One of the great masterpieces of 19th-century western art was loosely inspired by one of the greats of 19th-century Japanese art, it has been argued.
Martin Bailey, a specialist on Vincent van Gogh, believes that the Dutch artist drew inspiration from Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawawhen he painted one of his most dazzling and celebrated works, The Starry Night.
Side by side, the similarities are obvious. In the Hokusai the wave towers over the volcanic peak of Mount Fuji, Bailey said. In the Van Gogh, “the swirling mass in the sky hurtles towards the more gentle slopes of Les Alpilles”.
Art historians know that Van Gogh was a keen collector of Japanese prints. He particularly admired the Hokusai print, which is now one of the most recognisable and reproduced artworks of all time. In one letter to his brother Theo, he said: the “These waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.”
Starry Night was painted in the summer of 1889, when Van Gogh was in a small mental asylum on the outskirts of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
He was a voluntary patient, admitted after he cut off his ear and presented it, wrapped in paper, to a young woman in a local brothel.
Van Gogh was well aware that he could not live independently without help. “It must have been horrific moving into a mental asylum in the 19th century,” said Bailey, author of the recent published Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum. “I did research on the other patients in the asylum and they were all in a terrible state so it must have been very, very difficult for him to adjust his life. I think it was art which kept him sane and gave him a reason to live.”
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