Vincent Van Gogh revered the novels of George Eliot; he wrote about them, recommended them, they influenced his life choices and ultimately inspired his art. What was it about her writing that appealed to him and to what extent are her ideas evident in his own work?
It is often said that the art of Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) is the result of a disturbed and volatile mind, an idea that has come to reinforce our notion of the artistic temperament. However, I believe he always painted with purpose, that his art was considered, rather than impulsive and influenced by both intellectual and emotional responses. This is borne out in his many letters (of which 902 survive) that show him to be a very intelligent and thoughtful man. They are revealing of his feelings about life and art and show how he was strongly influenced by religion and social compassion. His letters also show how he was inspired by literature, particularly English Victorian writers. Charles Dickens was a favourite, but I would like to focus on George Eliot, who had a particular influence and show how her views about religion, people and the need for a social conscience as well as her vivid descriptive language, helped inform his art.
George Eliot
The letters of Van Gogh are populated by numerous references to Eliot’s novels. In particular, Adam Bede, (1859) Silas Marner, (1861) and Felix Holt, The Radical, (1866) made a great impression. A popular Victorian novelist, George Eliot (1819-1880) was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans and her most famous novel is probably Middlemarch (1871). Her novels are set in provincial English towns and villages and are characterised by moral conflicts, religious faith and the testing of community and family bonds. She creates a strong sense of human sympathy for her characters. Her style is realist, meaning she gives faithful, authentic depictions of ordinary people and their environment. She uses detailed, colourful, precise and unrushed descriptions to create word-paintings, something that Van Gogh particularly appreciated. In one letter to his brother Theo, he recounts a passage from Adam Bede with a memorable description of a landscape and which he mentions again in a subsequent letter: ‘that landscape described in that passage in Adam Bede, which we both found so moving’. (044)[1]Jansen, et al., 2009. All subsequent three digit numbers in brackets after quotations, refer to individual letters written by Van Gogh. In another letter he praises Eliot’s style, how her descriptions of the effect of light, fabric and colour were comparable to paintings by Israëls. He says, ‘Eliot really has that something different […] is masterly in execution.’ (332)
When she was young, Eliot had followed evangelicalism and even after breaking with it, remained fascinated by its devotees.[2]Sund, 2002, p.29 She came to believe in an ethical religion which had humanity at its centre and which encouraged a deep sense of personal responsibility to others and sympathy with the poor. Van Gogh also had a religious upbringing. His father was a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, which followed the Groningen School, an evangelical movement that embraced emotive piety and commitment to social causes. During the two periods he lived in England, (between 1873 and 1876) Van Gogh became interested in the growing English evangelical movement, an interest that ‘deepened under the influence of George Eliot’s fiction.’ [3]Sund, 2002, p. 29 In 1876 he decided to become a preacher, a quest that failed and in 1880 he turned to art. When looking at Van Gogh’s work it becomes apparent how it is infused with religious ideas of social responsibility and compassion, that are evident in Eliot’s novels.
Adam Bede and Van Gogh’s forsaken women
Spoiler alert: the following gives details of the plot. In the story of Adam Bede, Adam, a pious, intelligent and ambitious carpenter is in love with Hetty, a pretty but self-centred farm girl who has set her aspirational eyes on the local landowner’s son. This leads to an affair and a pregnant Hetty secretly leaves home to endure an arduous journey before giving birth. In despair at her shameful situation and with suicidal thoughts, she abandons the baby, who dies. Hetty is sentenced to death. Whilst in prison an evangelical preacher Dinah Morris persuades her to repent. The sentence is commuted to banishment and Dinah and Adam marry.
