Vincent Van Gogh
Netherlands, 1853-1890 (active France)

The Outskirts of Paris, 1886
oil on canvas
18 x 21 1/8 in.

Lent by Mrs. Frank G. Wangeman in memory of Marie Wangeman



Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, 1887, Oil on cardboard, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

“If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. “ - Vincent Van Gogh

“I want to give the wretched a brotherly message. When I sign [my paintings] ‘Vincent’ it is as one of them.” - Vincent van Gogh 

RESEARCH PAPER

“The Outskirts of Paris” is by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, who painted this work in 1886. Van Gogh’s somber pallet and dreary subject matter in this painting are reminiscent of the desolate fields and the scenes of abject poverty that he painted at the beginning of his artistic career in Belgium, which is exemplified in his 1885 masterpiece, “The Potato Eaters.”

Van Gogh painted this view of the industrial outskirts of Paris looking away from the city, down a muddy road, and across a field towards a series of nondescript buildings. A gas lamp post is at the painting’s center with a lonely lamplighter depicted walking slowly back towards the city. The painting’s texture is thick, the palette is dark, and van Gogh used broad brush strokes throughout this composition to depict the field, figures, and buildings. This technique gives the painting an unfinished look that corresponds to the unfinished, changing landscape that it depicts. 

In this scene, a couple heads toward the right of the painting while a mother with two children proceed into the distance. The painting’s dreariness of this drab landscape is enhanced by a turbulent sky that is accentuated by crows, which have been used as symbols of death and to which van Gogh returned in his last works.

In this bleak landscape on the edge of Paris, van Gogh represents an uneasy mingling of the urban and rural landscapes. Van Gogh, like many artists of his time, was concerned with the way in which rural landscapes and the rural way of life were being adversely affected by industrialization and urbanization. Van Gogh may be expressing his concern in this painting.

Art historians have wondered if the central figure in this painting could be a self-portrait of van Gogh (Personal communication with art historian Kim Smith). Van Gogh painted many self-portraits during his artistic career. Also, art historians have wondered if the crossroads depicted at the center of the painting could have had symbolic meaning to van Gogh. Van Gogh’s personal life was at a crossroads when he painted this painting as he had recently moved to Paris and, more importantly, he had recently changed professions from the ministry to being an artist. 

Vincent Willem van Gogh (born: Zundent, the Netherlands, March 30, 1853; died: Auvers-sur-Oise, France, July 29, 1890).

Vincent van Gogh was active as an artist for only the last ten years of his life, yet the dramatic elements of his life — poverty, self-mutilation, mental breakdown, and suicide —- enhance the pathos of his artistic life. The fact that van Gogh went unrecognized and rejected by society, selling only one painting during his lifetime, only heightens his artistic legend.

Vincent van Gogh was born into a Dutch family with strong traditions in religion and art and van Gogh oscillated between the two professions until he finally fused them together in his later art work.  

Van Gogh was a devout Christian and when he turned to art later in life his art work vibrates with the energy of life that van Gogh perceived to be in all living things (World Book Encyclopedia, p. 645). It is van Gogh’s innovative representation of nature that makes him truly a modern artist.

In 1877, van Gogh studied to be a Protestant minister and moved to Borinage, Belgium, to minister to impoverished miners. However, being unsuccessful at this career, in 1880, van Gogh turned to painting as a profession and his early paintings were of scenes of peasant life done in somber colors, being greatly influenced by the realistic peasant-painter Jean-Francois Millet. Van Gogh sought to comfort the downtrodden through his art. (Stone, p. 126).

In 1886, van Gogh moved to Paris to study art and to live with his younger brother Theo. While there, van Gogh was influenced by the artists Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. Also while in Paris, van Gogh began collecting Japanese prints that contained non-Western styles of cropping, perspective, and simplicity that also influenced his artistic style.

