Meadow with flowers under a stormy sky

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Meadow with flowers under a stormy sky
Vincent van Gogh , 1888 or 1889
60 × 73 cm
oil on canvas
Private collection

Meadow with flowers under a stormy sky ( French Paysage sous un ciel mouvementé ) is a painting by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh from 1888 or 1889. The picture, painted in oil on canvas, measures 60 cm × 73 cm. It is one of a series of landscape paintings that van Gogh painted during his stay in Provence . The painting is in a private collection.

Image description

The painting shows a Provencal landscape near Arles in landscape format . About halfway up the horizon line divides the picture into a lower half with a meadow of flowers and an upper half with a cloudy sky. In the meadow in the lower part, van Gogh sketched the grass with long brushstrokes in different shades of green and depicted a multitude of flowers with small dots of color in white, yellow, orange and light blue. Near the left edge of the picture there are two people in the flower meadow. With just a few brushstrokes, a standing man and a woman crouching down in green and pink are indicated in green and black paint. The woman may be picking some of the meadow flowers. Behind the couple are two willow trees and a slender, towering tree with red flowers. There are more trees along the horizon, and cypresses are clearly visible on the right edge of the picture. In addition, there are individual buildings to see. At the right edge of the picture is a gray building with a red roof, near the center of the picture there is a building with blue walls and red roofs, which could be a church. Further in the distance there is a factory chimney from which smoke rises to the left. Above this landscape the sky is depicted with a lively cloud formation. While a light blue sky with individual white clouds can be seen on the horizon, there are dense clouds above the meadow, the colors of which range from white, light and dark gray, violet to blue. These cloud formations are applied with thick brushstrokes, the movement of the brush underlining the movement of the clouds.

The German title speaks of a “stormy sky”, the French title simply calls the sky “mouvementé” (stormy or moving). It is definitely a spring landscape, a time of year when storms are not unusual, but thunderstorms are also conceivable. The blossoms of the meadow and the first green of the trees point to spring. In the picture, the calm elements of the spring landscape in the lower part contrast with the lively events in the sky. It is possible that this painting is not just a depiction of a landscape, but rather Van Gogh's expression of his emotional world. The picture is not signed or dated.

Landscape pictures from Provence

The painting Meadow with Flowers under a Stormy Sky was created during van Gogh's stay in Arles, which lasted from February 1888 to May 1889. Art historians do not agree whether the picture was taken shortly after his arrival in spring 1888 or shortly before his departure the following year. Depending on the chronological assignment, there are different interpretations of the image.

Before van Gogh came to Arles, he had lived in Paris for two years. Tired of life in the big city, he looked for relaxation in rural surroundings and hoped for a mild climate and the colors and light of the south. When he arrived in Arles on February 20, 1888, the city was under a 60 cm blanket of snow. It wasn't until March that the climate began to get warmer. It is possible that the picture Meadow with Flowers under a Stormy Sky was created precisely at this time. The spring flowers in the foreground can be a symbol of departure, the thunderstorm or the storm represent change.

A series of pictures with flowering fruit trees was soon created. In a letter to his brother Theo in Paris he wrote: "A small town in the middle of meadows full of yellow and purple flowers - you know, that would be a Japanese dream". But not only Japanese art inspired him in Arles, he also referred to Dutch painters like Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael , whose landscapes he felt reminded of. Van Gogh's palette became more colorful overall in Arles. He devoted himself to depicting simple country life, motifs that he had previously painted in the Netherlands. The peasants in a meadow with flowers under a stormy sky in front of the skyline of Arles appear repeatedly in van Gogh's works and the detail of a smoking factory chimney also appears several times in van Gogh's pictures from Arles.

In the late summer of 1888 van Gogh devoted himself to depicting wheat fields and showing harvest motifs. This series includes the painting Wheatfield with Grains ( Honolulu Museum of Art , Honolulu), which also shows a moving cloudy sky over a landscape. In September of that year, van Gogh moved into the so-called Yellow House in Arles , which was to become an artist's studio of the south - a kind of artists' colony. At the end of October 1888, fellow painter Paul Gauguin came from Paris to work and live with Van Gogh. The relationship, which had been difficult from the beginning, escalated on December 23 with a violent rift. Gauguin left immediately and Van Gogh was taken to the Arles hospital, in April 1889 he went to the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence .

A permanent return to Arles was impossible for Van Gogh, since he was exposed to the hostility of the citizens there who thought he was crazy . Some authors assume that the painting Meadow with Flowers under a Stormy Sky was made in the first half of April 1889, before van Gogh went to Saint-Rémy. The picture can be seen as a mirror of van Gogh's state of mind at this time, a melancholy mood between confidence and fear of the future. While still in Arles, he painted the picture Blooming Orchard with a View of Arles ( Neue Pinakothek , Munich), in which the willows show their first green as in a meadow with flowers under a stormy sky and a person is also sketched in the landscape. Van Gogh made other paintings with very moving cloud formations over a landscape, for example a mountain landscape behind the Hospital Saint-Paul ( Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek , Copenhagen) and a wheat field with cypress trees ( National Gallery , London), in the summer of 1889 in Saint-Rémy.