Van Gogh showed great sympathy for fallen women. Along with poor and homeless women and overworked seamstresses they were themes for his early studies. One striking work is Sorrow (Fig. 1) a drawing of an unkempt, naked and pregnant woman sitting forlornly in a winter landscape. It is an unsparing image of alienation, vulnerability and hardship, emphasised by the simple graphic style. A particular passage from Adam Bede reminds me of this work. It is a poignant moment when Dinah visits Hetty in her cell. As the jailer opens the door…
‘A jet of light from his lantern fell on the opposite corner of the cell, where Hetty was sitting on her straw pallet with her face buried in her knees.’ [4]Eliot, 2008, p. 486
A few pages later Hetty confesses to Dinah what she did, saying:
‘I came to a place where there was lots of chips and turf, and I sat down on the trunk of a tree to think what I should do.’ [5]Eliot, 2008, p. 492
Although Van Gogh doesn’t reference these scenes in a letter, for me there is a strong correlation between these images of Hetty in the book and the woman in the drawing. Having recently given birth, Hetty was wandering in a winter landscape alone, unkempt and distressed. Although she is a flawed character who has made wrong decisions, she is also a victim of a society with limited options for women and uncompromising ideas on how they should behave. I believe Eliot wants us to feel deep sympathy for Hetty and I think it is highly likely that these images made an impression on Van Gogh. The title of the work encourages us to sympathise with the woman and this is reinforced by the inscription in French at the bottom which translates as: ‘Why is there a woman alone on earth – abandoned’. This is a quote from L’amour and La femme (1860) by Jules Michelet, a French writer who inspired many of Van Gogh’s ideas about love and literature. Michelet believed men should be prepared to protect and rescue a fallen woman.
Van Gogh put Michelet’s idea into practice, because the model for Sorrow was Clasina (Sien) Hoornik, a seamstress, prostitute and single mother who Van Gogh found roaming the streets. He tells his brother Theo, ‘this winter I met a pregnant woman, abandoned by the man whose child she was carrying.’ (224) Knowing he faced disapproval from family and friends for taking her in, he argued ‘What is more cultured, more sensitive, more manly, to forsake a woman or to take on a forsaken one?’ Sien was perhaps ‘a living embodiment of the destitute women so often portrayed in the pages of The Graphic and Illustrated London News.’[6]Sund , 2002, p. 63 Van Gogh collected these images whilst living in London, but in his own work he wanted to express something more personal, ‘I want to do drawings that move people. Sorrow is a small beginning…’ ‘[…] something straight from my own feelings.’ ‘I would like to express not something sentimentally melancholic but deep sorrow’ (249). Sorrow illustrates his compassion towards forsaken women and their solitary struggle, a compassion he wants us all to feel. Sien may have been the model, but for me, Hetty is Sorrow.
Adam Bede and Van Gogh’s rural labourers
In the first chapter of the second book of Adam Bede, Eliot addresses the reader. She explains and justifies her ideas, particularly her belief that writers and artists should be faithful to life. She believes it is important that we remember the ordinary people and commonplace workers, people with ‘those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world…’ [7]Eliot, 2008, p. 196 They are as worthy of our attention as images of angels, prophets and heroic warriors. She writes that whilst we may revere beauty, most people are not beautiful, but beauty can be found in the ordinary and in having sympathy for our everyday fellowmen. Her views typified the Social Realist writing of the time, which championed stories of the working class in commonplace settings that showed the harsh realities of life.
Her view is manifest in Van Gogh’s ideas and work. Throughout his artistic career, he featured ordinary subjects from the urban and rural poor, paying people to model for him. Between 1884 and 1885 he worked on studies of the heads of peasants in a series he titled ‘Heads of the People’. He had a preference for people with ‘coarse, flat faces with low foreheads and thick lips, not sharp, but full and Millet like.’ (451) (Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), was a French Realist painter and a major influence) One of these works is Head of a Woman (Fig. 2). He uses thick, blunt brushstrokes that emphasis her large features and convey a ruggedness. He has chosen earthy colours to create a weathered skin tone that contrasts with the white cap, which is not really white but made up of lighter tones of grey, blue and brown. Van Gogh was particularly interested in the tonal contrast between the face and the white cap, an item that characterised the appearance of rural women. He wrote: ‘…the heads of these women here with the white caps – it’s difficult – but it’s so eternally beautiful. It’s precisely the chiaroscuro – the white and the part of the face in shadow, that has such a fine tone.’ (478) Although the work is a study and not a portrait, there is a sense of dignity in the woman’s strong stare and an element of femininity and self-worth from her earrings. It’s as if we are being asked to look deeper than a first impression and see the beauty that Van Gogh sees.
