SOLD!

I feel kinda silly: the auction I posted about yesterday and said was tonight -- was actually last night. Chalk it up to my frequent habit of having no idea what the date is on a particular day!

At any rate, Vincent's Weaver, up for auction at Christie's New York, did sell above estimate, at a final price of $818,500 (including the buyer's premium). As Allie the Hist-fic Chick pointed out in a comment to yesterday's post, that was a lowish estimate (and it turns out, a lowish final price), but that can be explained by the economic times. All the estimates seemed conservative to me. Also, one of the Dutch-era weaver paintings was not going to fetch as much as a van Gogh Dutch-era landscape picture, and no Dutch-era paintings would fetch as much as the post-Paris canvases (from Arles, Saint-Remy, or Auvers-sur-Oise). There's definitely a 'market hierarchy' when it comes to van Gogh's work.

I hope the Weaver's new owner enjoys the 'good deal' they got. ;-)

Up for Auction

The art market must be trying to rebound, because a van Gogh painting is up for auction this week in New York. In November 2007, van Gogh's "Fields" (from the Auvers period) shockingly failed to sell at auction, leading the pundits to proclaim the art market in recession. Since then, the auction houses of the world have kept Vincent on the back burner aside from the occasional minor work.

Tomorrow night (3 November) Christie's is including one of Vincent's 1884 weaver paintings in the evening Modern & Impressionist art sale: this one (F162). The estimate stands at $400,000-600,000, which is fairly standard for one of the Dutch-era pictures. (The later Arles/Saint-Remy/Auvers canvases command much more.) This painting, along with the other weavers in the series, was made just after Vincent left Drenthe (before that he was in The Hague) and settled in Nuenen with his parents. Van Gogh was fascinated by the village weavers and their machinery, completing a whole series of paintings and drawings during his first months in Nuenen.

If the van Gogh doesn't sell, what will the pundits say? I'll be watching! Go here for the write-up in the Christie's online catalogue.

Autumn Rhythms

Autumn has arrived in Florida -- high of only 65 today in St Petersburg! Brrr...that's January weather! I had to excavate a sweater this morning from the depths of the closet, forgotten since about February.

In honor of the lovely fall weather (many folks outside FL actually have autumn leaves to see), here is one of Vincent's many autumn-themed pictures, "Autumn Landscape with Poplars," from October 1884, while he was living in Nuenen with his family. Today the painting is in the Van Gogh Museum, having made a circular route through galleries and collectors. Vincent loved fall, and he used his (at this point) newfound interest in complementary colors to celebrate the season: orange leaves, blue sky. He also used a perspective frame to construct the image, a wooden frame strung with string that he adopted early in his artistic career and continued to use until around May 1888 in Arles. The perspective in this picture is mostly successful, aside from the bridge-fence at left, which is a bit off, and the size of the farmhouse in the background, which is slightly too big. But in general Vincent displays his growing confidence both in the rendering of perspective and in the paint medium.

The woman walking into the foreground wears a traditional Dutch mourning shawl, a garment that Vincent seems to have admired for its visual qualities, as he depicted it more than once in paintings and drawings. Here, the theme of mourning and melancholy ties in to the passing of time and the passing of the seasons. But Vincent's attitude about autumn was not gloomy -- he considered autumn to be part of the cycle of life, and as such, it had its own beauty.

Vincent's Weavers

Julianne over at Writing the Renaissance has posted some interesting things lately about Lyon and the silk industry, so I thought I'd chime in today about van Gogh's artistic interest in professional weavers. While living in Nuenen with his parents, during a six or seven-month period (January-July 1884) Vincent made about thirty drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings of local weavers. These compositions allowed him to work on his perspective technique while exploring his interest in "peasant" subjects. As art historians have noted, however, these works present a contradiction: they possess a certain "utopian" viewpoint (Carol Zemel's word), an idealized view of peasant life, but at the same time an awareness that these men lived difficult lives in an era of increasing modernization. Van Gogh claimed to identify with these working-class artisans, but, ironically, his brother Theo gave him far more money than a Nuenen weaver would see per month. Vincent hoped his weaver pictures would find an audience among Theo's urban-bourgeois clients, but to his great aggravation, Theo thought them unmarketable.

The drawing seen here (Van Gogh Museum) dates from Jan-Feb 1884 and is one of the earliest in the series. The inclusion of a baby at right is interesting. The possible influence of George Eliot's "Silas Marner"--a book Vincent greatly admired--has been noted. But one cannot ignore the fact that only a few months before, Vincent had left his makeshift family, Sien Hoornik and her children, behind in The Hague. In his letters to Theo while living with Sien, Vincent rhapsodizes about having Sien's baby son in the house and describes how the boy toddled around his studio. Is the baby in the drawing a partial-memory of how Sien's son kept Vincent company?

The Nuenen weavers partially inspired Vincent to adopt a new technique in his explorations of color. While living in Paris with Theo in 1886-88 (and possibly earlier), Vincent used balls of wool yarn to test color combinations. A lacquered teabox filled with yarn-balls, left behind in Paris when Vincent went to Arles, today is in the Van Gogh Museum (although seldom put on display). Some of the yarn-balls are wound with complementary colors, others with closely related tones that mirror some of Vincent's paintings of that period. Even when Vincent stopped painting and drawing the weavers in July 1884, their practices stayed with him.