A group of ultimate frisbee players who call themselves “Los Quijotes” meet Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons to play. Specifics about time and place (including maps) can be found at their web site:

http://losquijotes.webcindario.com/index.htm

Last night I was clicking through old files on my laptop from the Spring semester of 2000 when I was a study-abroad student in Amsterdam–my first taste of life in Europe.

I dug up this essay about a lesser-known painting of Vincent Van Gogh called The Cottage. I thought it had some interesting things to say, so here it is. Enjoy!

I haven’t been living in Amsterdam for very long, only a month or so of the three I’ll be studying here, but already one thing is obvious, the Dutch want you to know Vincent Van Gogh is one of their own. He was born on Dutch soil.

The metro line I take downtown passes several shops dedicated entirely to Van Gogh. Tourists are buying Van Gogh sweatshirts and pencil sharpeners and interactive CD-ROMs with Starry Night mouse pads to complement. April and I often joke about these tourists, saying the most obvious sign someone is visiting the Netherlands for the first time is if they are carrying a poster box with Vincent Van Gogh splashed on the side.

I don’t blame the Dutch for holding on so tightly to Van Gogh. Everyone knows something about him. Whether a person has had a calendar of his paintings hanging in the kitchen, or she can tell you the story of how he sliced off a corner of his own ear to please a close friend, everyone knows Vincent Van Gogh. He’s still making his mark today. In 1990 his The Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82,500,000, giving the painting the title “most expensive painting ever sold.”

Needless to say, one of the biggest attractions in Amsterdam is the Van Gogh Museum, the only museum in the entire country devoted to one person. Within only five months of re-opening after an expansion project in 1999, over 700,000 people visited the museum, making it the most visited museum in the Netherlands.

I visited the museum one Thursday afternoon not intending to buy a mouse pad or a Van Gogh writing pen, but curious to learn more about the man, the one crouching in the shadows of his own name.

I knew a few things about Van Gogh already. One of my college roommates had recently read a book about Van Gogh, and in our late night conversations, I picked up a few stories about Vincent’s disturbing childhood. But as I logged onto one of the computers in the museum library and scrolled through pages of his biography, I found there was still more to this man.

I cringed as I read about one rejection after another. Vincent was rejected by the Church–refused by a theological school in Amsterdam and later dismissed as a preacher from his church in Borniage, Belgium. Vincent relied on his brother Theo for support, both financially and emotionally. The rest of his family called him a failure, and rightly so. Vincent only sold one painting in his entire lifetime, and for a measly four hundred francs at that.

Vincent was plagued by psychotic fits that drove him to seek medical treatment a number of times throughout his life. In fact, he never seemed content with himself. He wrote in a letter to his brother, “I wish to remain shut up as much for my own peace of mind as for other people’s.”

On July 27, 1890 Vincent took his own life, walking to a wheat field with a shot gun in his hand and shooting himself in the chest. He died in his bed with his brother at his side.

Leaving the electronic facts on the screen, I leaned back in my chair, trying to comprehend why this man, a man who considered himself a failure, is still a hero to so many today.

I decided to take a walk through the gallery. The place was packed. Thankfully there was space with some elbow room in the corner of one of the main exhibition halls. A painting called The Cottage hung there on the wall. The painting wasn’t a familiar one, and consider the number of visitors simply passing it by, it wasn’t a popular one either.

I took a few moments to look at the piece. What caught my eye initially was not the cottage itself, which stood at the center of the painting, but rather the time of day the painting suggested. The sun had recently slipped over the horizon and now darkness was settling in–the hour of day when everything drains of color. The fruit trees growing to the left of the cottage were shaded gray and black, yet visibly ripe and full of sweetness. The thatch roof which would have shown brilliantly only hours before now lay draped over the cottage in a sheet of dull brown. The cottage with shutters and doors wide open to meet the afternoon heat sat in the shadows, each one a covering of thick, black paint.

I wanted to see the cottage differently. I wanted Vincent to paint a new one, one with all the wonderful colors the cottage deserved, the colors I had seen in The Starry Night and in Sunflowers. I wanted the sun in the sky, illuminating the cottage and its surroundings, molding the landscape, and giving it crisply defined contours.

The stories from Vincent’s life played again through my head as I looked at the painting, and then…there it was–the cottage, dimly lit: an image of Vincent’s life. Unmistakable. This was the story of Vincent Van Gogh’s life.

Each stroke of dull brown and gray and black told me a little more about who Vincent was. It was as if Vincent himself had wanted to dip his paint brush into a vibrant red and give life to those pieces of fruit, making them juicy and eatable, so tangible they would have made my mouth water. He too wanted to know the limits of his own painted horizon. But this painting was not a painting of what could have been, but of his reality.

Vincent saw this cottage in the dim light of a broken life.

“What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter, and then the painting.”
–Vincent Van Gogh