Van Gogh’s Ukiyo-e Paintings

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We’re mostly all familiar with Post-Impressionist great Vincent Van Gogh–the Dutch artist who painted the swirly skies of Starry Night. This guy:

Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin, 1888, Oil on canvas, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. Source: Artst

Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Well, Van Gogh (or Vincent, as he signed his paintings) was a notable lover of Japanese art. The influence of ukiyo-e, “floating images of the dream world”, was essential to his formation as a painter. While many of Van Gogh’s contemporaries like Monet and Toulouse-Latrec were also fans of ukiyo-e, Van Gogh adopted the very foundations of the artform into his own painting style. For instance, the flatness of color and strong use of line which typify ukiyo-e are also cornerstones of Van Gogh’s painting. His keen observations of nature, expressed in the likes of Irises, capture some of that linearity that hypes up the flatness of the plane:

Vincent Van Gogh, Irises, 1889, Oil on canvas, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California. Source: Art in Context

The composition in Irises, with its zoomed-in flowers and asymmetrical arrangement, is also aligned with ukiyo-e motifs.

However, besides beyond simply being fleetingly inspired by ukiyo-e, Van Gogh took his interest further by actually reproducing three ukiyo-e prints from Hiroshige and Eisen.

Van Gogh was notorious for being “unable to paint without a model” (he wrote so himself to his brother Theo in one of their many exchanges), so these reproductions may have been a way for him to intensely study Japanese art while also giving free reign to self-expression.

Learn more about Van Gogh’s Ukiyo-e Paintings in IKB’s first video!

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