Van Gogh Influences

Prints and practical lessons

Van Gogh entered Goupil in 1869 with help from his uncle Cent. The art trade introduced him to reproductions as well as paintings. Theo also worked for Goupil, although the brothers did not serve in the same branch. Prints allowed their interest in pictures to travel between places and become a continuing conversation. ^[1]

A reproduction offers a particular kind of access. It makes a composition available for prolonged study and repetition, away from the original picture. A black-and-white version preserves relationships of light, line and gesture while leaving colour to be imagined or supplied anew. The intermediary matters: learning from a print is already learning from someone's translation of an artwork. This distinction becomes especially revealing when Van Gogh later turns printed models into paintings.

Writing to Theo on 7 September 1880, Vincent thanked him for prints and described his exercises. He reported working through sixty charcoal studies from Charles Bargue's course and making five copies of Millet's Sower. Tersteeg had lent him courses to copy. These are the artist's reported efforts, rather than a count of drawings that survive. Repetition had a practical destination: he wanted to become able to draw the male and female miners around him. The printed example and the living worker belonged to the same programme of learning. ^[2]

A surviving pencil drawing makes the chain unusually clear. The Daughter of Jacob Meyer is after Bargue, whose model was after Holbein. The current museum record dates it to Brussels, October 1880–April 1881, and identifies it as F847, JHjuv12, d1125S2005. Its dimensions are 42.6 × 30.5 cm; it is jointly owned by the Kröller-Müller Museum and Van Gogh Museum. ^[3]

Here an old master's portrait reaches a beginner through a teaching image. The chain is useful because it specifies what copying meant: a task could train the hand without requiring access to the original Holbein. It also prepares a comparison with the later copies. In the Hiroshige and Rembrandt paintings, a recognisable model remains, but the artist's choices of medium, framing and colour become much more conspicuous.

Instruction could also mean someone arranging a task in the studio. During his early December 1881 visit to Anton Mauve, Van Gogh began painting a still life and continued drawing in the evenings. The critical notes to his letter of 1–3 December identify the earthenware pot and clogs as F63, JH920. This visit preceded his final move to The Hague around Christmas. Mauve's contribution was concrete tuition in working with materials and a set subject, as well as the example of an established painter. ^[4]

British illustration offered another route to subjects he valued. Van Gogh admired Luke Fildes's Homeless and Hungry, published in The Graphic in 1869. The related painting, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward, followed in 1874 and is now at Royal Holloway. Admiration for the illustration establishes an encounter with a print; it does not establish a visit to the canvas or make it an exact prototype for Sorrow. Van Gogh in London follows the wider British setting. ^[5]

Drawing manuals remained useful long after those early exercises. On 15 July 1888, Van Gogh identified Adolphe Cassagne’s The A B C D of Drawing for Theo as the text for Drawing for All, explaining that it was sold separately from the illustrated sections and shared their publisher. The same letter reports drawings being made for John Russell in the hope of receiving his drawings in return. A published lesson and another painter’s work offered different ways to continue learning. The Russell exchange was an intention in progress, rather than a completed transaction. ^[6]

His letter of 23 or 24 September 1888 brings reproductions back beside practice from life. He had arranged Daumier, Delacroix and Géricault images with the Japanese prints in his studio, and wanted Millet’s field-work series and an etching of the Sower. Yet he thought even an accomplished figure sketched from life fell short of a figure painted from a model by the same master. He still wanted to learn to convey a whole figure in a few strokes. Admired examples surrounded him without making continued study of people unnecessary. ^[7]

Reading and colour before Paris

Books gave Van Gogh a language for comparing the effects of pictures. In his letter of about 22–24 June 1880, Shakespeare appears beside Rembrandt, Michelet beside Correggio, and Victor Hugo beside Delacroix. He moves between writers and painters through his response to human feeling and expression. These comparisons show reading and looking working together. They do not turn every novel into a prescribed subject for a painting. The more specific encounter with Daudet in Tarascon Stagecoach later shows how a literary association could enter a picture of an observed place. ^[8]

Colour also had a history before his Paris years. The Van Gogh Museum's catalogue connects his Nuenen still-life exercises with Charles Blanc's colour principles, including complementary colours and broken tones. A subdued palette can contain deliberate colour relationships. Nuenen therefore belongs within his education in colour, rather than serving simply as the dark prelude to a sudden Paris revelation. ^[9]

