EMILE BERNARD (1868-1941): A poet as well as a painter, Bernard was a prodigy on the Parisian scene at age eighteen. He painted with both Gauguin and Vincent, but he is now best known for having written a book about Vincent.
PAUL CÉZANNE (1839-1906): A painter who also worked in the south of France (in Aix-en-Provence). Vincent claimed that some of his shaky forms must be a result of painting in the mis-tral. Like Vincent, Cézanne wanted to penetrate beyond the reality of nature, but to Cézanne what lay beyond were the abstract forms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.
EDGAR DEGAS (1834-1917): Degas refused to paint outdoors, as the other Impressionists did, claiming that “art is not a sport.” His sharply cropped pictures, original use of space, and paintings of contemporary subject matter—ballet dancers and horse racing—made him one of the Impressionists even though he broke with them over color.
CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70): An English novelist who wrote many famous books, including A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities, that dealt with the suffering of the poor and the social injustices of his era. Vincent, who had great sympathy for the poor, found Dickens's themes important and his stories moving.
FLEMISH: A term used to describe the people, language, and styles of northern Belgium.
FRANC: A French monetary unit.
PAUL GAUGUIN (1848-1903): A painter who was the central figure of a movement called Symbolism, which explored the spiritual nature of art. Gauguin's flat planes of color outlined in black were influenced by stained glass and folk art. He was a flamboyant figure who went to Brittany to live among the peasants and later to Tahiti to paint the natives, whose simplicity and faith he tried to capture in his paintings.
GUILDER: A Dutch monetary unit.
THE HAGUE: The capital of the province of South Holland.
HAGUE SCHOOL (1860-1900): A group of artists, including Anton Mauve, who painted Dutch landscapes in an idealized style with a strong sense of the light of this northern region.
FRANS HALS (1581?–1666): A great seventeenth-century portrait painter from Antwerp. Vincent spent hours studying his works in the museum in Amsterdam.
IMPRESSIONISM: A movement originated in France in the 1850s by a group of artists who were interested in exploring the scientific effects of light and movement and in representing impressions of the moment in their paintings. They celebrated the everyday pleasures of middle-class life, especially through scenes of leisure activities.
EDOUARD MANET (1832-83): A French artist who was more interested in the structure of painting than its expressive content. His followers were called Impressionists, but he disliked the term.
ANTON MAUVE (1838-88): Vincent's cousin, a Dutch painter of landscapes and still lifes, who briefly taught Vincent.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET (1814-75): A French painter who lived in the village of Barbizon near Paris. His lovingly painted scenes of peasant life influenced Vincent's art, and Vincent made many copies of Millet's paintings, both to learn and to “console” himself.
CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926): Impressionism took its name from one of Monet's paintings—Impression: Sunrise. He dedicated his life to painting his immediate visual observations of light and color in nature, working in the open air. Early in his career he had to beg his friends for money to buy bread for his children, but eventually his paintings of water lilies, haystacks, gardens, and other sun-drenched scenes gained him a wide following.
CAMILLE PISSARRO (1830-1903): A painter who was the white-bearded father figure to many young artists, helping, among others, Vincent, Cézanne, and Gauguin. Pissarro's son Lucien, also a painter, was a friend of Vincent's in Paris.
POST-IMPRESSIONISTS: A term later used by critics to identify Vincent van Gogh and the other artists of his generation who were trying to go beyond the Impressionists to put emotion back into their painting through strong color, shape, or line.
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN (1606-69): The greatest genius of Dutch art in the seventeenth century, whose use of light and expressive content Vincent admired. He is the only artist who painted more self-portraits than Vincent.
PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919): Renoir's happy disposition is evident in his paintings, both the early Impressionist works, in which the subject matter often was people having a good time, and his later round and rosy nudes, painted in a more classical style.
GEORGES SEURAT (1859-91): Seurat finished only seven paintings in ten years, canvases that brilliantly demonstrate Pointillism, which used dots of color to produce an optical effect on the canvas.
PAUL SIGNAC (1863-1935): A Pointillist, like his friend and mentor Georges Seurat.
HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC (1864-1901): Toulouse-Lautrec painted Parisian nightlife with a satirical and unsentimental eye, from the viewpoint of what he self-mockingly called “elbow height” in reference to his own short stature.
JAN VERMEER (1632-75): A Chitch painter of everyday life in the seventeenth century, known for his magical use of light. His serene mosaics of colored surfaces have a distinctly modern quality.