© Richard HuangLandscapes draw us in with beautiful sunrises, otherworldly auroras, glittering stars, and turbulent seas. But I often wonder: beyond recreating the beauty of nature, what else were the great artists trying to express?
From October 22, 2016, to January 29, 2017, the Art Gallery of Ontario presented an exhibition titled Mystical Landscapes: Masterpieces from Monet, Van Gogh and More. It brought together ninety works borrowed from collections around the world, exploring how great artists used landscape to express their inner, spiritual worlds.
Most of the works were created between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The First World War was looming; waves of industrialization, urbanization, materialism, and nationalism followed one another; Darwin’s theory of evolution had recently gained currency; and traditional religious institutions were under challenge. Artists and the wider public alike found themselves in a widespread crisis of faith.
They sought a spiritual path forward in different ways. Gauguin looked for religious awakening through a return to the elemental in Brittany; Monet found inner peace through contemplation at Giverny; and Van Gogh listened for the call of the spirit beneath the starry skies of Arles. Their searching, reflection, and creative work produced an extraordinary body of Post-Impressionist art.
The exhibition opened with three celebrated works by Gauguin.
© InternetVision after the Sermon, Paul Gauguin, 1888, Scottish National Gallery:
This oil painting depicts a group of Breton peasant women who, after hearing a sermon in church, see a vision of the biblical Jacob wrestling with an angel.
Broad areas of color, flattened forms, an absence of shadows, and strong, flowing outlines make every figure stand out with striking clarity.
A diagonally angled tree trunk divides the composition in two. At lower left, peasant women pray with their eyes closed, representing the earthly world; at upper right, Jacob and the angel grapple, representing the spiritual realm. The material and spiritual worlds are ingeniously contained within a single small canvas.
Most striking of all is the vast field of vermilion. Rather than use the natural earth tones of soil or grass, Gauguin boldly chose a supernatural red. To me it looks at once like a field and a sky. It evokes the flushed, feverish struggle of Jacob and the angel, as though it might end in blood; yet it also suggests the artist’s own restlessness and burning desire for spiritual renewal.
© InternetThe Yellow Christ, Paul Gauguin, 1889, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo:
This oil painting shows peasant women in northern France praying before the crucified Christ.
According to the Bible, the Crucifixion took place in Jerusalem, but Gauguin relocates it to France as a symbolic act. The scene is not presented as a literal event but as an expression of religious faith. Christ’s body and the surrounding fields share the same exaggerated yellow, suggesting a supernatural spiritual presence that permeates everything.
In the background, a tiny figure climbs over a wall and walks away. I see in it Gauguin’s own wish to escape the city, return to a more elemental existence, and live simply. This, too, is symbolic.
Together with his Green Christ, this painting is regarded as both a foundational and an exemplary work of Symbolism.
© InternetChrist in the Garden of Olives, Paul Gauguin, 1889, Norton Museum of Art:
This oil painting depicts the biblical story of Gethsemane. On the night before the Crucifixion, after the Last Supper, Jesus went with his disciples to pray in this olive grove in Jerusalem. It was there that Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples, betrayed him.
Christ bears Gauguin’s own features in a self-portrait. His dejected expression conveys the artist’s disillusionment with society. Intriguingly, Gauguin’s face is concealed in some form within all three paintings selected for the exhibition, carrying symbolic meaning in each. This was the first time the three works had ever been exhibited side by side.
More intriguing still is Christ’s unusually red hair, an allusion to Gauguin’s fraught relationship with Van Gogh. The two had once been close companions who admired each other, but their friendship soured into hostility. Gauguin ultimately left Van Gogh, who then cut off part of his own ear. Love ran deep, and so did hate.
This painting by Gauguin directly inspired Van Gogh’s series of olive-grove paintings.
© InternetThe Olive Trees, Vincent van Gogh, 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York:
Van Gogh plainly disagreed with Gauguin’s approach, dismissing Christ in the Garden of Olives as empty and insubstantial. For Van Gogh, nature possessed a sacred power of its own. If he wished to evoke the story of Gethsemane, he believed that painting the olive grove would be enough; there was no need to include Christ. And so he painted The Olive Trees.
Flowing lines shape the clouds, distant mountains, and olive grove. Their rolling motion makes me feel that the trees are moving, the earth is moving, and even the sky is moving—as though a mysterious force were taking shape, surging and gathering strength. This, to Van Gogh, was what it meant for a painting to possess real substance.
His more famous starry-night paintings express something similar.
