INSPIRING IMPRESSIONISM
the Hague following an argument with his father, Van Gogh
wrote about a walk he had taken, ‘alone at a remote spot in
the dunes’, during which he had been comforted by the
‘feeling that one had not been alone but had talked to one
of the old figures from the time of the beginning, Daubigny’.
This walk, he wrote, had made him feel ‘much calmer’.
When Spring was sold during the Paris Salon exhibition
in 1857 to the Emperor Napoleon III, Daubigny was
46-years-old; only a few years older than Van Gogh was
when, in the summer of 1890, he showed up at the home
of Daubigny’s long-grieving widow. At 37, Van Gogh was
racked with worries about his future, his lack of success,
and ‘the persistence of turmoil’ in his life.
On 13 June, around the time of his pilgrimage to
Daubigny’s home, he told his brother that for him, ‘life
might well remain solitary. I have not perceived those to
whom I’ve been most attached other than through a glass,
darkly.’ Van Gogh, you sense, had come looking for the
garden so that he might feel less alone in the company of
Daubigny’s very soil. But when it came down to it, face-to-
face on the doorstep, all this was probably left unsaid.
Working on double-square canvases, a practice Daubigny
had pioneered as a landscapist, Van Gogh made two
paintings that afternoon entitled Daubigny’s Garden, in
which the figure of Mme Daubigny stands at the bottom of
her garden, a small black smudge of a woman dressed in
mourning clothes, beside an empty garden chair in which, it
is suggested, her husband used to sit.That Mme Daubigny probably didn’t pose for Van Gogh is
beside the point; that her husband had actually died
months before in his treasured home beside this garden is,
perhaps, less so. Within three weeks, in any case, her
peculiar guest had also passed on.
Inspiring Impressionism: Daubigny, Monet and Van Gogh runs at
the Scottish National Gallery from 25 June to 2 October 2016.
http://www.nationalgalleries.orgCOLLECTION: TAFT MUSEUM OF ART, CINCINNATICOLLECTION RUDOLF STAECHELINHEINO, NETHERLANDS, HANNEMA-DE STUERS FOUNDATIONArtists & Illustrators 3936 Daubigny final.indd 39 12/05/2016 09:50