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Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings
- crtified 3y agoOne of the biggest lessons Van Gogh taught us is that social status can be an extremely poor representation of merit. We can walk down the street proud in our suits and high standing, while any beggar on the street might be a Van Gogh (discovered, or not), capable of things we cannot dream of.
- amelius 3y agoOnly the visible spectrum, with light coming from one direction only? Researchers will probably want more.
- lukas099 3y agoI am intrigued by your comment. Is there a real effort to photograph paintings in nonvisible spectrum and fuller set of angles?
- Someone 3y agoNon-visible spectrum, including x-ray, is common. It allows one to see what’s below the surface (sketches or painted-over parts) Researchers also use all kinds of machinery to figure out how paintings were made, what materials were used, etc. A painting by Rembrandt was put in a synchrotron, for example (https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-discover-unusual-compound-in-famous-17th-century-painting/ https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-discover-unusual-compou...) Fuller sets of angles also is fairly normal and must have happened for some of van Gogh’s paintings, since you can or could buy 3D prints of them (https://all3dp.com/3d-printing-van-gogh-painting/ https://all3dp.com/3d-printing-van-gogh-painting/)
- yread 3y agoOpenSeaDragon https://openseadragon.github.io/examples/in-the-wild/ https://openseadragon.github.io/examples/in-the-wild/ (an open source package that can provide the deep zooming experience just like MicrIO used for these paintings) has been used for this collection: http://boschproject.org/book_links.html http://boschproject.org/book_links.html where you can compare the visible light with some kind of UV (I guess? you have to buy the book to find out), eg: http://boschproject.org/view.html?mode=curtain&layout=top-major&pointer=0.395,0.003&r=0.3029,0.3777,0.4874,0.2692&i=89MCPVIS,89MCPIRP,89IRREFL http://boschproject.org/view.html?mode=curtain&layout=top-ma...
- AbortedLaunch 3y agoVan Gogh Worldwide has a number of photos of paintings done with raking light and sometimes even X-ray. The raking light really allows one to see the amount of paint applied.
- ciroduran 3y agoNo Starry Night though, I wonder how much the MoMA would allow digitalising it
- lode 3y agoThere's a high resolution (30,000 × 23,756 pixels) picture of it on Wikipedia [1] - thanks to the Google Art project [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-_Starry_Night_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-_Starry_Night_-... [2]: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-starry-night-vincent-van-gogh/bgEuwDxel93-Pg https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-starry-night-vin...
- ponyous 3y agoOn one of the paintings[0] you can see electricity poles that look fairly modern. I didn't realise that was already the case back then! [0]: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/d0420V1962 https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/d0420V1962
- FartyMcFarter 3y agoThey look more like telephone poles, and if my google-fu is serving me, it's unlikely that large scale power distribution was around in Paris in 1887: https://histoire.bnpparibas/en/the-compagnie-parisienne-de-distribution-delectricite-1914-1946/ https://histoire.bnpparibas/en/the-compagnie-parisienne-de-d...
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago1887 is in the beginning of France electrification it could indeed be electricity poles (mostly haphazard efforts in France from 1880 to 1890-ish but it’s the entrance of Paris so not an unlikely candidate). Alternatively that could also be part of the telegraphs system which was fairly widespread at the time (the painting is of one of Paris gates).
- leobg 3y agoThere was a woman on television in the 1990s who actually met Van Gogh back when she was a kid. I was surprised to hear that, just as you are surprised to see telephone poles in his pictures.
- LesterTheMolest 3y ago[flagged]
- Freak_NL 3y agoNot very impressive at the painfully low resolution you download the images at. You can zoom in for a larger view, but the website does all it can to prevent users from actually downloading the high resolution image. Pathetic for a museum.
- rcme 3y agoYou can get URLs to the high resolution images using the network inspector. E.g. https://iiif.micr.io/TZCqF/full/1800,/0/default.webp https://iiif.micr.io/TZCqF/full/1800,/0/default.webp
- workergnome 3y agoIf you're interested in playing around more with this, it's using a standard called IIIF (https://iiif.io https://iiif.io) for image access via API. It's used by many museums, libraries, and archives. One of the benefits of this is that you can get access to a metadata file that lets you know technical information about the image: It's at https://iiif.micr.io/TZCqF/info.json https://iiif.micr.io/TZCqF/info.json.