  • Vincent van Gogh:
    Wheatfield with Grains
    June 1888

  • Vincent van Gogh:
    Blooming Orchard with a View of Arles
    April 1889

  • Vincent van Gogh:
    Mountain landscape behind the Saint-Paul Hospital
    June 1889

  • Vincent van Gogh:
    Wheat Field with Cypress Trees
    September 1889

Provenance

Vincent van Gogh sent the painting Meadow with Flowers under a Stormy Sky to his brother Theo in Paris on July 15, 1889 . After the painter's death in 1890, his brother Theo inherited the picture, after his death in January 1891 the painting passed into the possession of his wife Johanna van Gogh-Bonger . She sold the picture in 1901 to the collector Willem J. Leuring, who kept it until 1905. In 1908 the Parisian Galerie Druet put the painting up for sale. Afterwards it was possibly in the collection of Amedée Schuffenecker in Meudon and in the offer of the E. Blot gallery in Paris. The picture is documented in the collection of Marczell von Nemes , who acquired it before 1912 and kept it until November 21, 1918, when it changed hands in the Paris auction house Hôtel Drouot . After that, the painting Meadow with Flowers under a Stormy Sky was in Amsterdam - first in the P. Voûte collection and then in the Johann NH Eisenloeffel gallery. In 1928 the Canadian collector Harry S. Southam acquired the work and kept it until 1934. Various art dealers followed as owners: W. Scott & Son in Montreal, Alex. Reid and Lefevre in London and the Bignou Gallery in New York, which held the picture from 1938 to around 1944. In 1948 the Galerie Moos in Geneva took over the painting and sold it to the Belgian collector Louis Franck in 1955. Together with his wife Evelyn, he had put together an important collection of works of modern art, which in addition to the work of van Gogh also included works by Paul Cézanne , James Ensor and Pablo Picasso . The collector couple transferred this art collection to the private foundation Fondation Socindec in Vaduz in Liechtenstein in 1962 . From 1997, the collection of Louis and Evelyn Franck was on permanent loan from the Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland. On 5 November 2015, the painting was in the New York branch of the auction house Sotheby's for auction and went for 54 million US dollars to an unknown collector.

literature

  • Carel Blotkamp, ​​Nina Zimmer: Vincent van Gogh: between earth and sky: the landscapes . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2009, ISBN 978-3-7757-2302-2 .
  • Isabelle Cahn, Natacha Allet: Van Gogh / Artaud. Le Suicidé de la Société . Musée d'Orsay, Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2-35433-144-3 .
  • Ronald Pickvance : Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1986, ISBN 0-8109-1734-3 .
  • Timothy J. Standring: Becoming van Gogh . Exhibition catalog Denver Art Museum, Yale University Press, New Haven 2012, ISBN 978-0-300-18686-4 .
  • Ingo F. Walther, Rainer Metzger: Vincent van Gogh, all paintings . Taschen, Cologne 1989–1992, ISBN 3-8228-0396-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Title Meadow with flowers under a stormy sky after Ingo F. Walther, Rainer Metzger: Vincent van Gogh, all paintings , p. 338.
  2. ↑ In the literature there are sometimes slightly different information on the dimensions, which may be based on conversion differences between centimeter information and American length information.
  3. ↑ The following authors date the picture to spring 1988: Isabelle Cahn, Natacha Allet: Van Gogh / Artaud. Le Suicidé de la Société , p. 138; Ingo F. Walther, Rainer Metzger: Vincent van Gogh, all paintings , vol. II, p. 338; The picture dates to the spring of 1889: Carel Blotkamp, ​​Nina Zimmer: Vincent van Gogh: Between Earth and Sky: the Landscapes , p. 234; Timothy J. Standring: Becoming van Gogh , S. 273rd
  4. ↑ Quote from Letter 487 from Carel Blotkamp, ​​Nina Zimmer: Vincent van Gogh: between earth and sky: the landscapes , p. 189.
  5. ↑ Quotation from Letter 496 from Carel Blotkamp, ​​Nina Zimmer: Vincent van Gogh: between earth and sky: the landscapes , p. 189.
  6. ↑ On July 15, 1989 Vincent van Gogh sent a total of 12 rolled pictures to his brother Theo. The art historian Ronald Pickvance assumes that these were pictures from the spring of 1889, the color of which had meanwhile dried sufficiently that they could be sent rolled. Among them was the painting Meadow with Flowers under a Stormy Sky. See Ronald Pickvance: Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers , p. 293.
  7. ↑ Information about the auction on the website www.sothebys.com