Writing to Theo around 2 July 1884, Van Gogh considered blue in relation to yellow and green. The letter places colour contrast within his Dutch practice. Its evidence concerns his own reading and experimentation; it does not require a claim that he personally studied Chevreul at first hand. The later Paris flower studies developed an existing interest under different conditions. The broader colour story includes both learned principles and repeated attempts to make them work in paint. ^[10]

In Antwerp portraits F206/F207a, scholars compare broad, loose brushwork with Hals and Jordaens, and F206’s arbitrary impasto highlights with Rubens’s Teresa of Avila: handling rather than literal copying. ^[11]

Portrait of a Woman, F207a/JH1204. Van Gogh Museum, s0143V1962.

Flower studies and selective learning in Paris

Van Gogh's letter to the English painter Horace Mann Livens, dated September or October 1886 in the current edition, offers an unusually connected account of Paris learning. It brings the expense of work, choices of subject, other painters and his own ambitions into one conversation. ^[12]

He explained that he lacked money to pay models. Otherwise, he would have concentrated on figures. Flowers supplied a practicable way to study colour: he listed red poppies, blue cornflowers and forget-me-nots, roses and yellow chrysanthemums. His choices of subject were connected with what he could afford to work from. A bouquet could keep an artistic problem active when the preferred figure work was beyond his means. The flower paintings belong within a continuing ambition to paint people, rather than a separate decorative pursuit. ^[12]

The experiments had a structure. He sought blue against orange, red against green, and yellow against violet. He also sought broken and neutral tones to bring the forceful oppositions into relation. This is more specific than simply deciding to paint brightly. Strong pairs were part of an arrangement that needed intermediate tones and control. He wanted intense colour, and regarded the flowers as exercises through which he could improve. The letter does not identify every surviving bouquet with one of these combinations; it describes the work he was attempting across a series. ^[12]

He then connected that practice with two recently painted heads, which he thought better in light and colour than his earlier efforts. The progression matters: financial limits had redirected him towards flowers, and the experience could return to his figure painting. He treated colour as a means of building form, not merely something applied after drawing. His report of green and blue landscapes extends the same active concern beyond the still-life table. Different subjects could become parts of one education. ^[12]

Livens also heard about Van Gogh's response to Impressionism. Vincent admired a nude by Degas and a landscape by Monet, whose precise identities the letter leaves open. He distinguished his own developing colour, and Livens's, from the Impressionists' theories. His enthusiasm was selective. Seeing a convincing picture could encourage him while leaving him free to pursue another effect. The letter allows admiration and disagreement to coexist, which is a better account of learning than a claim that he adopted an entire movement on arrival. ^[12]

Paris nevertheless offered possibilities he wanted Livens to understand. He reported exchanges with artists and four dealers displaying his studies; display does not mean four sales. He offered to share his lodgings and studio if Livens came, while warning that Paris cost more than Antwerp and was hard for someone without money. His description makes artistic company inseparable from the means of continuing to work. The city held opportunities to see, exchange and exhibit pictures, but those opportunities did not remove the daily cost of painting. ^[12]

His account of Cormon's studio was equally qualified. After three or four months there, he had found it less useful than expected, while allowing that the fault might be his own. He described feeling more himself after working independently. This was a judgement about a particular period of training, not a dismissal of every lesson or contact it supplied. Progress, for him, involved testing which surroundings helped him work. His invitation to Livens shows that independence could still include shared space and artistic friendship. ^[12]

Cormon's studio connected him with Toulouse-Lautrec and Bernard. Other friendships developed through different encounters, while Tanguy's shop provided a meeting place. Van Gogh actively sought exchanges, although proposals did not invariably succeed. This circle was assembled through work and initiative; it was not one class in which all the leading modern painters studied together. ^[1]

Monticelli and the handling of flowers

The Van Gogh Museum identifies Monticelli's flower paintings as an example behind the thick paint in Vase with Chinese Asters and Gladioli. Van Gogh made this canvas in August–September 1886; its identifiers are F234, JH1168 and s0177V1962. The museum also points to an adjustment within the still life itself. The vase survives, and the painted version is larger: the depicted bouquet would not fit the actual container. The object supplied a starting point that the painting changed. An influence on handling therefore worked alongside adaptation of the thing in front of him. Flowers and brushwork and technique explore these two concerns more fully. ^[13]