Eliot does something similar in Adam Bede. Adam’s mother Lisbeth is described as an anxious, insecure, spare old woman with work hardened hands and dark dim eyes ‘probably from too much crying’[8]Eliot, 2008, p. 45) and who spends a great deal of time lamenting her lot as she knits. Yet in the same passage she is described as tall and vigorous, with a broad chest and a ‘firmly-upright attitude…’ She has thick black eyebrows, ‘[h]er grey hair is turned neatly back under a pure linen cap…’ and she is ‘…as clean as a snowdrop.’ She may be a poor, anxious woman, but Eliot wants us to see that there is much to admire.
Van Gogh went on to make studies of male and female labourers working in the fields, such as Digger (1885) (Fig. 3). His compositions of figures bent over the land, emphasised their hard, back-breaking work and recall Eliot’s description mentioned earlier. His depictions undermined popular idealized images of a rural idyll that featured healthy, fresh faced labourers and natural, comely women full of vitality. It has been suggested that Van Gogh had overstated the heavy and coarse features of his peasants, giving them the appearance almost of a caricature.[9]Sund, 2002, p. 91 Van Gogh believed he was being sincere, that ‘painting peasant life is a serious thing’ and ‘one must paint the peasants as if one were one of them, as feeling, thinking as they do themselves.’ (497) He thought that his images could help educate the wealthy urban class about the rural poor. He wanted his art to be seen and regularly sent it to his brother in Paris to distribute.
Silas Marner and Van Gogh’s weavers
In Silas Marner, Marner is a weaver, wrongly accused of a crime and exiled from his urban home with a religious sect, to live a solitary life on the outskirts of a rural village. He amasses a lot of money but is then robbed and left devasted by his loss. Unintendedly he takes in an orphan child who he names Eppie and whose presence helps restore him, giving meaning to his life and a new relationship with the villagers. Much of the story revolves around the antics of two of the local landowner’s sons and the repercussions for Marner, however it is the way his character has been shaped by his status as a weaver and an outsider, that are highlighted by Eliot.
Marner represented the artisans displaced as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Handcraft was in decline and she writes of the weavers going in search of work as being scattered ‘emigrants from the town into the country’ where they were ‘regarded as aliens…’[10]Eliot, 1999, p. 4 She characterises them as ‘pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny county-folk, looked like remnants of a disinterested race.’[11]Eliot, 1999, p. 3 She is suggesting that their physiognomy was shaped by the nature of their indoor work and that this contrasted significantly with rural farm workers who viewed them with suspicion. This was the case for Marner, whose appearance was considered peculiar by the villagers and corresponded with his mysterious occupation. Even the sound of Marner’s loom was disagreeable, in comparison with the natural sounds of rural machinery.