- lagt_t 3y agoYou need to learn to scrape better: https://iiif.micr.io/qDCTO/full/1800,/0/default.jpg https://iiif.micr.io/qDCTO/full/1800,/0/default.jpg
- Freak_NL 3y agoI shouldn't have to circumvent anything.
- zimpenfish 3y agoYou can push that to 3569x4699 - https://iiif.micr.io/qDCTO/full/3569,/0/default.jpg https://iiif.micr.io/qDCTO/full/3569,/0/default.jpg Then it will complain that 3570x4700 is too large because "the maximum is 4000x4000px" which is weird because 3569x4699 is already bigger than 4000x4000 in both linear and areal dimension. But what they really mean is 16Mi pixels - 16770731 (3569x4699) < 16777216 (2*24, 4096x4096) < 16779000 (3570x4700).
- nenadg 3y agoI've been lucky enough to spend some time in Auvers-sur-Oise back in 2012 while at the same time jumping to Amsterdam to van Gogh's museum. It was an interesting experience.
- Charlie_26 3y agoCool, now that they’re digitised we can cover them in soup
- spaceman_2020 3y agoFor an art noob, can someone help me understand why the perspective is off in so many of them? I know that he's a master and I don't want to contest that, but the perspective being off feels a little...amateurish? Or is that an intentional choice? If it is, would love to know the 'why' of it
- padolsey 3y agoAFAIK his paintings were never intended to be 'realistic' in the sense we may value, but instead: symbolic. He played with color, intensity, and perspective, expressing vast emotion, and in some cases, turmoil. His mental health and state changed throughout his life which you can almost "see" evolving through his art as he aged. He's incredible to read about - https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/stories/vincents-illness-and-the-healing-power-of-art https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/stories/vinc... EDIT: I find this really interesting: a visual timeline of how his relationship with alcohol changed his artistic style in various phases of his life: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/536428/fpsyt-11-00685-HTML-r1/image_m/fpsyt-11-00685-g003.jpg https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/536428/fpsyt-11-0...
- strobe 3y ago'perspective' it's just a tool in toolbox of creativity and you can play with it whatever you think would be appropriate to archive your goals.
- gumby 3y agoI used to think “painting is obsolete since we have photographs”. I later came to realize that paintings can show things photographs can’t, often much more. Every time you “say” (express) something you are making choices: emphasizing some things and glossing over others. Something strange happens to you but when you tell me about it you skip the extraneous details and focus on what reinforces your point. Taking a photograph, even if not edited (cropped, lighting changed, etc), and even if spontaneous or lucky, is as much about what is not in the frame as what is. In a good movie, we don’t have to wait while the character goes to the bathroom, or while they drive to the store. We just get the part of the story that matters (this is Chekhov’s gun). All that is true of a painting, but like a story you can make lots of edits, pulling things literally into the frame that are metasyntactic, that a camera would never see. In a way the sharp literalism of a photo is much too limiting, as it tunes your visual system to focus on the image itself more than what might be expressed.
- garyrob 3y agoThe FAQ on that site has an entry for "Where is ‘The Starry Night’?" and its answer is at Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Where it happens that I saw it a few weeks ago, as part of a big Van Gogh exhibition with many of his paintings. I have to say that if you have a chance to go to that, or to another Van Gogh exhibition, I really recommend it. From what I understand, not everyone resonates with his work. In fact I believe I saw a critical post on HN some time ago from someone who mentioned having "art students". I'm cynical enough to think they may have been middle school students because I don't think there are many serious people in the art world today who don't love Van Gogh. And yet, I have a friend who, when the subject of the importance of preserving Van Gogh's work came up, said "They've never done anything for me!" so he couldn't see a reason why it mattered. And, of course, few loved his work while he was alive. Gauguin is even said to have even mocked some of Van Gogh's work in his own, even though they painted together for a time. (This is mentioned at the exhibition at MOMA and a relevant Gauguin is shown.) So, YMMV. But, I had tears in my eyes from the beauty. Give Van Gogh a chance; his work may really come to mean something to you. It may not, but if it happens that you have yet to do so, it might be worth your while to give it some time, letting yourself be in a state of openness to the forms and colors.