Monticelli's Vase of Flowers, about 1875, now in the Van Gogh Museum as s0251V1962, offers a related example of his flower painting. Its provenance needs care: it was probably given by Alexander Reid to Theo between September 1887 and February 1888. That later, probable acquisition does not establish this particular panel as the model for Vincent's 1886 painting. A comparison of approaches is different from an exact source identification. ^[14]

Dealers such as Delarebeyrette made Monticelli accessible beyond the brothers' own holdings. Current catalogue research counts at least five, possibly six Monticellis in their collection. Access through dealers and later ownership are related channels, with different chronologies. ^[1]

Divided colour along the Seine

Signac's The Ponton Félicité at Asnières, painted in 1886, offers another kind of example. The Van Gogh Museum explains its use of contrasting, unmixed dots and suggests that Vincent may well have seen this canvas at the 1887 Indépendants exhibition. That is a possible encounter with a particular work, rather than a proven model for one of his river paintings. The distinction preserves the value of the comparison: it shows a method available in his surroundings without inventing a direct copy. ^[15]

The Seine landscapes became a field for testing separate touches and stronger colour relationships amid an environment of work and recreation. The Seine with Pont de la Grande Jatte, F304, JH1326, s0086V1962, dates to May–July 1887. It belongs to that sustained experimentation around Asnières. Van Gogh along the Seine follows the places and pictures more closely. ^[16]

Detailed catalogue research documents his encounter with Seurat's Courbevoie painting in 1887. The chronology supports gradual experiment rather than an instantaneous conversion at an assumed exhibition visit in 1886. ^[11]

In the letter to Willemien assigned to late October 1887, Vincent said that his work at Asnières had helped him see more colour. This retrospective judgement gives the landscape studies a place in his own account of learning. A new method was something to work through outdoors and assess afterwards. It could sharpen perception without obliging him to repeat another painter's system in every subsequent canvas. ^[17]

Hiroshige translated into oil paint

Japanese prints also passed through this circle: Vincent displayed them at Le Tambourin without selling them, and later exchanged some with Bernard for his work. ^[1]

Bridge in the Rain, F372, JH1297, s0114V1962, is an exact adaptation after Hiroshige. Painted in Paris in October–November 1887, it measures 73.3 × 53.8 cm. Its model is the 1857 Afternoon Shower on the Great Bridge near Atake, from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Van Gogh strengthened the colours and surrounded the scene with strips containing Japanese characters. Here Japanese art reached him through a specific woodblock print, rather than an unspecified general resemblance. ^[18]

Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige), F372/JH1297 (s0114V1962).

The owned impression reproduced in the museum catalogue and Van Gogh's painting make the retained structure easy to follow. A bridge rises diagonally from the lower left towards the right edge. Small travellers cross it beneath umbrellas and coverings, and the bridge supports form a dark framework below their feet. Above them lies a broad river with a narrow boat. Across the water, a low distant shore divides river from sky. These large relationships hold the scene together in both versions.

The painting makes the frame part of the experience. Red and green strips surround the landscape on all four sides, and the red inner line creates a strongly defined opening. The borrowed view now occupies a window inside another painted surface. The eye can move between the small figures on the bridge and the much larger characters around them. The extra border changes the proportions of the whole image without requiring the central scene to become an entirely different composition.

Within that opening, differences of mark become as significant as differences of hue. The bridge in the painting is a broad yellow diagonal, set against green water and blue above. Repeated horizontal touches animate the water, while the rain cuts through the view in long, slanting lines. The source print's precise linear structure remains recognisable, but the oil painting gives it a visibly worked surface. These observations concern the reproduced images; their colour cannot serve as a measurement of the original objects.

The catalogue relates the border to the canvas format. It identifies borrowed characters from Yoshimori's Courtesan Nishikigi, about 1865, and an unidentified Eight Views of the Yoshiwara print. Some text is intelligible; it is not a continuous poem authored by Van Gogh. Scholars propose enlargement through tracing and a grid, but no tracing survives and no actual grid was found. These remain reconstructions of his procedure. ^[11]

The exact source makes the changes meaningful. The bridge, travellers and downpour are retained while the surrounding border, oil surface and colour relationships establish another picture. Copying could demand close attention and still produce invention. Flowering Plum Tree after Hiroshige offers another focused comparison within this group.

