Collection: Through Vincent’s Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources

Santa Barbara Museum of Art

February 27 - May 22, 2022

The exhibition Through Vincent’s Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources presents paintings, drawings and prints by the artists most beloved by Vincent van Gogh, firmly connecting his art to its late 19th-century context. The exhibition will demonstrate Van Gogh’s early and abiding interest in a wide variety of art. To visually narrate the impact of Van Gogh’s sources, more than fifteen signature paintings and drawings by the artist himself will be juxtaposed with more than 100 works of art that fed his voracious imagination. The selection will include paintings by contemporary Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, such as Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac, and Alfred Sisley; earlier French artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Honoré Daumier; and Anton Mauve, Van Gogh’s cousin who was part of the Hague School of Dutch realists. Nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige, who influenced Van Gogh’s art profoundly, are included as well.

The Columbus exhibition will include 61 works from the private collection of Steven Naifeh, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning co-writer and of the best-selling biography Van Gogh: The Life. Gregory Smith (1951–2014), Naifeh’s husband and co-author of the book, was raised in Columbus. Among works loaned from the Naifeh collection are paintings by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jozef Israëls, and Paul Sérusier. Other lenders to the exhibition include the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid (Spain); Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (Netherlands); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; and numerous private collections.

The exhibition will also emphasize Vincent’s robust appetite for literature and the fictional worlds of the modern novel. The installation will include early editions of beloved novels by Charles Dickens, Guy de Maupassant, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola, to remind viewers of the fictional worlds that impacted Van Gogh’s vision.

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