is that totally ethical? You know, like medically ethical? I don't know. But that's an extreme example of this tendency to read Starry Night as a reflection of what his mental health must have been like in the moment that he painted it. Another very popular interpretation is people who read Starry Night as a religious painting, and specifically as a Christian painting. And while I suppose it depends on your definition of religion, this theory. Doesn't track for two primary reasons. One, Van Gogh literally refers to this painting as a study of the night sky and nothing else, and two, by the final years of his life, Van Gogh's conception of faith in God had shifted away from the frameworks put in place by organized religion. He was still a deeply spiritual man, but it's very unlikely that he painted Starry Night from a distinctly Christian perspective. And before anyone comes from me, yes, Van Gogh did paint overtly Christian images, which I define roughly as those featuring biblical figures or events. However, to my knowledge, all of those were copies after other artists. They weren't original compositions like the Starry Night. Finally, there are the people that go what I like to call the full Da Vinci Code route. These are the people who choose to read Starry Night as if it illustrates some kind of hallucinatory vision or revelation that Van Gogh had, and that if we study it enough, it might just unlock for us what Van Gogh thought about life and man's place in the universe and you know the infinity of the cosmos. Which seems to me like a lot of pressure to put on a little old painting. You know what? I'm actually a little surprised that no one's tried writing basically the Van Gogh equivalent of the Da Vinci Code. That book would be bananas. There are a thousand different other readings and interpretations of Starry Night, but those three that I highlighted are some of the more popular narratives that surround this work. The fact remains that you can interpret Starry Night however you want. That's the beauty of art. It doesn't have to mean any one thing. You can choose to read it as a madman's fever dream or as a religious painting or as some kind of magnum opus containing the secrets of the universe. Power to you. You do you. You interpret that painting however the heck you want. But we need to remember that our interpretations of arts and what it means to us, what it makes us feel, is more a reflection of us than it is of the intentions of the person who made it. The fact of the matter is that we don't know exactly what Van Gogh was feeling or intending when he made this work. There's a little bit that we can read into it, and I'll get into that in a second. But more often than not, we're just a group of blind monkeys throwing spaghetti at a wall, hoping something will stick. I think a lot of this stems from how we today think about art. As I talked a little bit about at the beginning of the episode, there is a tendency that we have as a culture, and when I say we and culture, I'm speaking to sort of the North American and Western European approaches to art history with which I'm familiar. But we have this tendency to turn these paintings and artists into rock stars and idols. That's especially true in museum contexts, because hey, museums have to sell tickets, they have to market their shows, and they advertise these works and artists as blockbuster events. That is thrown into even greater relief when works by someone like Van Gogh or Gogan come on the market and they sell for tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, which is just cuckoo for Coco Pubs, Banana Town, Bonkersville Central, okay? It's insane. In the face of all of that, it becomes very, very easy to forget the humanity of these objects, the humanity of their makers, the humanity of the circumstances that surrounded the act of creation. We forget that these objects are paint on canvas stretched over wood. Now, of course, they're they're more than that as well, as cultural symbols, but at the end of the day, that's exactly what Starry Night is. It's a created object that a man painting in a sunlit room in southern France made by placing paint on a canvas. All of that said, what do we know about what Van Gogh may have seen or intended when he painted this painting? What we have on that is pretty dang vague, especially as he only mentions Starry Night, like the actual painting, that one time in that letter from June 19, 1889, in which, again, he just references it as a study of the night sky. He did, however, frequently talk in his letters about his perspectives on nature and the idea of painting that nature. In several of those letters, he specifically addresses the night sky, not starry night, but the actual night sky above his head. The two words that he frequently brings up in relation to the night sky are consolation and wonder. He found comfort in the fact that there was something bigger than the challenges and tribulations of human existence. I think that we've all felt a similar way when staring up at the night sky. You get that distinct feeling of being so small yet so connected. And from his letters, we know that Van Gogh wanted to paint artworks that evoked that sense of consolation and wonder. There are also a few instances in which he makes comments about stars that are very spiritual in nature. In one particularly touching correspondence, he writes this. Why I say to myself, should the spots of light in the heavens be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Terrascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. End quote. At the end of the day, though, these mentions of stars and the night sky in Van Gogh's letters occurred months, if not years, before he eventually painted Starry