Vincent Van Gogh's christian faith and how it influenced his life and art

Abstract

The genesis of this thesis was the experience of the transcendent quality of Vincent van Gogh’s oeuvre. The hypothesis is that Van Gogh pursued his vocation to be a minister of Christ through art having failed in his desire to pursue a vocation in the institutional church. The perspective is through the lens of Christian Spirituality and the concept of transformation leading to transcendence. Van Gogh’s life is viewed as a compulsive mission, a pilgrimage with both a physical and spiritual dimension. His physical journey is well documented. His spiritual journey seems almost as clear when his obsession with depicting the Sower is analysed in the light of that parable and Christ’s Gospel as expressed as much in his artworks as in his correspondence. Account is taken of the abundant critical literature including Christocentric analyses. These latter tend to focus on the trilogy of paintings which unmistakably represent religious biblical images: The Pietà (after Delacroix), The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix), and The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt). However, this ignores the rich Christian symbolism that can be found in so much of his other work through his understanding of chromatics and the choice of his subject matter. Van Gogh’s early life as an art dealer exposed him to a wide variety of artistic genres and styles. He also became an advocate for and an adept in Japonisme. Van Gogh was multilingual and widely read in his native Dutch and in English and French. He was immersed in the Bible and Christ’s teaching. All of this combined in his developing mastery of a personalised art form which found expression in depictions beginning with The Potato Eaters, continuing through numerous works of sowers, harvest and reaping, culminating in the death and resurrection symbolism in his final works, Wheatfields with Crows and Roots. Christian spirituality evidenced in that mission