Vincent and Me
The image is haunting - the sharp nose and sunken cheeks, the desperate eyes peering from hollowed sockets. Face and beard are slashed by violent almost bloody diagonal strokes that clash with the blues elsewhere on the canvas. We have seen the image a thousand times and we know it as the portrait of genius and madness.
His name is Vincent Van Gogh. The cause and form of his madness may be debated, but it was almost certainly the depressive aspect of his disorder that ended his life.
"Well, my own work," he wrote in his last letter to his brother Theo, "I am risking my life for it, and my reason has half foundered."
Six days later, he would be dead, a bullet to his chest, an act of suicide.
Some twelve or thirteen years ago the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York staged a monumental exhibit of the last three years of his life, that extraordinarily productive time when he painted outdoors under the brilliant skies at Arles and Saint Remy in Provence in the south of France.
"There is a sun," he wrote to his brother Theo, "a light that for want of a better word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!"
One hundred and eighty-nine paintings he executed in one incredibly manic twelve-month run: haystacks, harvests, cafes, portraits, self-portraits - all these works he poured his soul - and ultimately his sanity - into, which only stood in mockery to his extraordinary gift, without a single buyer to be had.
Think: If you were possessed of the talent of Van Gogh and no one on this planet recognized it, wouldn't you, too, go mad?
For several years now, he had been reduced to living on the charity of his brother Theo, hoping against hope that one day he would find a market for his work.
"What am I in the eyes of most people," he wrote his brother not long after embarking on his career in painting in 1882, "a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low."
Then he added: "All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart."
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