Like Eliot, Van Gogh was interested in weavers. He owned prints featuring weavers and Silas Marner was a favourite book mentioned many times in his letters. In 1883 he moved to Neunen in Brabant which was the centre of the Dutch textile industry. Neunen specialised in traditional hand-weaving with many looms worked in the home. Van Gogh was interested in a type of artisan who represented a pre-industrial Holland and the next year he began a series of images of weavers, to be part of a collection of drawings of Brabant artisans. His response to the subject has much in common with Eliot’s which, whilst drawing attention to the craft, is also revealing of the realities of working conditions and the singularity of the weavers. In Weaver’s Workshop (Fig. 4), we see a weaver engulphed by a loom, whilst a baby sits watching. He writes about his work in a letter:
‘Next to that loom, by a little window through which one can see a small green field, there’s a high chair, and the little child sits in it, watching the weaver’s shuttle fly back and forth for hours. I’ve tackled that affair just as it is in reality, the loom with the little weaver, the small window and that high chair in the wretched little room with the clay floor.’ (428)
I think Weaver’s Workshop could almost be illustrating a passage from Silas Marner, when Silas is described working at his loom whilst having to look after his adopted two-year-old daughter Eppie. In the story, the loom is positioned by a small window in a room furnished only with essentials and with a rough, sandy floor. Van Gogh’s drawing shows how the loom dominates a domestic setting. He has paid a great deal of attention to the detail of the loom and to the lighting in the room, building up tones with directional pen strokes to accurately capture both the apparatus and the atmosphere. He would sit all day drawing the weavers and wrote much about the subject, such as how the colours reminded him of Dutch masters, but also about the problem of cramped conditions and the difficulty of getting far enough away to draw.
Van Gogh gave his weavers rather blank, characterless expressions. He once described the Neunen weavers as having a ‘dreamy, almost pensive, almost a sleep-walker’s air.’ (158) Perhaps he is expressing in their faces the numbing effect of the monotonous nature of the work. This echoes the thoughts of Eliot who also characterised Marner’s work as monotonous and hypnotic suggesting it led to the merging of his physical movement with his mental state:
‘…his ear filled with its monotony, his eyes bent close down on the slow growth of sameness in the brownish web, his muscles moving with such even repetition that their pause seemed almost as much a constraint as the holding of his breath.'[12]Eliot, 1999, p. 18
Through their depictions of weavers, both Van Gogh and George Eliot were acknowledging their singularity and their place within a changing world, something which they felt was worthy of attention.
Silas Marner and Van Gogh’s despondent men
Along with forsaken women, Van Gogh produced images of worn out and despondent men. Typically featuring an elderly man sitting on a chair by a fireplace with his head in his hands, it was a theme he began in 1881 and returned to many times. The image of a man by a hearth or sick bed was an established motif in European art and a popular pose in book illustrations. This subject reflected Van Gogh’s interest in the poor, weary and disenfranchised. In the drawing Worn Out (1882) (Fig. 5), we see a man dressed in work clothes sat on a simple chair alongside a meagre fire. His clenched fists covering his eyes are suggestive of his emotional state. It is an image of anguish, isolation, deprivation and vulnerability.
It is possible that a particular scene described in Silas Marner made an impression on Van Gogh and had a bearing on this image. Marner lives an isolated life with no family, friends or comforts other than his money. It is not that he is a greedy miser, rather that his gold coins are all he has in the world to look at and love. Whilst weaving he would look forward to the evening when he had the pleasure of handling and counting the coins. The loss of his money is emotionally catastrophic, it is akin to a bereavement. Eliot writes:
‘And all evening, as he sat in his loneliness by his dull fire, he leaned his elbows on his knees and clasped his head with his hands, and moaned very low – not as one who seeks to be heard.'[13]Eliot, 1999, p. 66
It is an image of deep despair and for me, one that is illustrated by Worn Out. Van Gogh went on to produce lithographs of the drawing which he titled At Eternity’s Gate. He explained the revised title in both religious and non-religious terms. On the one hand he believed that the strongest evidence for the existence of God ‘…is the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that.’ (288) On the other hand, it is ‘simply the fact that the poorest woodcutter, heath farmer or miner can have moments of emotion and mood that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to.’ (288)
Van Gogh reprised the image again in 1890 when he was in the asylum of Saint Paul. The image in his painting Sorrowing old Man (‘At Eternity’s Gate’) (Fig. 6) is taken from the earlier drawing and lithographs, with some small differences. It’s been suggested that ‘the man’s clenched fists indicate the anguish that Van Gogh himself must have been feeling in the asylum.’[14]Bailey, 2019, p. 86 Shortly before starting the painting he had been ill and was often observed sitting with his head in his hands, not wanting to speak with anyone.[15]Bailey, 2019, p. 86 Perhaps he was recalling not only his earlier images but also those of Marner. He may well have identified with aspects of the weaver’s life, such as his illness (both suffered seizures), loneliness and alienation as well as his humility.