- gumby 3y agoI’m in the “van Gough: meh” camp. But one thing (of many) that I love about being alive is that not everybody has the same tastes, and I enjoyed reading your comment.
- lizknope 3y agoI was never a fan of Van Gogh until I saw Starry Night in person at MOMA in NYC. The thing that jumps out at me is literally the paint on the painting. There is a lot of height to it. The paint is so thick in sections that it sticks out far above the canvas that it can cause a shadow next to it. We tend to think of paintings as 2 dimensional but Starry Night is 3D and seeing it online or in a book or poster is not the same experience. Since then I've seen about 10 other Van Gogh paintings in museums and I noticed this similar style in his paintings.
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- tcfhgj 3y agoLuxury that's worthless if you are chased by heat and thirst
- Jupe 3y agoAgreed, but the same can be said for any creative output by another human, can it not? Watching movies, reading books, listening to music... even reading articles and comments on Hacker News would be "worthless luxuries" if one is "chased by heat and thirst".
- Dowwie 3y agoor if the entire solar system is being pulled into a two-dimensional black hole
- empiricus 3y agoI was once in the Orsay museum, and realized that the Van Gogh paintings are nice enough to put in the kitchen; which unfortunately is a bar too high for 99% of existing paintings in the world. For some reasons, many painters do not try to make beautiful things, or they are incapable.
- mav88 3y agoI went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam because I was there and it was on the bucket list. Pictures in a book or on web pages do not do justice to how vibrant the pictures are in real life. Plus, in the days before additional security was required, you could go right up to them (within reason) and check them out up close. They look like they were painted yesterday. Not everyone likes his work but I'm a fan.
- diego_moita 3y ago> Pictures in a book or on web pages do not do justice to how vibrant the pictures are in real life This is true and big. The paintings are nice on books and screens but are stunning in real life. There is a lot of nuance in the colours that pictures don't replicate. Same happens to Vermeer landscapes. His "View of Delft" is just nice on screen but almost magical when seen in real.
- golemotron 3y agoHN might be the best place to ask. What lights do galleries use? They make the paintings pop.
- Misdicorl 3y agoSurely the lighting matters but I think it is only secondary. The thing that's missing in reproductions is the physical texture of the paintings.
- empiricus 3y agoSlightly related: I've noticed first in Ghent, then in Amsterdam, that at certain moments of the day, the eddies and the waves of the water reflections in the channels are quite similar to the Van Gogh trademark lines.
- ocfnash 3y agoA couple of years ago I read Irving Stone's biography of Van Gogh [1] and it very much enriched my experience of Van Gogh's art. The book is based largely on a collection of letters between Vincent and his brother Theo and is quite moving sometimes. I recommend it! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lust_for_Life_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lust_for_Life_(novel)
- talkingtab 3y agoThe best way I have come to understand art is that for a moment it lets me experience how it felt to be another person. When I see some of Van Gogh's works, take the Church at Auvers, or Starry Night, I feel like I can understand the overwhelming beauty - how he felt - when he looked at a church or the night sky. I have times when I am deeply touched by a ordinary moment. I see a person walking on a dirt country road. Or a mother look at her daughter with utter love. And those things I would like to share with others, so I have tried to paint. I am not a good painter. But I do think every person should try to express those moments that touch them - in some media or another. And who knows, if you try to paint something perhaps someone will see it and it will take their breath away.
- hef19898 3y agoI don't paint, but I do take pictures. And looking at how painters throughout history depicted the world had an impact on my photography. Especially Van Gogh, as it was the first painter, and museum, I visited by actively trying to learn something instead of just admiring, or not, works of art. After all, the use of light and composition are almost universial concepts.