In 1888, van Gogh moved to Arles, in southern France, where the bright sunlight and rural landscapes inspired him to use increasingly bold colors. In Arles, van Gogh’s developed his artistic style of working with great speed to capture an impression of his subject while it possessed him. During this time, van Gogh also began using the ‘impasto’ painting technique of applying paint thickly to create textures of paint on his canvas, and ultimately he applied his tubes of paint directly onto his canvas. Van Gogh also began painting almost exclusively in ‘plein air,’ or outdoors, taking his canvas and paints to the location that he was painting rather than painting in a studio.

Van Gogh spent the last two years of his life battling severe mental illness and he committed himself into a mental health facility. While there, van Gogh painted some of his most famous paintings including; ‘A Starry Night,’ ‘Irises,’ ‘Vase with Roses,’ and others.

Feeling hopeless that his mental health would not improve, van Gogh committed suicide in July 1890 (Turner, p. 245). Van Gogh left behind him over 1,000 water colors, drawings, and sketches and 1,250 paintings ranging from the dark, realistic style of his early works to the intensely colored, expressionistic style of his last works.

Van Gogh’s life, with its initial failures, its radiant ascension, and its tragic fall, leaves the art world with his legacy of being one of the most famous and influential artists in Western art.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Robert Coronado, 2020.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hombure, Cornelia, “Van Gogh - Up Close.” Ottawa, Canada: National Gallery of Canada, 2012.

Leymarie, Jean, “Van Gogh.” New York, New York: Portland House, 1987.

Stone, Irving and Jean, eds. “Dear Theo - The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh.” Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1937.

Turner, Jane, ed. “The Dictionary of Art” Subject: Gogh, Vincent (Willem) van. New York, New York: Grove Dictionaries, Inc., 1996.

Gogh, Vincent (Willem) van, ‘The New Encyclopedia Britannica,’ Volume 5. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 2010.

Gogh, Vincent (Willem) van, ‘The World Book Encyclopedia,’ Volume 20. Chicago: World Book, Inc. 2018.

COMMENTS

Vincent Van Gogh painted this view of the dreary industrial outskirts of Paris late in the fall of 1886. We are looking away from the city, down a wet, muddy road across fields toward a jumble of nondescript factories and warehouses. In the very center of the canvas, extending above the horizon, is the one of the last of the city's gas lamp posts. A weary lamplighter, to the left, is beginning his long trudge back to the center of town. A man in a worker's smock and a female companion head off to the right, while other figures make their way down the road. The paint is thick and fluid, and the colors are uniformly somber. Van Gogh uses the same loose, broad brush stroke throughout the composition, to describe fields, factories and figures alike. This gives the painting an unfinished look that corresponds with the unfinished, rapidly changing landscape it depicts.

This part of Paris--the peculiar and melancholy area that was neither city nor country--was called the banlieue, and was a provocative subject for a number of mid- to late-nineteenth century authors and painters. Van Gogh's painting seems to illustrate one contemporary writer's description of the banlieue: "Artists and workers are shut up in veritable Siberias, criss-crossed with winding, unpaved paths, without lights, without shops, with no water laid on, where everything is lacking . . . We have sewn rags onto the purple robe of a queen; we have built within Paris two cities, quite different and hostile: the city of luxury, surrounded, besieged by the city of misery."

SBMA INFORM #1745 1/22/98

With the following scribbled note to his brother Theo, Vincent van Gogh announced his arrival in Paris in early March of 1886: "Do not be cross with me for having come all at once like this; I have thought about it so much, and I believe that in this way we shall save time. Shall be at the Louvre from midday on or sooner if you like."' Having completed in 1885 The Potato Eaters, the masterpiece of his years in The Netherlands, van Gogh rightly felt it was time to leave Antwerp and experience firsthand the new developments in art erupting in Paris. The twenty months he lived there, ending 20 February 1888, were the most productive of his short career, resulting in more than two hundred paintings. Van Gogh spent some time in the studio of the traditional painter Fernand Cormon, but most of what he learned came by observation in the Louvre, in the city's many other art galleries, and from meetings with other artists. In a relatively short time he had encountered Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Japanese art. His excitement is conveyed in a letter he wrote, probably in the fall of 1887, to the English painter Levens whom he had known in Antwerp: "In Antwerp I did not even know what the Impressionists were, now I have seen them and though not being one of the club yet I have much admired certain Impressionists' pictures -­Degas nude figure-Claude Monet landscape." Van Gogh goes on to describe his own current works, concluding with "a dozen landscapes too, frankly green frankly blue."' The present painting, with just a few touches of bright color for the build­ings at the distant horizon, dates to shortly before those bolder examples of 1887. It is one of a number of the transitional works done of the Paris neighborhoods where van Gogh wandered at that time. The apartment that he and Theo shared from June of 1886 was high up on the Butte Montmartre, then still a rural area on the out­skirts of the city, with gardens, windmills, and quarries, not far from new industrial developments, all of which fascinated van Gogh. T J. Clark has placed the locale of the present painting as "somewhere in the brief interval of open country between the working suburbs of Clignancourt and the iron-and-steel town of Saint-Denis to the north." 3

