The horizon line in this painting by Vincent van Gogh is high, focusing our attention on the enclosed wheat field in the foreground. The field, which occupies the canvas asymmetrically, has been freshly sown. The rain lashes the space so vigorously that it appears to be lashing the canvas itself.
You could see this as a painting about time — about seasons and life spans. We know, for instance, that it’s early in the wheat growing season. We know, too, that it’s late in the artist’s life.
Too early? Too late? That’s the ever-present question with van Gogh. We’re always looking at him and glancing at the watch on our wrist. Did he come to painting too late? Did he peak too early? Did we, his public, come to his aid too late? Should we cling to the romantic idea that he was ahead of his time? Or pathologize him, lamenting that he sought help for his troubles too late?
“Rain,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a rebuke to all that. It qualifies as “late van Gogh” since it was painted in 1889. This was about nine months before he died, when he was in an asylum at Saint-Rémy, France, outside Arles. But since van Gogh had only taken up painting in 1881, there wasn’t much of an early or middle period to set it against.
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After his 1888 move to Arles, everything by van Gogh burns in an incandescent present.
On Nov. 3, 1889, while “Rain” was still on the easel, he wrote a letter to his brother Theo. He mentioned the season (“most of the leaves have fallen,” he said, making the landscape “look more like the north”), and the weather (the studio, he said, was damp). He also touched on his state of mind, about which he knew Theo worried. It had been less than a year since the notorious ear-slicing breakdown.
“My health is very good,” he now claimed. And yet, he admitted, he was prone to melancholy. This was no blip. A week earlier, he had written that “melancholy very often overtakes me with great force.” There were, of course, deep reasons for this, unique to van Gogh. And despite a million posthumous attempts to diagnose him, we will never know what afflicted him with any certainty. But painting like a man possessed and failing to make money from it — losing money, in fact — didn’t help. It was deeply discouraging.
Van Gogh, moreover, was lonely. Capable of great ecstasies in front of nature, and of being moved to tears by art and books and people, he was nevertheless alone now in an asylum, apart from his dear brother, unloved by any woman and feeling chronically unlovable.
So yes, there’s melancholy in “Rain.” But it might be a mistake to project too much negative feeling onto it. After all, van Gogh loved everything about nature. Lashing rain was part of the seasonal cycle that he adored and wished to give life to on canvas.
He was inspired by a Japanese print made in 1857 by Utagawa Hiroshige, which the van Gogh brothers owned and which Vincent had earlier copied. Called “The Great Bridge: A Sudden Shower at Atake,” it shows pedestrians huddled under umbrellas as they cross a narrow bridge. The driving rain is depicted with streaking diagonal lines. It’s a fantastic picture.
Van Gogh’s rendering is much wilder. The raindrops scour the air’s thick atmosphere as a plow scours the earth. They fall in a disorderly fashion, at cross purposes to each other and to the lines of the furrowed field. You feel the unrelenting, brutal nature of the downpour, the whipping wind. There is something savage, almost self-lacerating, about it.
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Nature is never tidy, it reminds us. Nor is the human mind, which is just one more part of nature. In writing to Theo, Vincent talked about the importance of trying to capture “nature’s wholeness.” He championed the idea, too, of feeling oneself “fully in the midst of nature.”
But he was conscious that while he was out in the field, Theo was in Paris with his wife, Jo, who was pregnant. Theo had told his brother that Jo was already feeling her child “quicken” inside her. This kind of life, mixed up as it was with love, companionship and a viable future, struck van Gogh at this moment as “much more interesting than landscape.”
Alas, for that kind of love, it was, for Vincent, too late. But he still had his field, the rain, his paints and his indelible, off-the-clock, perpetual present.
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