Night. So it would be foolish of us to claim that the painting is a direct illustration of any of those comments. The fact remains that we will never know what exactly Van Gogh was thinking when he painted what would become a masterpiece. What we know for certain, however, is that he would never, ever, in a million years have anticipated just how successful this self-professed study of a starry sky would eventually become, or what it would mean to millions, if not billions, of people around the world. As I said at the beginning of the episode, Starry Night is my favorite painting of all time. I will readily admit that my love of the painting was born by the narratives that I now so criticize. Just as Claudia Hammond wrote in her essay that I quoted earlier, I was invested in this idea that someone so troubled could make something so beautiful, and I absolutely bought into this vision of Van Gogh as a tormented genius whose ability to create was directly tied to his illness. In that regard, I'm a total cliche. But, but, as I've grown up and grown older and learned to view these popular narratives with more care and criticism, I've fallen in love with this painting all over again, though for what I think you could say are simpler or maybe just more personal reasons, ones that reflect my own ideas about art and objects in our lives. I have long since given up trying to figure out what Van Gogh specifically thought or felt or intended when he painted Starry Night, because ultimately what's important is what I think and I feel when I look at this canvas. That's all that matters. What I see is not only a masterpiece, a beautiful work of art, but also a site of history, a site of human connection, one that, when we stand before it, tethers together anyone who's ever seen this painting and felt something while looking at it, no matter when they lived or where they were. Connecting all of us not only to each other, but also to a red-haired man in southern France who once looked up at the very same stars that watch us today. In May of 1890, Van Gogh left the asylum to move to a small village outside of Paris. He did so to be closer to his doctor, who he had come to see as a friend and even a brother. Ultimately, however, this proximity did very little to help Van Gogh, whose mental and physical health had continued to deteriorate and showed no signs of improvement. By the summer, Van Gogh felt that he couldn't go on. On July 27, 1890, Vincent Van Gogh grabbed a revolver and walked into the middle of a nearby field, where he proceeded to shoot himself in the chest. The wound was fatal, though not immediately so, and Van Gogh died at a local inn two days later after attending doctors were not able to remove the bullet. But Van Gogh was not alone in his final moments. His brother Theo had rushed down from Paris to be at his side, where he diligently watched over his older brother for almost two days before Vincent Van Gogh finally took death to a star, just as he had written about wanting to do in his letters. He was 37 years old. Now there are some different theories about Van Gogh's death, including foul play, but the most widely accepted and logical explanation is that he went into that field with the intention of ending his life. As his letters attest, he was exhausted. He felt like a failure and a burden, and he didn't foresee things getting any better. If anything, all indicators suggested that things would only get worse. The day after his death, Van Gogh was laid to eternal rest in the local village cemetery. His funeral was small, attended by a few friends from Paris, including several artists, a couple of villagers, and, of course, his beloved brother Theo. Unfortunately, following his brother's death, Theo's health would also take a turn for the worst. He died just six months later at the age of 33, leaving behind a widow, Joanna, and a one-year-old son, who Theo and Joanna had named Vincent after his uncle. While Van Gogh was originally buried near the entryway to the village cemetery, his remains were moved 15 years later to a slightly different location in that same cemetery. That occurred at the request of his sister-in-law, Theo's widow, Ioanna. It was Joanna's wish that the Van Gogh brothers would eventually rest side by side, something that Vincent's original burial place would not allow. It took ten more years for the brothers to be reunited, but finally, in 1914, Theo's remains embarked on a final 300-mile journey from his original burial place in Utrecht to a grave beside his brother. That is where the two remain today, as much brothers in death as they were in life. When Vincent died in 1890, Theo inherited all of his brother's finished works, and that was in addition to all of the ones he already owned. There were literal stacks of paintings throughout the Van Gogh house. Some, however, did make it onto the walls, including a painting of an almond blossom tree branch that Van Gogh had painted to celebrate the birth of his nephew, Vincent. That canvas remains one of Van Gogh's most famous works, right alongside Starry Night. When Theo died just six months after his brother, his widow Joanna, who I'm just going to call Joe, and son Vincent inherited those works. This marked a crucial turning point for Van Gogh's art, as Joe took it upon herself to become president and CEO of the Vincent Van Gogh Hype Train. In fact, I think it's safe to say that it's because of Joe that Van Gogh and his art are world famous. She was absolutely instrumental to that happening, which I find amazing, especially because she only met him a handful of times before he died. She took up those efforts not only because she genuinely believed that her brother-in-law had painted extraordinary works, but also in honor of