As has been noted by several art historians, van Gogh's painted observations of the banlieue, the area between town and country, parallel the melancholy, ones found in contemporary novels he may have read, such as the Goncourt brothers Germinie Lacerteux where the authors describe the view from the Butte: "On the completely flat horizon line, streaked occasionally by the white smoke of a railway train, groups of strollers created black, almost motionless spots in the distance."'

In van Gogh's painting these strollers convey a narrative and emotional ele­ment. Near the center a weary lamp lighter with an indistinct face trudges along the path in front of the isolated lamp post; a couple heads off to the right, and a moth­er and two children are proceeding into the distance. The sense of suppressed des­peration in the drab landscape under turbulent clouds is further enhanced by the black birds, those abstract squiggles in the sky, ominous premonitions of one of the painter's final works, Wheat Field with Crows.

1.Van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Greenwich, 1958), vol. 2, 511, no. 459.
2. Ibid., 513, no. 459a.
3. Clark, 1985, 25.
4. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Germainie Lacerteux (orig. ed. 1865, flammarion ed. Paris, 1990). Vol. 12, 115-116; see Sund, 1992, 156.
Literature:
J.-B. de la Faille, L'Oeuvre de Vincent van Gogh (Paris and Brussels, 1928), vol. 1, 77, no. 264. Vol. 2, p1. lxxii;
G. Schmidt, Van Gogh (Bern, 1947), no. 11;
H. R. Graetz, The Symbolic Language of Vincent van Gogh (New York, 1963), 51, pl. 18;
J.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van Gogh, His Paintings and Drawings (Amsterdam, 1970), 132, no. 264;
Paolo Lecaldano, L'Opera pitturica complera di van Gogh (Milan, 1971), vol. 1, 111, no. 312;
Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh, His Paris; Period, 1886-1888 (The Hague, 1976), 232;
Jan Hulsker, The Complete van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings; Sketches (New York, 1980), 256 and 259, no. 1179;
Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York, 1985), 25-29, fig. 9;
Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Mertzger. Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Paintings (Cologne, 1990), vol. 1, 200;
Judy Sund, True to Temperament: Van Gogh and French Naturalist Literature (Cambridge, 1992), 156, fig. 26;
Jan Hulsker, The New Complete van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1996), 254 and 259 no. 1179.

Copied from: Santa Barbra Collects Impressions of France, SBMA

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Unlike the Impressionists, Van Gogh shied away from the centralized areas of the city, where wealthier Parisians promenaded along the major thoroughfares and in gas-lit parks. By the time Van Gogh made this painting, he had been living in Paris for six months or so, but his palette still had not entirely departed from the earthen tones to which he was accustomed. His attraction to decidedly un-picturesque locales such as this one parallels that of established progressive artists like Jean-François Raff aëlli, who made rag pickers and the disenfranchised of the suburbs his preferred subjects.

The shuffling figure of a Zouave (a soldier for hire), identifiable through the crisscrossed banding of his uniform, along with a single lamppost, occupy the composition’s center. The newfangled gaslight lamp is bleakly contrasted with the muddy wasteland of the outskirts of Paris and the monotonous outline of factory buildings, which would eventually replace the few remaining windmills just visible in the city skyline.

- Through Vincent's Eyes, 2022