Felix Holt, The Radical and Vincent
I’d like to end with a brief look at Felix Holt, The Radical. The story is set at the time of the First Reform Act of 1832. It concerns two politically motivated men, the landowner Harold Transome and an artisan called Felix Holt and their relationship with a woman whom they both admire. Holt, who is educated with a medical apprenticeship, renounces his middleclass life, to live and work among the lower class workers as a watchmaker. Concerned about the living conditions of his fellow workers and the implications of the Act, he wants to inspire them to take control of their lives and futures. He is earnest and passionate, but also pious and chooses to live an austere life.
Van Gogh wrote that the book touched him deeply (066). He said ‘there are certain ideas about life in it that I find outstanding – profound things said in a plain way’ (332) He thought of Holt as a role model because of his belief in living a simple life and his attitude to work, that if you stuck to what is best for you, what you believe in, you can never fail, ‘The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.’ (090) Van Gogh conveys his idea of living a simple life The Bedroom (1888) (Fig. 7), (A second version was painted in 1889.) He writes to his sister that she’ll probably find the room ugly, but to understand it is to be aware of what he was trying to achieve: ‘I wanted to arrive at an effect of simplicity as described in Felix Holt.’ (812) He does this through colour. He uses a pallet of complimentary colours – red and green, yellow and violet – which are harmonious and restful to the eye. Over the years the colours have faded and changed, for example the blue walls were originally violet, which is complimentary to the yellow of the bed. In addition, the floor was redder and the bed linen greener. He wanted to show how simplicity could be achieved with colours other than neutral shades of grey, white, black and brown and this was the reason for the study. (812) This is a very intellectual approach. It shows how he had moved away from literal representations of social types and was now finding pictorial solutions to philosophical ideas about life. Although he remained deeply influenced by George Eliot’s ideas, he was developing his own unique response.
Conclusion
I’ve focused on a selection of works of Van Gogh, that in my opinion, reveal a direct correlation with some of the ideas expressed in the novels of George Eliot. Of course, we don’t need to know what an artist was reading in order to appreciate his art, but I think having some understanding of his inspiration helps us get beyond our emotional response, to consider other possible meanings. I hope that I’ve shown how Van Gogh was an intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate man, who painted despite his illness, not because of it.
Notes
Bibliography
Bailey, M. (2019), ‘At Eternity’s Gate’, in Jacobi, C. (ed) (2019), Van Gogh and Britain, London, Tate Publishing
Eliot, G. (1999), Silas Marner, (With new introduction and notes by R. T. Jones) (This edition first published 1994), Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions.
Eliot, G. (2008), Adam Bede, (Introduction and notes by Margaret Reynolds) (First published 1859) London, Penguin.
Jacobi, C. (2019), ‘Worn Out’, in Jacobi, C. (ed) (2019), Van Gogh and Britain, London, Tate Publishing
Sund, J. (2002), Van Gogh, London, Phaidon.
Online Sources
Jansen, L., Luijten, H., & Bakker, N. (eds) (2009) Vincent Van Gogh – The Letters, (Version Jan 2020) Amsterdam & the Hague, Van Gogh Museum & Hugens ING. Available at: http://vangoghletters.org/vg/ Accessed 23rd March, 2021
Van Gogh Museum website available at https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en Accessed 23rd March, 2021
Really interesting study and I think you can definitely see the connections and influences between Van Gogh and George Elliot which I had never been aware of before. I shall look at these in a new light now.
Thank you for reading my piece and I’m glad you found it interesting. We’re lucky to have the letters of Van Gogh, not only do they offer valuable insights into his ideas about art, they are an absolutely fascinating read.