Sun paintings
- Lex van der steen
- Jul 19
- 6 min read
This text belongs to a set of three, all related to the sun. I have written them simultaneously in the same period. There is no particular order to them. This is the third one to be published.
In a painting named The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt) from 1890, in the last year of his life, Van Gogh took inspiration from an etching by Rembrandt from 1632. In the etching of Rembrandt, Jezus is depicted holding up his hand, surrounded by people. He radiates a bright light, and below him one can see a man, Lazarus, getting up from the ground, rising up from death. In Van Gogh’s painting from 1890, we only see Lazarus and two women directly next to him (which were also in Rembrandt’s etching). And instead of taking place in a cave, the scene is located in what seems to be a wheat field, resembling the french countryside where Van Gogh was staying at the time. And while in the etching of Rembrandt Jezus himself figured as the source of light, in Van Gogh’s version we see the sun burning strongly and proud in the middle of the sky.
The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt) displays perhaps most explicitly the overlap between the experience of nature and a spiritual, religious sentiment that Van Gogh seems to have felt throughout his life. It does not take much time reading the many letters he wrote to his brother to stumble upon passages in which nature seems to bring about some type of religious experience. For example, in a letter from 11 march 1882, he compares the birth of a calf, which he witnessed, to the birth of baby Jezus. In fact, in this painting, Van Gogh has painted Lazarus with a orange beard, probably having himself in mind (in this period, he was dealing with seizures and severe crises due to his bad mental and physical health, and in between he experienced better periods as well, in which he was able to paint again). In short, both in Van Gogh’s personal experience, and in his paintings, the natural and the mythical often overlapped. In his book Van Gogh and the Artists He Loved, Steven Naifeh even writes how, in The Starry Night, one can see a “sentiment that Laurillard had preached years earlier: God is nature and nature is beauty. Art is religion.” In a somewhat similar fashion, the art collector Helene Kröller-Müller saw Van Gogh as someone who had basically become a spinozist without reading Spinoza, and believed she understood Van Gogh’s paintings better once she started looking at them in the light of Spinoza (for whom God and Nature were equal). And indeed, not only did Van Gogh talk about nature as if it were something truly divine, but also did he see nature itself often as art. For example, in a letter from 2 november 1883, he writes about the landscape of Drenthe (a Dutch province) how “the flat landscapes of heath or wheatfields, everything, everything became just exactly like the most beautiful Corots. A silence, a mystery, a peace as only he has painted”. Or later that year, on the fifth of september, when he wrote how “I came home from the dunes behind Loosduinen, soaking wet because I had spent 3 hours in the rain at a spot where everything was Ruisdael, Daubigny or Jules Dupré”. And these are only two of many similar comparisons between his experiences of natural phenomena and paintings he loved. If we push this a little further, painting can perhaps be understood as both an activity and a way of appearing and existing. The world is painted and being painted. Van Gogh, as a painter, does not create an image of the world that never coincides with whatever it depicts, but rather engages in a process that is inherent to nature. In the act of painting, he bathes in a larger picture of becoming that is inherent to natural life itself.
I want to articulate an interpretation for a painting from autumn 1888, the year in which “[h]is antagonism toward [religion] would reach its height”, called The Sower. It has already been noticed by others that the sun behind the figure in the painting, seems to depict a halo, thereby portaying the sower as a saint. Something interesting that Van Gogh probably did not know, is that the iconographic element of the halo, which can be found in different religious images from all over the world, probably originated with the Zoroastrian Persian sun-deity Mithra. The halo, thus, actually started as a sun-symbol. Anyway, concerning Van Gogh’s painting, I think we should focus more on the fact that the head of the sower is not completely inside the sun, but is located rather on the edge of it, partially inside and partially outside of the sun-halo. If the head of the sower would be completely covered by the sun-halo, he would be absolutely divine, in contrast to a nature which is not or at least less so. Instead, the sower is not simply divine but, rather, exactly the passage between divinity and nature, between sacred and profane. Not completely holy like the saints, nor merely natural like the rocks and the clouds.
On the twelfth of June, 1877, Van Gogh wrote to his brother for the first (but not last) time about the Dutch poet and preacher Eliza Laurillard: “Heard Laurillard on Sunday morning in the early sermon on ‘Jesus went through the cornfields’. He made a deep impression on me – he also spoke in that sermon about the parable of the sower and about the man who cast seed into the ground, and he should sleep, and rise day and night, and the seed should spring and increase and grow up, he knoweth not how”. When one reads poems by Laurillard, as published in books like Bloemen en knoppen (1878), like this one called Overal leven (Life everywhere), it becomes clear how God, according to him, is revealed in nature, and how the natural cannot be distinguished from the divine:
'k Zag vischjes in het diep van 't beekjen
En watervliegen op zijn vlak;
'k Zag mieren op 't bemoste steenblok,
Dat uit het water opwaarts stak;
Daar boven zag ik vlinders fladd'ren,
Weêr hooger vloog de zwaluw rond,
Terwijl mijn oog, nog hooger starend,
Den breedgewiekten eiber vond.
En 'k dacht: ‘Zoo is 't in heel de schepping:
Alom een zijn, dat leeft en streeft,
Op iedere verdieping leven, -
Alomme God, die 't leven geeft.’
Laurillard wrote plenty of poems with similar topics. What is interesting about Van Gogh’s remark, however, is the emphasis on the acts of agriculture and engagement with the land. In the same collection of poems mentioned above, Laurillard also included a longer one on harvest. Van Gogh has, throughout his painting carreer, drawn and painted farmers and the agricultural life many times. And indeed, if beauty, art, and the divine are first and foremost found in nature – or rather, cannot be distinguished from nature – it are perhaps those lives that are engaged with nature most that are given a certain priviliged position concerning these matters.
I think, similarly, we can further understand the painting of the sower from autumn 1888. In contrast to the typical religious painting, the main figure is not looking up to the sky, but is rather, in the practice of sowing, looking towards the earth. The sower is focussed on the earth and the seeds, which ‘should spring and increase and grow up’. The seeds will sprout, and then move towards the sun. Unlike the plants, the sower cannot look directly into the sun. Instead, human life requires the plants and animals that it has always already been surrounded by, and it is in them that the divine is mirrored. The sower looks down to the earth, in order to see the holy that it cannot touch upon directly. Hence also the tree in the middle of the painting, for the viewer to see.
Plants grow from one planet to another, from the earth to the sun.
It is in this green space, this bridge between earth and sun, the nature-painting, that humanity has its home.
Sources:
Laurillard, E. (1878). Bloemen en Knoppen: Gedichten. Amsterdam: D. B. Centen.
Naifeh, S. (2021). Van Gogh and the Artists He Loved. New York: Random House.
Letters of Van Gogh can be found on: https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters.html
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