Twelve canvases, barely five years of work, and almost every one of them explained by the painter himself in a letter before anyone else had a word to say. Some of those letters confirm what the pictures seem to show. Others contradict it, starting with the painting most people still take for his farewell.
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How These Were Chosen
Van Gogh painted for only about ten years and left some 860 oil paintings. His famous pictures mark the moments his work changed direction: the brown interiors of a Dutch village, the yellows of Provence, the fields along the Oise where it all ended in 1890.
The twelve follow that road, from the least known to the most famous. Each one marks a turn in how he used color or in what he chose to paint, and the best known go highest.
He also described every one of them himself, to his brother Theo, his sister Willemien or a fellow painter. So each entry starts from what he meant to do, in his own words, before anyone else explained the picture for him.
12. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr Gachet (1890)
Dr Paul Gachet rests his head on his right hand, his eyes lowered toward the table. He sits in a blue coat and a white cap at a red table, against hills of a hard blue, and a sprig of foxglove lies in front of him.
The sitter was the doctor looking after the painter. A few weeks before his death, in June 1890, Vincent van Gogh was living at Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north of Paris, and Gachet, who counted Cézanne and Renoir among his friends, had taken him in hand.
The two men got on at once. On 5 June Van Gogh told his sister Willemien that in Gachet he had found a ready-made friend, something like a new brother.
A week later, on 13 June, he wrote to her about the portrait itself. He had given Gachet an expression of melancholy, he said, which many viewers might take for a grimace. He called the face sad but gentle, clear and intelligent.
To Paul Gauguin he went further. The portrait, he wrote, had the heartbroken expression of our time. A country doctor with his head in his hand had become, in the painter's own words, the face of a whole generation.
The foxglove is the one dark purple note among all those cold blues. Whether Van Gogh chose it as a doctor's plant or simply because the picture needed that color, I have never been able to decide.
At a Glance
Artist: Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890)
Painted: June 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 68.2 × 57 cm (26.9 × 22.4 in)
Where to see it: Musée d'Orsay, Paris
About This Painting
Is there more than one portrait of Paul Gachet by Van Gogh?
Yes, two in oil. This one reached the French state in 1949 as a gift from Gachet's children, Paul and Marguerite. The second version sold at Christie's in New York in 1990, and its present whereabouts are unknown.
11. Vincent van Gogh, The Night Café (1888)
A man in white stands beside the billiard table in The Night Café, facing out of the picture. Around him the walls are red, the lamps throw yellow halos into the air, and a few customers slump at tables along the sides. The painter had a bed upstairs. When he set out to paint this room, he did it at night, with colors he said were meant to express something terrible.