Van Gogh, Vincent - Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet (1890)

The Melancholy Mirror

Vincent van Gogh painted Dr. Gachet because he found a man whose soul was as shattered as his own. It was 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise. The air smelled of damp earth and lavender. Van Gogh was fresh out of the asylum, looking for a savior when he found a doctor who looked like he needed one too.

Gachet sits with his head resting on a weary hand. His eyes aren’t looking at the viewer, but instead regard the end of the world. On the red table sits a sprig of foxglove, a garden source of the substance digitalis, used as a heart medication. In the late 19th century, psychology and neurology were brutal, primitive attempts to navigate an internal landscape no one understood. Doctors like Gachet were trying to cure the mind they barely understood while the steam engine and the telegraph made the world move too fast for the human spirit to keep up.

This is the human face of modernism’s exhaustion, the birth of aesthetic Expressionism trying to shed the skin of Post-Impressionism. Van Gogh used cobalt blues that feel like ice and reds that feel like a fever. He died only months after completing this painting. It took a century after that for the first version of this particular painting to be sold at auction for $82.5 million US. The world finally decided to pay for the pain it had ignored when the paint was still wet.

References

Bailey, M. (2018). Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum. White Lion Publishing.

Distel, A., & Stein, S. A. (1999). Cézanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Naifeh, S., & Smith, G. W. (2011). Van Gogh: The Life. Random House.

Pickvance, R. (1986). Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Van Gogh, V. (1996). The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Penguin Classics.