The white house at night

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The White House by Night (Vincent van Gogh)
The white house at night
Vincent van Gogh , 1890
Oil on canvas
59 × 72.5 cm
Hermitage (Saint Petersburg)

The white house at night (French: La maison blanche ) is the title of a painting by Vincent van Gogh . The 59 × 72.5 cm picture, painted in oil on canvas, was created in June 1890, just a few weeks before the artist's death, in Auvers-sur-Oise . It is one of a series of pictures that deal with the theme of the house and are symbolic of the emotional tensions that the artist was under. For the last time he turned to the representation of a heavenly body in this painting , which in Van Gogh's work also had symbolic meaning. After the Second World War, the picture came to the Soviet Union as so-called looted art and is now exhibited in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg , if the question of ownership continues .

Image description

The first description of the picture comes from van Gogh himself. In a letter dated June 17, 1890, he tells his brother Theo about two pictures he is working on. In addition to a still life, he mentions a study that shows "a white house in the countryside with a star in the night sky and an orange-lit window and black foliage and a dark pink note".

The painting, created in June 1890, shows a house in Auvers, where van Gogh lived at the time. It is not known whether the artist had a special relationship with this house or whether he knew the residents personally. The structure of the picture is determined by strict horizontal and vertical lines, which can be found mainly in the outlines of the house and its windows. In the painting, the house takes up a large space and has moved close to the left and upper edge of the picture. You can see the front and the left side wall of the house, with the left gable and the chimney on the left roof ridge almost reaching the edge of the picture. Another chimney limits the roof, which slopes slightly to the right.

The two-story facade is divided by two rows of windows. In the top row there are seven windows framed by green shutters. The shutter on the far left is closed, the other shutters are open. A red light shines in the third window from the right and the far right window. Of the lower row of windows, only the window on the far left can be seen, the shutters of which are also open. An orange light shines from this window. The rest of the ground floor area at the front of the house is covered by several trees painted in green and black brushstrokes that stand in the front yard of the house. Another light shines between these trees in the middle of the ground floor and possibly marks the front door of the house. The facade of the front of the house is executed with short horizontal and vertical brushstrokes, whereby in addition to the dominant white, which gives the picture its name, various shades of gray can also be recognized. The side wall lacks that brilliant white; Instead, the painter used green-beige tones for coloring in long, vertical brushstrokes. The roof of the house is covered with red tiles. To underline the structure, van Gogh used narrow vertical white and black brushstrokes in addition to red paint. The house with its front garden is surrounded by an ocher wall, which is interrupted in the right half of the picture by four posts. The right pair of posts marks the entrance to the property, the two other posts that are a little further apart may flank a driveway.

There are several trees and other greenery around the house. In addition to the more spherical trees in front of the house front, there are two elongated trees on the left edge of the picture in front of the property wall. One of these stands in the middle of the side wall of the house and extends up to the level of the upper boundary of the window on the first floor of the front facade. Another tree of the same size stands to the left and is cut from the edge of the picture. Another tree, which is to the right of the house and is partially covered by the building, is even larger. Its branches, which become more and more expansive towards the top, extend into the roof area. In addition, there are spherical trees behind the property wall on the right edge of the picture, as well as undefined low green in front of the wall in the center of the picture.

In front of the house there is a path outlined in ocher tones with horizontal brushstrokes. Two dark-clad women, viewed from behind, are just leaving it to enter the property of the house through the entrance gate. Another woman is in the foreground and is cut in the foot area from the lower edge of the picture. In the front view, the darkly clad woman is almost only shown in silhouette and the face is only executed with a few brushstrokes. Coming from the right, her hurrying walk is underlined by a rowing right arm. Through the lower bleed, it practically pushes out of the picture. She may have come from shopping, which the bag in her left hand could indicate.

The background of the image is determined by the blue sky with a yellow celestial body. Again, the sky is executed with short horizontal brushstrokes, the hues of which vary between different shades of blue and purple and yellowish nuances. To the right of the house is the yellow celestial body, which is surrounded by a halo through circular brushstrokes . It is unclear what kind of heavenly body it is. A single brightly shining star, as the painter describes in his letter, would be possible. However, it could also be the planet Venus , which at that time was clearly visible in the evening sky.

