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Gauguin versus Van Gogh​

 

When Spiritual Differences Compromise Artistic Communion

It is said that clashing personalities caused the quarrel between Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, which led to Vincent's psychotic episode and the incident involving his severed ear (as seen in Self-portrait with bandaged ear).

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This incompatibility may also have been of a spiritual nature. Both had received a solid religious education — one Protestant and the other Catholic — and retained two mutually incompatible worldviews.

In the hope of establishing an artists' community in Arles…

Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin exchanged self-portraits — Self-Portrait Dedicated to Vincent van Gogh (Les Misérables), is now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin, in the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A comparative study of these paintings reveals two characters that could not be more different.

Chapter 1 - A Modernist Genius, 1900-1970

​​Gauguin arrived in Arles in October 1888…

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He shared his artistic approach with Van Gogh. A formal analysis of their Alyscamps and Harvest paintings (such as The Red Vineyards near Arles in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and The Wine Harvest, Human Misery in the Ordrupgaard Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark) highlights their artistic incompatibility.

chapitre 2 - Une Éducation catholique sous Dupanloup

When the sermons of his childhood echo in Gauguin's mind...

An analysis of Paul Gauguin's Harvest, Eves and Vision after the Sermon held at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, highlights an unexpected resonance between the most iconoclastic of modern painters and the traditional Catholic faith taught by Monsignor Dupanloup.

Chapter 3 - Gauguin the Catholic

Van Gogh disapproved of the religious themes in the works of his friends.

Between 1888 and 1890, both Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard produced religious representations. Although Gauguin was anticlerical, his paintings exuded Catholicism — an influence that would later inform his conception of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Chapter 4 - Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin’s religious paintings

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