Family Man
Vincent Van Gogh's Portraits
James Galliard Romaine, Jr.
July 1, 2000
Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portrait At The Detroit Institute of Art, March 12-June 4, 2000; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, July 2-September 24, 2000; Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 22, 2000-January 14, 2001. Modern artists don't paint halos, and Vincent van Gogh was a modern artist. But the first extensive exhibition of Vincent's portraiture, Van Gogh Face to Face, shows an artist who was just as much a Christian believer as a modern man. In Self-Portrait with Felt Hat, for example, Vincent presents himself as a Parisian gentleman. The most striking aspect of the portrait is the way he shapes the image from brushstrokes radiating from his eye, enveloping the entire canvas in a modern halo. As Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, "I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance, by the vibrations of our coloring." Thanks to his eccentricities, and also to the epilepsy that increasingly beset him throughout his short life (1853-1890), Vincent van Gogh is often thought of as the quintessentially alienated artist. Indeed, to many of his contemporaries he was something between foolish and frightening-the citizens of one town where he took up residence circulated a petition to have him expelled. But thanks to his extensive correspondence with his younger brother, who remained Vincent's confidant his entire life, we have a first-person record of Vincent's extraordinary love for family and faith. In addition to his warm relationship with Theo, Vincent greatly admired his father, who was an ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. "There is something I cannot resist telling you Theo-you from whom I have no secrets-there is much ...
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