her late husband's memory and the love that he had for his brother. As of 1891, though, those paintings were virtually worthless, at least monetarily worthless. An appraiser estimated that Joe could get maybe 2,000 guilders for the 200 paintings that she had proposed to sell. Now I'm not exactly sure how much that would be today, but my sketchy online converter of dubious accuracy estimated that to be around $1,000. $1,000, or somewhere thereabouts, for 200 paintings by Van Gogh. Jo, however, decides to keep those paintings and market them herself by getting them included in exhibitions and even putting on traveling exhibitions of her own. Her goal was to get Vincent Van Gogh's name and art recognized outside of France and the Netherlands. She wanted him to be a world-famous name, and she worked for the rest of her life to make that happen. By the time Joe died in 1925, she had succeeded in making her brother-in-law a household name. Now at this point, the Van Gogh estate passed to her son Vincent, who I'm going to call Vincent Jr., even though he wasn't technically a junior. An engineer by trade, Vincent Jr. went about things a bit differently than his mother did. He wasn't as emotionally invested in this endeavor, given that he was only six months old when his uncle passed away and only a year old when his father did. He was still, however, committed to the family legacy. In 1930, just five years after his mother's death, Vincent Jr. transferred most of the family's remaining paintings to the Steadlik Museum in Amsterdam, which is the city's main modern and contemporary art museum. Now Vincent Jr. didn't give the museum the paintings, he still was their legal owner, but the Steadlik housed and displayed them. That arrangement continued for about 20 years until Vincent Jr. and the Dutch government entered into conversations about building a permanent museum and foundation dedicated to Van Gogh and his work. It took a couple of decades to get the plans right and build the building, but on June 3, 1973, the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh opened in Amsterdam. It is a state-of-the-art, multi-story building dedicated to Van Gogh, duh, but also the art of his peers and contemporaries, including Emile Bernard, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and of course Paul Gauguin. Can't escape him. I was lucky enough to spend a morning at the Van Gogh Museum in 2016, and it has to be one of my favorite museums in the entire world. Now, some people I've talked to, including friends, have a slightly different opinion, but I thought it was absolutely fabulous. That's another thing that if anyone is lucky to go to Amsterdam, you should absolutely put the Van Gogh Museum high on your list. It is worth every single one cent euro coins. Also the Anne Frank House. Definitely go there too. As for Van Gogh's legacy in the present day, he's more famous now than ever before. Case in point, anyone who lives anywhere even remotely close to a city will probably have seen advertisements for something called Van Gogh, the immersive experience. The immersive experience is not an exhibition of literal Van Gogh paintings, but rather projections of his work. They take super high-definition images, blow them up real big, and project them onto massive white walls. Anyone who's seen the first season of Emily in Paris will know what I'm talking about. I have yet to experience this experience because last time I checked, tickets to do so were $45. And I just can't afford that. But if you can, go check it out. Let me know. Let me know how it was and if it was worth it. Van Gogh has also received renewed attention in the world of cinema and television over the past five or ten years. Though I'd be remiss not to mention the 1956 film A Lust for Life, which features Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gogan. The movie is based on a book by Irving Stone, and it's uh quite the experience. There's a moment that I distinctly remember in which Gogan first arrives to the Yellow House to stay with Van Gogh, and Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh comes running out of an upstairs bedroom and just yells, PAL, into Gogan's face before he like tackles him in a hug. It's um it's a lot, yeah. I don't particularly care for that movie, though it's I mean, I was it's a good one to see, it's a good one to watch once. But like only once, if you get my drift. But that's okay, because there's a lot more recent movies and TV shows that have engaged with Van Gogh's life and work that are not only more enjoyable, in my opinion, but also beautiful. One of the most promising, which I haven't seen yet, but I'm very interested in it, is a 2017 movie called Loving Vincent, which was advertised as the quote-unquote first fully oil-painted film in the world. The film is composed of 65,000 frames, each of which is an oil painting in Van Gogh's signature style. I've watched trailers for the movie, it looks absolutely insane, and if I didn't know better, I would have thought that they filmed it with actual actors and then put it through a filter of some kind, but no, it is a legit painted film. And it was nominated for an Oscar. It didn't win, that went to Disney's Coco, but you know, nominated all the same. The next year in 2018, there was another biopic that was released entitled At Eternity's Gate, in which Vincent Van Gogh was played by Willem Defoe, which uh struck me as a bit of an odd choice given that Defoe was in his 60s at the time, portraying a man who died at the age of 37. But hey, artistic license and all of that. My personal favorite Van Gogh appearance in popular culture originally aired in 2010, when Doctor Who, the Matt Smith era, released an episode called Vincent and the Doctor. Now