Van Gogh and the Dutch tradition: Mapping the countryside of Arles

Abstract

In July of 1888 Vincent van Gogh produced a series of drawings of the plain the Crau. Two drawings from this series are particularly shaped by the circumstances surrounding van Gogh at that time, and what he wanted to communicate about the French countryside. Wanting to produce drawings that would sell, van Gogh turned to methods of composition and style based on Dutch seventeenth-century panoramic landscapes, which were themselves shaped by the practices of map making. Van Gogh produced representations of the French countryside that reveal his nostalgic attitude and the biases of his class. What van Gogh saw in France was the old Holland of the seventeenth-century landscape artists, not France of the late nineteenth century. The drawings re-connect the artist to his Dutch visual heritage. They also reveal van Gogh's nostalgic view of the rural landscape, and his particularly Dutch attitude toward changes in this landscape caused by nineteenth-century modernization. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)