The painting with the dimensions 59 × 72.5 cm is painted in oil on canvas. Vincent van Gogh usually received canvases with a prefabricated primer from his brother Theo. In contrast to this, a thinner fabric has been used in this picture, the primer of which van Gogh presumably carried out himself. Later this thin canvas was backed with a thicker canvas, with several areas being unprofessionally smoothed with thickly applied paint. The colors of the picture have retained much of their freshness to this day, but have been partially changed by chemical processes. In his catalog from 1928 , de la Faille describes the color of the woman's dress in the foreground as ultramarine and the dark pink note described by van Gogh is no longer comprehensible today.

The house motif in van Gogh's oeuvre

Houses as a motif appear in van Gogh's early work. In the paintings Farmhouses in Loosduinen ( Centraal Museum Utrecht ) or Farmhouses with Trees (Muzeum Kolekcji im. Jana Pawła II, Warsaw) from 1883 in The Hague , the artist depicted the houses painted in dark earth colors as part of a landscape composition. During his time in Nuenen (1883–1885) created pictures such as Hut at Dusk or Rectory in Nuenen (both Van Gogh Museum , Amsterdam), in which he clearly placed the house in the center of the picture and worked out details such as doors and windows or the structure of the roof. In connection with these pictures, the author Albert Kostenewitsch points out the difference between any house and a real home and sees a symbolic message in the pictures: "All the symbols of comfort ... are utterly joyless, even filled with inexplicable restlessness" . The tense personal relationship with his fellow men, especially with his father, shaped van Gogh's desire for a house as a place of security and refuge during this time. In a letter to his brother Theo van Gogh , he wrote about his parents' house: “You are just as shy about taking me into your house as you would be shy about having a big shaggy dog ​​in your house.” The similarities between the two are striking Depiction of the rectory in Nuenen and the White House built five years later at night . Both pictures show a similar composition, both houses are surrounded by a wall, the gate of which is on the right edge of the picture and in front of both houses there are dark silhouettes of women.

After a few pictures with house motifs in bright impressionist colors were already taken in the Parisian years (for example The Restaurant de la Sirene in Asnières , 1887, Ashmolean Museum , Oxford), van Gogh also devoted himself to this topic during his stay in Provence. In addition to paintings such as Farmhouse in Provence ( National Gallery of Art , Washington DC) or Farmhouse in a Wheat Field (Van Gogh Museum), in which the houses are in turn embedded in the landscape, the depiction of his home in Vincent's house in Arles (Das yellow house) (Van Gogh Museum) one of the best-known representations of the house motif by van Gogh. After living in a guesthouse at the beginning of his stay in Arles, he wrote shortly before moving into the rented house on May 4, 1888: “And at the end of the year I would be a different person. I would have a home and I would have the peace and quiet I need for my health ”.

What is striking is the accumulation of pictures with house motifs that were created in the little more than two months before van Gogh's suicide in Auvers. Unlike before in Arles, he lived in Auvers again in an inn. Immediately after his arrival he reports to his brother Theo: “Auvers is very beautiful; so there are still many old thatched roofs here, which is gradually becoming rare. ”In May 1890 he began to paint these thatched-roof houses several times with strong, curved brushstrokes. Examples of these more hopeful images are Les chaumières (Hermitage, Saint Petersburg), Maisons à Auvers ( Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ) or Straße in Auvers ( Ateneum , Helsinki). In contrast to these works, executed with lively brushwork, the rigid forms in the painting The White House at Night , like the dark figures in front of the house, seem like a "gloomy foreboding".

Shortly before his death in July 1890, van Gogh took up the motif of a white house again. In the two versions of the picture Der Garten von Daubigny ( Kunstmuseum Basel and Hiroshima Museum of Art ) van Gogh has again integrated the house into the landscape, where trees almost cover it. The whole scene is bathed in bright daylight and for the author Kostenewitsch these images stand for “reconciliation” and overcoming a crisis.

  • Rectory in Nuenen , 1885

  • Vincent's House in Arles (The Yellow House) , 1888

  • Street in Auvers , 1890

  • The garden of Daubigny , 1890

The last constellation

Road with Cypress and Star , May 1890

Van Gogh has repeatedly painted stars in his pictures since 1888 and the painting Starry Night from 1889 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is one of the artist's best-known works today. He may have received suggestions for this from reading the works of authors such as Victor Hugo or Walt Whitman , who repeatedly devoted themselves to the stars in their writings.

