#post-impressionism

Supposedly he painted this right after leaving hospital — the print behind him nods to the Japanese woodblocks he collected.

He painted apples over and over for most of his working life, dozens of times. The line everyone quotes is that he meant to astonish Paris with one — though nobody seems certain he ever actually said it.

By this point he'd left France for the Pacific for good and was painting what was around him — the fruit and the birds are local ones. According to Wikipedia he was broke and in bad health through most of those last years, shipping canvases back to dealers in Paris and hoping.

The women praying aren't watching a real fight — the wrestling bit is supposed to be what they're seeing in their heads after a sermon. He painted it in a Breton village and, from what I can find, offered it to the local church, who wanted nothing to do with it.

He was living in an asylum in the south of France when he made this, and it's roughly the view out of his bedroom window before dawn, with a village added that wasn't actually there. According to Wikipedia he didn't rate it much himself — in his letters he wrote it off as a failure.

The men at the table were, supposedly, farm workers from his family's estate. He painted this same card game more than once, with fewer players crowded round it each time.

He made this during the year he spent in an asylum in the south of France — apparently he kept painting almost the whole time he was there, mostly working from whatever the grounds and the valley around the place gave him to look at.

The same jugs, cloths and bowls turn up in dozens of these — a table set up indoors and gone at for weeks on end. He worked so slowly, it's said, that the fruit went off before he was done, so he took to using wax ones.

He was on a run of night pictures around this time, and wrote to his brother about wanting to do darkness in colour instead of black — that's the bit I keep seeing quoted, anyway. The spot was supposedly a two-minute walk from the house he was renting.

The woman here was apparently an artist herself — an etcher — and by most accounts pretty private, which makes it interesting she agreed to sit for this at all.

This one apparently sold at a record-breaking auction price back in the 1980s, which is part of why it ended up in a Tokyo collection instead of a European one.

This one, apparently, was one of three repeats he made a few months after the originals — meant as a gift for Gauguin, though it never actually reached him.

From what I've read this comes from his last couple of years out in the Pacific, when he was ill, broke and permanently at war with the local officials. The story where a man walks away from Europe and finds paradise doesn't survive much reading.

I couldn't find much background on this one, no anecdote to pass along — if anyone knows the story behind that lit candle, I'd love to hear it.

There's a story that this was the very last thing he painted, and from what I can find that isn't right — it's from his final weeks, but other canvases came after. The long, letterbox shape wasn't a one-off either; he did a run of them that same summer.

Apparently he managed this whole night scene without touching black paint once — just blues, greens, and that one yellow. He also set the easel up outside and painted it after dark on the actual square, which wasn't really how night scenes got made at the time.

The cabaret had only just opened when this was painted, and he did a whole run of pictures of the place. Someone apparently found writing on the back explaining that the man is teaching a new girl the steps — the dancer went by the nickname 'the Boneless'. The crowd is said to be full of actual regulars, his own father among them.

This came out of a run of flower paintings made in his last year, while he was living in an asylum in the south of France and painting whatever was brought to his room. The background was pink once, according to the museum's own notes — the red pigment faded out of it — so the pale white we get isn't the colour he actually mixed.

Apparently he meant this one as a summing-up and expected to be done after it — he was ill and broke, and by his own account he tried to end his life not long after finishing. The story goes you're meant to read it right to left, from the baby at one end to the old woman at the other, though sources disagree on how literally he meant that.

Painted as a present for his brother's newborn son, who'd been given his name. They say the family hung it over their bed. The flat, bright look of it supposedly owes a lot to the Japanese prints he collected.