Portrait of the Uncle As an Artist

Vincent W. Van Gogh grew up with his uncle's paintings and has devoted part of his life to a study of the man behind them. Mr. Van Gogh, a consultant engineer by profession, pursuing this research on his great uncle in spare moments, has brought many important documents to light and has written a series of articles that gives a fully dimensioned portrait of the artist.

Mr. Van Gogh, who is in Cambridge for a short visit and a talk on his uncle at the Fogg Museum, is a calm, white-haired gentleman who possesses the ease and charm that one associates with his father, Theo, Vincent's brother and truest friend. Since both brothers died before Mr. Van Gogh was two, he speaks of them with not only family pride, but also with appropriate scholarly detachment.

Theo owned and left to his family about a third of Vincent's total creative output, which Mr. Van Gogh saw early and often. Theo's possessions covered the whole range of his brother's art, from the gray Dutch period, to the Impressionist style of Vincent's Paris days to the final agonized distortions of the Auvers paintings. These works have since been put on permanent loan at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Mr. Van Gogh has retained in direct possession only a handful of his uncle's art, enough to decorate the small house outside Amsterdam which he occupies.

This extra-curricular devotion to his uncle and his art stems from Mr. Van Gogh's firm belief in the permanence of Vincent's contribution to art. During an interview yesterday, it became clear that he like to talk about the purely Dutch elements which his uncle depicted while in southern France. The drawbridge, boats on the beach and the flat, plain-like terrain of Vincent's mature work are all typically Dutch, not French, themes. The recurrent motif, found in the late works, of mountains rising in the distance beyond the plains reflects the lowlander's fondness for height. In Dutch medieval manuscripts the local terrain is invariably represented in this manner, an example of national wishful thinking.

Mr. Van Gogh is above all interested in the lessons that his uncle's turbulent and eventually resolved quest for identity can offer us. Vincent's constant search for the right job in his early days, he feels, provides a model of determination to succeed at self-discovery. In Vincent's eventual turn to art, he remarks that his uncle suddenly found a way of applying all that he had learned to a process of giving, not taking. This use of knowledge he considers an essential step in gaining maturity.

Mr. Van Gogh has recently begun work on the question of the genesis of creativity in an attempt to arrive at conclusions of a more general nature from the vast number of documents and artworks of his uncle that he has at his disposal. But his main interest in his uncle probably remains that of organizing exhibitions of the best examples in his family's collection for museums all over the world.

Mr. Van Gogh, whose resemblance to his uncle is extraordinary--sans white hair, he could double as the Vincent of the Parisian period--also has the warmth and kindness that his father possessed to so great an extent. He is a direct link to major figures in a vital period of the history of art.