Gogh, Vincent van

Editor’s Note:

Here is a close-up of the two pigs in this sketch.

Nieuw-Amsterdam is a village in the northeast Netherlands, in the Dutch province of Drenthe. In the Fall of 1883 Vincent Van Gogh stayed in the Scholte Boarding House in Nieuw-Amsterdam for two months while sketching and painting in the area.

The image above is one of six that Van Gogh included with a letter to his brother, Theo. This letter was written in Nieuw-Amsterdam on or about Wednesday, 3 October 1883. Here is an excerpt:

Flat planes or strips differing in colour, which grow narrower and narrower as they approach the horizon. Accentuated here and there by a sod hut or small farm or a few scrawny birches, poplars, oaks. Stacks of peat everywhere, and always barges sailing past with peat or bulrushes from the marshes. Here and there thin cows of a delicate colour, often sheep — pigs. The figures that now and then appear on the plain usually have great character, sometimes they’re really charming. I drew, among others, a woman in the barge with crepe around her cap brooches because she was in mourning, and later a mother with a small child — this one had a purple scarf around her head.

There are a lot of Ostade types among them, physiognomies that remind one of pigs or crows, but every so often there’s a little figure that’s like a lily among the thorns. In short, I’m very pleased about this trip, for I’m full of what I’ve seen.

Editor’s Note:

A pork butcher in French is ‘charcutier’ and this term can be seen on the sign above the shop door.

Van Gogh was thirty-four years old in 1888 when he painted this. He wrote briefly about the town of Arles, France and this painting in a letter to his brother Theo, dated 25 February 1888. Here is an excerpt from http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/:

My dear Theo,

Thanks for your nice letter, also the 50’franc note.

So far I haven’t found life here as cheap as I’d hoped, but still I have three studies done, which probably I would not have been able to do in Paris these days…

The studies I’ve done are — an old Arlèsienne woman, a landscape with snow, a view of a bit of a pavement with a charcuterie [pork’butcher’s shop]. The women are quite beautiful here, that is no lie — but on the other hand the museum in Arles is atrocious and a joke, and ought to be in Tarascon. There is also a museum of genuine antiques here.