I know that Doctor Who isn't for everyone, I totally get that, but it's a really fun episode, and there's one scene in particular that pulls at my heartstrings every time. For those of you who don't want a spoiler, too bad the episode's been out for 12 years. That scene appears at the end of the episode when Van Gogh travels through time to the present day and gets to see his paintings on the walls of the Louvre. He also hears a docent, played by the incomparable Bill Nye, who is wearing a bow tie, giving a lecture about how Van Gogh is basically the greatest artist of all time. And it's an absolutely stunning sequence. And the actor who plays Van Gogh kills it. He is so good. The episode is admittedly a bit iffy with regards to portraying Van Gogh as someone who can see literal monsters. The connotation being that maybe he was mentally ill, but he also saw monsters, and that's why, you know, he went quote unquote crazy. Uh, a bit iffy in 2022. But it is Doctor Who, so that's like kind of part of the deal, the monsters and the aliens and all that stuff. But I thought the ending addressed Van Gogh's battles with mental health in a very touching and constructive way. I'll include a link to that particular scene on the website, along with links to all of the other media that I mentioned earlier. To close, I'll say this. If there is one thing I know, it's that Vincent Van Gogh's popularity is here to stay. There's something about this artist that has captured the imagination and curiosity of millions of people around the world. He is an undoubted rock star of art history. But once upon a time, he was just a man, one with paint on his fingertips and stars in his eyes. That is all I have for you today on Vincent Van Gogh and Starry Night. That was a long one. Even so, however, there's more that I want to talk about. Therefore, keep an eye on your podcast feed in the next two weeks for what I believe will be two mini sodes. One concerning a study for Starry Night and its harrowing story, and one discussing the recent discovery of a new Van Gogh self-portrait. Crazy times. I plan to get one or both of those episodes out in the coming week, with a second to follow, so long as nothing big comes up in my life. As always, I will post the main sources that I use to write today's episode along with relevant images to the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. Those show notes usually go up a day or two after the podcast episode. So if you're listening to this on the day that it's posted, they might not be up just yet, but keep checking back. In the meantime, if you want to read more about Vincent Van Gogh, go pick up a copy of Stephen Nafa's and Gregory Whitesmith's Van Gogh a Life. It is 800 pages and very, very thorough. Dare I say it, too thorough. And that's coming from me. But it'll keep you occupied. I also want to give thanks to Gary F for providing some corrections for today's episode. Um if you ever notice that there are factual corrections, please do let me know. At the end of the day, sometimes things happen, you say some things at the Louvre when it's actually at the Orsay, or that someone died at a hospital rather than an inn. And if you do ever notice an inaccuracy, I would really appreciate you pointing it out. Please do so nicely. But um, yeah, you can do so at the podcast's email, stuffabout things podcast at gmail.com. Another thank you to Gary for being such a keen listener and being so kind in delivering those corrections. As for Gus Corner, this episode, Gus is doing fabulous. He turned nine years old on April 22nd, and despite being a little man, he is still very much a puppy at heart and continues to harass me constantly for walks and treats. He is truly the best thing ever, and I love him so much. As for me, I am in the throes of the job market, friends. I'm applying like crazy. Interviewing here and there, dodging rejections left and right, but I'm happy, I'm healthy, I'm covered in dog confetti, and I'm ready to record some mini sods for y'all. If you are enjoying this podcast, please give it a rating and even leave it a review if you've got the time. I've gotten a handful of new reviews since the last episode, and I really appreciate people taking the time to do that. Even the person who gave me two stars and said it sounded like I was talking in ten different fonts, which I actually thought was very fair and very funny. I personally thought I only had three fonts, but hey, considering that I sit in a walk-in closet talking into a microphone for days on end, let's just be thankful I don't start speaking in tongues. All that said, honestly, who knows when you'll get another full-length episode. It might be next month. It might be in five months, but another one will come eventually. In the meantime, if you are so inclined, reach out and say hi, either through the podcast's website or directly through email at stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com. That is it for me. I'm going to close out by thanking the usual suspects, hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org, for providing the royalty-free music that you hear at the start and at the end of each episode. The very classy symphonic banger that you hear at the beginning of the episode is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod, and the second synthpop tune is called Success Streams. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and of course, of course, of course, that you take the time to look at something beautiful today, no matter how small. A la prosima Michi. Hi! You wanna say something to the camera? Or to the microphone? Look up here. Look at that! Oh his tail's wagging. His tail's wagging. Thank you for that little kiss. That's so nice. That's so nice.