In the Shadow of Death

For those of us who stand in awe and admiration of the vibrant beauty, the vitality, and the expressive power of Vincent van Gogh's paintings, it is difficult to encompass the tragic overtones of his life and to connect the power and beauty of his work with his fatal decline into madness and suicide (Hulsker, 1990; Lubin, 1972; Nag-era, 1967). The Parisian art critic, Albert Aurier, wrote of him 6 months before his death, while van Gogh was still an inmate in the asylum of St. Paul-de-Mausole in St. Remy:

What characterizes his work as a whole is excess, excess of strength, excess of nervousness, violence in expression. In his categorical affirmation of the character of things, in his often fearless simplification of forms, in his insolence in challenging the sun face to face, in the vehement passion of his drawing and color, right down to the smallest particulars of his technique, a powerful figure reveals himself, a man, one who dares, very often brutal, and sometimes ingenuously delicate. And even more, this is revealed in the almost orgiastic excesses of everything he has painted: he is a fanatic, an enemy of bourgeois sobrieties and petty details, a kind of drunken giant, better suited to moving mountains than handling knickknacks, a brain in eruption, irresistibly pouring its lava into all the ravines of art, a terrible and maddened genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always close to the pathological. (Pickvance, 1986, p. 312)

This certainly mirrors the sense one obtains from perusing many of Vincent's powerful paintings—the impression of vigor, strength, power. But there are other works that express something quite different—a sense of pathos, sadness, poignancy, pain, and almost infinite depths of sorrow. On the brilliant colors of his canvases, one rarely catches a glimpse of the profound depression and dramatic tragedy that was his life.

Yet the motif of death ran like a persistent tragic thread through