Van Gogh and the Darkening of Oil Paintings

Yesterday, I visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which has the world’s largest collection of Van Gogh’s drawings and paintings.

Perhaps because some of the paintings were sent to the “Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers” exhibition at the National Gallery in London, England (which I had the extraordinary luck to see last September), very few of the paintings Van Gogh produced between 1888 and 1889 were on display. Since this was Van Gogh’s most prolific and brilliant period, a person who visited the Van Gogh Museum yesterday could easily have gone away with the impression that Van Gogh never did anything good.

Not all the work by a great artist is great. Claude Monet produced close to two thousand oil paintings, and while many of them are extraordinary, most are not. Painting is difficult, and even the best don’t always succeed. When one is lucky enough to see an exibition focused on a great artist like “Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers”, one only sees the best work produced by that artist. In contrast, visiting a smaller collection reminds one that art was difficult even for the most admired artists, those who reached for the sky and almost managed to fly. This is why one should not make sweeping statements about the greatness of this or that artist based on having seen a small fraction of their work.

When I first returned to art and was working through the exercises in Kimon Nicolaïdes’s “The Natural Way to Draw”, I looked at Van Gogh’s work in order of time. Although seeing a photograph of a work of art is not the same as seeing it in person, one can develop an appreciation for an artist’s vision by looking online at an artist’s complete œuvre ordered by time. When one looks at Van Gogh’s work this way, one can see just how diligent Van Gogh was and how hard he worked. Not everything he did was successful or impressive, but he was not as lacking in talent as many people think. What distinguishes Van Gogh from someone like Picasso is the diligence, patience, and respect for art that Van Gogh displayed. If you only see a few works by Van Gogh and a few by Picasso, you are unlikely to realize that one was a great artist and the other a performer.

I am currently reading a compilation of the letters Van Gogh sent to his brother Theo and others during his short life. The letters demonstrate Van Gogh’s seriousness about and respect for art, as well as his honesty and work ethic. However, to really see that Van Gogh was a great artist at the level of Rembrandt and Monet, I believe one has to see the paintings he produced between 1888 and 1889. Not just one or two of them, but many of them.

A lot of Van Gogh’s early work is dark (not in terms of subject matter but in terms of colour). One can imagine that this is related to the revolution that took place in landscape painting in the mid-1880. Not only was paint now being produced in tubes, allowing artists to work outdoors, but more importantly, pigments became available that were much more intense and brightly coloured. You can see this if you compare, for example, some of the landscapes Monet produced in the 1860s to those he produced in the 1880s. (This is not obvious in photographs one finds online, where the colours are inaccurate at best and artificially enhanced at worst; it is necessary to see the paintings in person.) When Van Gogh saw what the impressionists were doing, and when he, too, started using some of their techniques and pigments, his work exploded in a burst of colour.

But there is still a mystery here. The early work of Van Gogh is just too dark. It is so dark that one can hardly see it. The Van Gogh Museum helpfully displays a selection of the earlier works by Dutch artists who inspired Van Gogh, and it is interesting is that their work is dark, too. Did Dutch painters, for some reason, just like making paintings that were so dark that they could hardly be seen?

Thinking about this mystery, I was reminded that Honoré Daumier’s oil paintings are also very dark. Daumier, like Van Gogh, taught himself to paint. The art world had rejected him, and at the time, it wasn’t as easy to learn about oil-painting technique as it is now. Daumier’s paintings darkened and cracked badly.

The answer to the mystery is obvious. It is simply not possible that all those artists painted so darkly. A painter just doesn’t work that way. The works did not always look the way they do now. When we look at a work by Van Gogh, we are not looking at what he saw as he painted. The paintings are dark because some of the pigments in them have darkened.

Pigments undergo changes over time as a result of chemical reactions with components in the air. Some pigments fade. Some of Van Gogh’s paintings of flowers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are almost completely white. Van Gogh did not paint them white; he used fugitive reds, which have lost their redness. His blue irises were originally purple, which is why he made the background a golden yellow. Other paintings have become yellower than they were originally.

I believe it was not just the fugitive reds and the yellows that have changed colour. There is reason to think that some of the earth reds or earth yellows have become darker.

The changes in the colour of pigments happen very slowly, over decades, so that one may not realize what is happening. In a letter Van Gogh sent to his brother Theo from Antwerp on 28 November 1885, he wrote:1

It’s odd that my painted studies look darker here in the city than in the country. Is that because the light isn’t as bright in the city? I’m not sure, but it might matter more than one might think at first sight. I was struck by it and can imagine that some of the things that are with you now also look darker than I thought they were in the country. Yet those I brought along with me don’t seem the worse for it—the mill, avenue with autumn trees, a still life, as well as a few small things.

I believe the paintings looked darker to Van Gogh because the pigments had already begun to darken.

I suspect that it is because of this darkening that the Van Gogh Museum, as well as other museums, have such low lighting these days. They are trying to preserve the paintings for as long as possible. The low lighting, unfortunately, makes the paintings even harder to see.

(As far as I can tell, museums don’t inform their visitors that the paintings that are on display are darker than when they were originally painted. I suppose they are afraid that people will stop going and instead just look at photographs online. But the result is that people visit the museums and go away thinking that Van Gogh’s early paintings were horribly dark and that Van Gogh was a mad genius who didn’t know what he was doing until he happened to stumble upon his masterpieces. Lest anyone think I’m criticizing art museums, let me be clear: even with all the fading and darkening of colours, even with all the annoying people shoving others aside to take photographs of works that they don’t bother to look at, art museums are important and deserve your support. If you want to help artists, please donate to the major art museums so that artists will be able to study and learn from the artists of the past. If those museums were to go out of business, all their collections would be instantly grabbed by the ultra-wealthy and placed in freeports, never to be seen by the public again.)

As I have written before, one of the things about painting in oils that I find inspiring is that I feel I am making something that will, if treated with care, last for hundreds of years. I always use high-quality, lightfast colours. To reduce the chances of cracking and yellowing, I use a very simple technique, with just turpentine or odourless mineral spirits and sometimes a bit of linseed oil. In my early days, I stretched linen, and I still have some beautiful linen supports waiting to be painted on; but when I buy a new support, I now buy panels because a painting on panel is less likely to crack than a painting on stretched linen or canvas.

Nonetheless, we don’t know what we don’t know, and it’s likely that my paintings will not always look the way they do now. This is a little difficult for me to accept. Some artists apparently don’t care about this sort of thing, but I believe that colour is extremely important. The idea that a colour I took great care to mix may change over time is disturbing to me. I find it heartbreaking that the paintings of Van Gogh, who cared deeply about colour, no longer look the way he intended them to look, less than 150 years after he painted them.

If you own an oil painting, please take care to never touch it with your bare fingers. Even if the artist used lightfast pigments and archival techniques, the oil from your fingers will seep into the painting and cause it to darken over time. Also, never expose a painting to direct sunlight or place it near a heat source or a humidifier or dehumidifier. (Don’t even think about hanging an original painting in a bathroom.) For more tips, please refer to the information sheet I give my collectors, outlining how to care for works of art.

  1. Ronald de Leeuw, ed., The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Penguin, 1996), 316. ↩︎