- AlbertCory 3y agoI've been to most of the world's great art museums, but I haven't been there. (Or the Hermitage, but that's off the table at the moment /s) What are some lesser-known museums I need to add to the list? I have one for you: https://folkartmuseum.org/ https://folkartmuseum.org/. You can see the whole thing in an hour. If you think Van Gogh lacked formal training: these people had none whatsoever. This is really a great thread, HN'ers. Very literate, educated, and well-composed.
- Vinnl 3y agoI (and someone else too) already mentioned the Kröller-Müller elsewhere, but if you're in the Netherlands anyway, I'd recommend the Mauritshuis as well, and close to it is also the Escher museum if you're into that. I assume the Rijksmuseum is already crossed off :)
- yread 3y agoFrom the lesser known Frans Hals in Haarlem is very nice and much less busy
- dekhn 3y agoSeeing these paintings in person at the museum completely changed my appreciation for Van Gogh (I'm more of a rembrandt guy). The physical texture of the sunflowers is... its own art form beyond painting.
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- julienchastang 3y agoI went to a exhibit of van Gogh's lesser known works in Denver some years ago. For me, it really humanized him. As I recall, he learned his craft partly through a mail correspondence class. On display were some of his studies or "homework assignments" which I found particularly moving. He was seeking a path to a better life just like everyone else.
- smudgy 3y agoAs an aside, Broey Deschanel just released a video discussing the van Gogh "Experience"-style exhibitions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOFBAJStuk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOFBAJStuk8
- atkailash 3y ago[dead]
- roeles 3y agoI can recommend https://vangoghexpo.com/ https://vangoghexpo.com/ for those who love van gogh.
- bern4444 3y agoFor those in NYC - The Met has an exhibit on now of Van Goghs Cypresses paintings[0] I highly recommend going if you are in NYC. This exhibit includes Starry Night (which is on loan from the MOMA, also in NY) along with many others. For any moderate to major fan of Van Gogh it will not disappoint. [0]https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/van-gogh-cypresses https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/van-gogh-cypresses
- turtledragonfly 3y agoI like this collection because of how much there is to see. Van Gogh was more prolific than I had somehow imagined. There are different kinds of artists, and one kind (that I identify with) does it because of some semi-compulsion. It's not "oh, I think I'll do some art today, wouldn't that be nice?" but rather "I _need_ to make something; I will not feel right until I do. Where's my paint?" These are the ones who would keep producing even if nobody ever saw their work. I guess that jives with my understanding of Van Gogh's history. Not a commercial success, not sought-after. But he did it anyway.
- toyg 3y agoBit of both here. Definitely Van Gogh painted largely because he wanted to, but at the same time, the people helping him were constantly reminding him of the commercial necessities of the art, pushing him to produce more in this or that fashionable style.
- AtNightWeCode 3y agoI recommend this museum. It did not give me the same jaw-dropping experience as staring into Starry Night at MOMA. But it is a great museum and it spans over the entire life of Van Gogh, his development and tools. There is also a lot humor and distance in the descriptions which makes the experience less dark considering all the misery in his life.
- gdubs 3y agoSo, I wasn't really sure about the final season of Ted Lasso until the episode "Sunflowers". I won't go in to detail as to what the relevance here is in case you haven't seen it, but I thought it was just simply beautiful.
- crtified 3y agoIt must be great to see these original works in person. As other accounts have made clear. A rare spectacle. But it's also not viable, resources-wise, for every human being to travel to (say) Amsterdam in person for a viewing, for the experience. It will be nice when, one day, that full experience can be had, one way or another, without the cost of burning X (dozen/hundred/thousand) gallons of gas and ~ a months salary in costs per-time-per-person. I daresay that even now, with what limited technology we have, some of the dimensional properties would be able to be somewhat (not wholly!) represented for remote viewers, well beyond what a simple photograph represents. e.g. a detailed 3d scan and dedicated viewing software, with or without HMD/VR. The notion that highly endowed and profitable physical Art Galleries probably aren't entirely keen for that vision to proceed at pace, and certainly not as a free-for-all, does occur to me.
- crtified 3y agoNote that, already, "experiencing" the 3 dimensional aspect of the paint thickness - which is something that many in-person viewers comment upon, as one of the most striking parts of the experience - can be done at home by anybody with a web browser. https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/462 https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/462