Van Gogh [antikvár]

CROWS OVER CORNFIELD - Auvers-sur-Oise, July, 1890 Collection of V. W. Van Gogh, Laren. Up to a certain period, that is up to 1885-86, it is impossible not to refer to his life-story; 1885 was the year in which he finished his Potato Eaters, a kind of lay feast of Emmaus which marked the end of five years of deliberately chosen and obstinately maintained poverty and destitution as a missionary among the coal miners of the Borinage. During this period, in order to obey literally the teaching of Christ, he gave away all his possessions, his clothes and even his bed; and he ended up by wandering, more or less like a tramp or beggar, from Scheveningen to Drenthe and Nuenen with his drawings under his arm, still doubtful about what he wanted to do or how to set about it. The next year, 1886, was that in which he starved at Antwerp, threw up the academy there, which was too pedantic for his already restless hand, and discovered Rubens in the Royal Museum ('Rubens plunges me into exaltation,' he wrote to his brother Theo) and Japanese prints which had ended up, heaven knows how, in the antique shops along the canals and in the narrow streets of 5