Flowering Plum Orchard (after Hiroshige), F371/JH1296.

Returning to Millet with different colour

The worker Van Gogh had repeatedly copied in 1880 remained productive years later. The Kröller-Müller Museum's Sower, KM106.399, F422, JH1470, dates to about 17–28 June 1888. The museum connects it with Millet's 1850 composition, while drawing attention to the blue-violet field and orange-yellow colour. It interprets the juxtaposition of ripe wheat and new sowing as a cycle of life. This is a reading of this painting's arrangement, rather than a fixed religious code for every sower Van Gogh painted. ^[19]

The letter to Theo of 21 June records an earlier stage of the work. It places the picture within an active painting campaign, rather than presenting a familiar model as a finished solution that needed only to be repeated. The date also helps separate the artist's first description from the state reached after further work. ^[20]

His letter to Bernard of 27 June records reworking. Together the accounts show that returning to Millet could involve revision as well as recognition. His sustained study of Millet through reproductions does not establish direct access to the original 1850 painting. ^[21]

The comparison joins two moments of learning. Repeated drawing after a model and a later colour experiment can begin with the same subject while asking different things of it. The earlier exercise develops control; the later response tests what the inherited composition can carry in another palette. Millet and the Sower follows the relationship, while The Sower examines the painting more fully.

Millet’s compositions could themselves contain earlier art. Johanna Ruth Epstein relates Woman Mending by Her Sleeping Child to Rembrandt’s The Carpenter’s Household: the receding cradle, seated woman and view outside survive in a differently organised domestic scene, with the male worker moved outdoors. She also traces the infant beneath its coverlet to a cradle illustration by Jan Luyken, whose cradle in turn borrowed from Rembrandt’s Virgin and Child with Angels. This is an account of Millet’s adaptation of Dutch models, rather than evidence that Vincent knew the entire chain. It adds another possibility to the history of copying: an admired composition could already have transformed older figures before reaching the artist who studied it. ^[22]

Literature and remembered pictures at Tarascon

In his letter of 13 October 1888, Van Gogh brought several connections together around Tarascon Stagecoach. The old coach recalled Daudet's Tarascon world; he also invoked Daumier, Monticelli's thick paint and a remembered Monet of four differently coloured boats. The particular Monet canvas remains unidentified. He described grey sand, pink and yellow walls, green shutters and brightly coloured coaches and wheels. His comparisons concerned composition and paint handling within an observed subject, rather than a plan to put Monet's boats into a coach yard. The letter also placed the work within a projected decoration of fifteen no. 30 canvases. That number names a commercial canvas format, not an exact measurement. Literary association, a remembered painting and a material example could all contribute to one work without becoming the same kind of source. ^[23]

The painting is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, accession M.2025.139, a 2025 gift of the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation and Family. LACMA records its canvas dimensions as 71.44 × 92.55 cm. The museum draws attention to the coach as an ageing form of transport, increasingly displaced by rail, and interprets Van Gogh's attention to it as suggesting nostalgia. That interpretation adds a historical setting to the more specific associations in his letter. ^[24]

Gauguin and painting from imagination

An influence could arrive through conversation about how to work. Writing to Theo on 11 or 12 November 1888, Van Gogh credited Gauguin with giving him the courage to imagine. Their shared work in Arles encouraged a particular experiment: Memory of the Garden at Etten. This identifies a contribution by a living colleague without making Gauguin the inventor of every form of painting from memory. ^[25]

The November 1888 canvas, F496, JH1630, is in the State Hermitage Museum, inventory GE-9116. Its setting belongs to remembered Etten rather than a family group posed together in Arles. ^[26]

Memory of the Garden at Etten, F496/JH1630. State Hermitage Museum, GE9116.