While on the famous starry night , which Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo viewed as unsuccessful, the nocturnal sky is given a lively note by strong, curved strokes of color, in the painting The White House at Night the heavenly bodies stand quietly in the sky. It is the only picture painted in Auvers of a house with such a celestial body and at the same time his last picture with a star motif. The painter already showed a similar celestial body in the painting Street with Cypress and Star (Van Gogh Museum) , which he painted a month earlier in Saint-Rémy . For the author Kostenewitsch, both pictures are “among the most dramatic of this period” and the author points out that for van Gogh stars are a sign of fate that he painted “in moments of greatest pain”.

In 2001, several press reports pointed to an investigation by the astronomer Donald Olson of Southwest Texas State University , who based the position of the celestial body over the house and the direction in which the observer was looking, the exact time the painting was created at 7 p.m. (8 p.m., according to other sources) on June 16, 1890 and clearly identified the celestial body as the planet Venus. However, there are various arguments against the exact determination of the time. On the one hand, van Gogh painted the picture over several hours or even days and it is not clear whether it originated from nature or from memory. In his letter to his brother, van Gogh also reports that one window is lit, while three windows are lit in the picture. This suggests that van Gogh subsequently processed the picture. It also remains undecided why on a day in June a dark night sky should already have been visible at 7 or 8 p.m. Furthermore, it remains to be seen whether van Gogh actually observed the celestial body at this point or placed it at this point for compositional reasons.

Provenance

After the artist's death, the painting passed into the possession of his brother Theo van Gogh , who died a few months later. His widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger , later left the picture to Cornelis van Gogh (1824–1908), an uncle of Vincent van Gogh. The next owner of the painting was the Zurich art collector Fritz Meyer-Fierz , who a few years later sold the picture to the Amsterdam art dealer Frederik Muller & Co. In 1926 it was acquired by the Paul Cassirer gallery in Berlin . Via the JS Goldschmidt gallery in Berlin, the painting finally found its way into the collection of the industrialist Otto Krebs , who kept his extensive art collection in his country estate in Holzdorf near Weimar . After his death in 1941, the heirs left the works of art at this location, from where they were taken by the Red Army to the Soviet Union after the Second World War , and finally ended up in the depots of the Hermitage in Leningrad. It was not until 1995 that the museum showed the paintings from the Krebs Collection to the public for the first time , together with other works from so-called looted art collections. The ownership of the painting The White House at Night is still controversial between the German side (heirs and government) and the Russian side. In 1994 a certain Gerhard Novak from Offenbach offered the Christie's auction house the painting The White House at Night for sale. After the first inquiry, which was accompanied by a photograph of the painting, no further negotiations took place. In conclusion, it could not be clarified whether it was the original, now in Saint Petersburg, or a copy of the picture.

literature

  • Fritz Erpel (ed.): Vincent van Gogh - Complete letters. in the translation by Eva Schumann. Lamuv Verlag, Bornheim-Merten 1965.
  • National Museum Vincent van Gogh Amsterdam (Ed.): Vincent van Gogh. BV't Lanthuys, Amsterdam 1973.
  • Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage: lost masterpieces in German private collections. Kindler, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-463-40278-5 .
  • Wouter van der Veen, Peter Knapp: Van Gogh's Legacy: His Last 70 Days. Belser, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-7630-2538-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ French Title accordance Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage. P. 246.
  2. ↑ Fritz Erpel (Ed.): Vincent van Gogh - All letters. Letter No. 642, Volume 4, p. 382.
  3. ↑ Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage. P. 246.
  4. ↑ Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage. P. 246.
  5. ↑ Fritz Erpel (Ed.): Vincent van Gogh - All letters. Letter No. 346, Volume 3, pp. 108/109.
  6. ↑ from Letter 481, quoted from the National Museum Vincent van Gogh Amsterdam (ed.): Vincent van Gogh. P. 39.
  7. ↑ Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage. P. 248.
  8. ↑ Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage. P. 250.
  9. ↑ Wouter van der Veen, Peter Knapp: Van Goghs legacy. P. 155.
  10. ↑ Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage. P. 250.
  11. ↑ Astronomers date Van Gogh paintings. In: Der Spiegel. February 28, 2001.
  12. ↑ BBC News - Venus pinpoints Van Gogh painting.
  13. ↑ BBC News - Star dates Van Gogh canvas.
  14. ↑ Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage. P. 251.
  15. ^ M. Bailey: Where is the Real van Gogh's White House at Night? In: The Art Newspaper. Volume 5, No. 38, May 1994, p. 4.
  16. ↑ Konstantin Akinscha, Grigorij Koslow: The hunt for van Gogh . Focus No. 10/1994