© InternetStarry Night Over the Rhône, Vincent van Gogh, 1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris:
This oil painting depicts the Rhône at night in Arles, in southern France. Van Gogh had only recently moved there and was eagerly awaiting Gauguin’s arrival. At this point he was full of hope for the future, and the darkness and stars opened an infinite realm for his imagination. In a letter to his brother, he wrote that when he needed spiritual comfort, he would look up at the night sky.
As I study the painting, I am captivated by the richness of its colors. The sky is jewel blue, the water deep blue, and the ground purplish red, bathing the town itself in blue and violet. The gaslights are golden yellow, while their reflections shift from russet gold to bronze green. Overhead, the stars sparkle, radiating green and pink light. Follow the gaslit reflections toward the foreground and you find a colorfully dressed couple strolling hand in hand along the riverbank. What an enchanting night.
At an exhibition, watching the people who are looking at the paintings can be interesting too. One small episode stayed with me. Two young women were standing before the painting when one stepped closer and traced the shape of the Big Dipper among its brightest stars. Her friend nodded in agreement. I looked again, and there it was. I smiled in recognition. There is something wonderful about catching an artist’s quiet little intention.
Night ought to be black, yet Van Gogh painted it in luminous jewel blue. The stars are unusually large, like tiny flowers, flaring matches, or fireworks blossoming across a blue canopy. This is clearly more than a simple depiction of a natural night sky. It is Van Gogh’s own mystical starry night, a spiritual refuge that filled him with longing.
In front of me was an elderly man in a wheelchair, accompanied by two young volunteers. As usual, Van Gogh’s painting was surrounded by people, and whenever someone inadvertently blocked the man’s view, one of the volunteers would step forward, tap the person on the shoulder, and ask them to move aside. In this way, the old man studied the painting for a long time. Then, astonishingly, he stood up. Wow—how miraculous! At this point I could have boasted that Van Gogh’s painting had the healing powers of qigong. But as a believer in science, I would hardly claim that. I imagine the man could already walk but was too frail to stand for long. Judging by his look of contentment, however, I am certain that this beautiful starry night replenished both his physical and spiritual energy.
If Van Gogh heard a call beneath the starry sky, Monet found stillness in a water-lily pond.
© InternetThe Water Lilies series, Claude Monet:
Although he lived in a predominantly Christian country, the Impressionist master Monet sought inner peace through a Buddhist form of contemplation. The lotus is one of Buddhism’s symbols. Perhaps inspired by his love of Japanese art, Monet created a water garden on his own property. From then on, he would spend hours each day contemplating the pond before painting it.
His water lilies drift serenely across the pond, whose still surface reflects the weeping willows on the bank and the clouds above. After gazing at that mirror-like water for a while, I almost begin to see my own reflection and feel the pond slowly washing through my inner world.
Amid the smoke of the First World War, the pond became a spiritual haven for Monet. Over his lifetime, he created more than 250 paintings of water lilies. After the war, he donated a selection of them to the nation.
Even today, an unending stream of visitors pauses beside the pond at Giverny to contemplate it.
© InternetThe Sun, Edvard Munch, 1910, University of Oslo:
This oil painting depicts the sun rising slowly above the horizon. Munch created it while recovering from a severe mental breakdown. Unlike the fear and loneliness expressed in his celebrated painting The Scream, this work suggests an artist finally liberated from his inner anguish and melancholy. His paintings thereafter became brighter, calmer, and more philosophical, entering what art historians call his “second period.”
The sun’s radiating beams and concentric rings of glare fill the entire canvas and strike the eye with tremendous force. The sunlight rushes toward me as though shining directly into my heart. It possesses an awe-inspiring power that seems to transcend nature itself.
The yellow and white sunlight radiates warmth—the very warmth that bathes all living things. The grass and the small flowers at lower right are brimming with life because of it. In this steadily rising sun, we see hope.
The work hangs in the University of Oslo’s assembly hall, where it was intended to inspire generations of young people.
It is also worth noting that after the 2011 terrorist attack in Norway, in which Breivik killed seventy-eight people, the painting was displayed publicly so that people could sit before it in contemplation. Few things are as extraordinary as the power of a painting to help heal.
Conclusion:
At first sight, these masterpieces may simply captivate us with their colors, lines, and compositions. But when I look more closely, placing myself within their historical moment and absorbing every detail, the paintings come alive—and so do the artists. I no longer see only what is on the canvas; I can almost hear each artist speaking about the stirrings of his inner life.
Our own world is no less tangled and complicated. How can we bring a little more peace and happiness into our inner lives? My prescription is simple: listen to more music, spend more time with paintings, and read more history.
Art can heal.