In his letter to Willemien of about 12 November, Van Gogh included a sketch and explained how the painting could evoke people without giving an ordinary likeness. Colour, dreamlike forms and an analogy with music helped him convey what he remembered. The recipient matters: this was an explanation to his sister, not a sketch sent to Theo. The work proposes a way of representing memory through pictorial relationships rather than a report of everyone having stood together before him. ^[27]

Around 1 December he judged the experiment much less favourably. He criticised the result while observing a practical advantage of imaginative painting: one could work beside a warm stove. His dissatisfaction belongs beside his earlier enthusiasm. It does not establish that he destroyed the canvas or made a second version. The same painter could welcome another artist's encouragement, attempt a new procedure and then question what it produced. ^[28]

Gauguin offered argument and example, but Van Gogh continued to judge the resulting pictures. Memory of the Garden at Etten makes that process particularly tangible: the remembered subject, the explanation to Willemien and the later criticism show different stages of an experiment. Influence includes assessment after the initial stimulus.

Rembrandt and the choice of a fragment

For The Raising of Lazarus, the chain passes through another reproduction. The critical letters identify Rembrandt's larger etching, B73, transmitted in an Amand-Durand heliogravure after the Dutuit fifth state. This is a specific intermediary, distinct from both Rembrandt's smaller Lazarus print and modern museum impressions used for comparison. ^[29]

Rembrandt, The Raising of Lazarus: the larger plate, RP-P-OB-596. Comparative impression.

The resulting painting, F677, JH1972, s0169V1962, dates to May 1890 and is in the Van Gogh Museum. It is an adaptation of part of the composition, rather than a painted equivalent of the whole print. ^[30]

The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt), F677/JH1972 (s0169V1962).

Seen beside the larger Rembrandt composition, the change of scope is decisive. The print gathers the event inside a tall, dark space, with Christ standing above the lower group and other witnesses around it. Van Gogh's horizontal painting concentrates on the rising Lazarus and two women. One woman leans towards him with an extended arm; the other bends close with her back and sleeve forming a prominent striped shape. The relationships of these bodies remain central, while the larger gathering has gone.

Light also occupies a different kind of space. In the print, a bright opening and illuminated figures emerge within surrounding darkness. In the painting, yellow spreads across much of the field, a circular sun sits above the figures, and green clothing forms a strong area at the centre. The eye moves across broad colour spaces and the gestures joining the three bodies. The fragment has become the whole subject of another image. The comparison shows how much can change when an artist chooses where a copy begins and ends. ^[31]

Writing around 2 May 1890, Van Gogh discussed the small coloured adaptation and imagined a larger treatment involving the likenesses of Madame Roulin and Madame Ginoux. That wish should not be turned into actual sittings for this canvas. His letters help distinguish the work he made from a possible work he pictured making. ^[32]

Christ's omission from the painted fragment does not prove that the sun replaces him. The change can first be understood as a choice of framing, emphasis and medium. The Raising of Lazarus after Rembrandt follows the print chain and the questions of meaning in greater depth.

Delacroix and the continuing use of reproductions

Delacroix also reached Van Gogh through black-and-white models. His Pietà, F630, JH1775, s0168V1962, painted in September 1889, followed a lithograph after Delacroix. The intermediary supplied a composition that could be remade in oil and colour, without access to the original painting being necessary. ^[33]

Pietà (after Delacroix), F630/JH1775 (s0168V1962).

The Good Samaritan, F633, JH1974, KM104.010, followed an engraving after Delacroix in early May 1890. The Kröller-Müller Museum tentatively connects the subject's act of help with Theo's support of Vincent. That remains a possible association. The documented print source provides a firmer account of how the composition reached the painter. Van Gogh and religion considers these late biblical copies alongside his changing ideas about consolation. ^[34]

Exchanges also remained a way of seeking contact with living painters. On 24 June 1890, Vincent praised an exchange Theo had made with Eugène Boch and expressed curiosity about Boch’s recent work. In the same letter he hoped to spend a few days in Paris visiting Quost, Jeannin and others. He wanted Theo to have a Quost and thought an exchange might be possible. The completed Boch exchange and the hoped-for Quost acquisition occupy different stages: possession of a picture, a proposed visit and a possible future exchange should not be collapsed into one event. ^[35]

Across these examples, new encounters did not simply erase older models. A borrowed exercise, a flower study, a remembered Monet and a reproduced Rembrandt involved different decisions. Returning to the individual painting makes those decisions clearer: what was available to look at, what was kept, and what changed when Van Gogh made it his own.