Van Gogh’s Bible

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When his father died unexpectedly in 1885, a somber Vincent van Gogh decided to create a memorial to the Reverend Theodorus van Gogh. He placed his father’s heavy pulpit Bible on a cloth-covered table, set beside it a snuffed-out candle and small book, and then painted the scene.

As dark and somber as the artist’s mood, Vincent’s still life seems a simple and direct tribute to his father. But is there more to this image?

I believe that Vincent’s Still Life with Bible also reveals the artist’s personal religious philosophy. It illustrates how Vincent, himself a failed minister, used his paintings to interpret the Bible. As Vincent later wrote: “To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces…leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book, another in a picture.”¹

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in a Dutch Reform parsonage, the son and grandson of pastors. His dream was to follow in their path and become a pastor, a Bible teacher or an evangelist. As a young man, he could envision no other future: “Lately it has seemed to me that there are no professions in the world other than those of schoolmaster and clergyman,…especially a London missionary,” 020he wrote at age 23 to his younger brother Theo.²

That very year, Vincent assisted a Methodist minister in England. His excitement over his first sermon, given in the town of Richmond, is obvious in another letter to Theo: “When I was standing in the pulpit, I felt like somebody who, emerging from a dark underground comes back to the friendly daylight. It is a delightful thought that in the future, wherever I go, I shall preach the Gospel.”³

But Vincent lacked a university education, and despite his efforts to be tutored in biblical history and languages, and a probationary period as an evangelist to coal miners in Belgium, he was rejected by the church authorities. At age 26, Vincent was forced to turn to his second choice of vocation: artist.

For five years, Vincent struggled to learn to draw and paint, and at age 32 found himself a penniless painter living at home with his parents in their parsonage, now in Nuenen, in southern Holland. One March evening in 1885, Vincent’s father, returning from a pastoral visit, died on the doorstep of the parsonage.

In painting his memorial to his father, which he gave to his brother Theo, Vincent left clues to his religious thought that have largely escaped public notice. First, because he was sending the painting to Theo in Paris, he painted the letters ISAIE, French for “Isaiah,” across the top of the right-hand page of the open Bible; a few inches down the right margin of the painted page, Vincent wrote the Roman numeral LIII, indicating that the Bible was open to Isaiah 53, the famous Song of the Suffering Servant.

The song (quoted in the sidebar to this article) describes the mission of God’s disfigured and misunderstood servant, who was “despised and rejected by men” but nevertheless bore the grief and sorrows of others and atoned for their sins.

Isaiah is not the only text alluded to by the painting, however. Vincent also included a small yellow paperback novel—an unexpected element in this painting, which might otherwise be mistaken for a 17th-century Dutch still life. The careful observer will detect the title and author of the paperback; it is Emile Zola’s La Joie de vivre (The Joy of Living). The book was published the very year of the painting, in 1885, but Vincent’s copy is already bent and worn. Vincent has read it almost to pieces, and now he nudges it up against his father’s Bible.

Most commentators suggest that the pastor’s Bible open to Isaiah represents the conventional, strict way of life promoted by Isaiah and adhered to by Vincent’s father; the worn-out paperback symbolizes Vincent’s own, more bohemian approach to modern life. H.R. Graetz, for example, finds only a stark contrast in the juxtaposition: “The little novel in front of the weighty Bible symbolizes the opposition between the modern way of life and the strong religious tradition with the condemnation in Isaiah of joy in living—of Joie de vivre.”⁴

But most commentators have failed to understand Isaiah and Zola.

The Song of the Suffering Servant was one of Vincent’s favorite biblical passages, a passage he had preached about, and had himself attempted to live by, while working as an evangelist to coal miners. Vincent cited the song not to criticize his father, but to honor his service. Vincent recognized that Isaiah is not a dour prophet condemning joy in living. The servant’s very suffering provides the healing that leads the prophet to invite humanity to “break forth into singing,” to “buy wine and milk without price,” to hear “good tidings” (Isaiah 54–61).

Despite its title, Zola’s novel, on the other hand, is far from a bright picture of joyful living. It is the story of a suffering and abused orphan girl, cheated and misused by a miserable bourgeois family, betrayed by a lover and robbed of her inheritance. Only through her suffering does she become an angel of charity, healing the lives of others in her poor fishing village. The end of Zola’s book relates the good tidings that follow redemptive suffering:

She would remain unmarried in order to work for the universal deliverance. And she was, indeed, the incarnation of renunciation, of love for others and kindly charity for erring humanity. She had stripped herself of everything, but happiness rang out in her clear laugh.

In juxtaposing his father’s weighty Bible and the seemingly flimsy Zola paperback, Vincent seeks not to contrast these works but to impress the viewer with the correspondences hidden in them. For Vincent, Zola’s orphan girl is the suffering servant; Zola has incarnated the prophet’s message in a story meaningful to people of a later time.

But Vincent is also hinting at his own role as an artist: In his art, Vincent will strive to carry out the 021work of the prophet. He hopes his paintings will reveal the sacred in the places and people around him, and will have a healing effect upon the viewer. He wrote Theo: “In a picture, I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring.”⁵

For Vincent, the novelist and the painter are modern-day prophets in the line of Isaiah. They, too, are suffering servants who seek to heal their generation through prophetic words and images.

When his father died unexpectedly in 1885, a somber Vincent van Gogh decided to create a memorial to the Reverend Theodorus van Gogh. He placed his father’s heavy pulpit Bible on a cloth-covered table, set beside it a snuffed-out candle and small book, and then painted the scene. As dark and somber as the artist’s mood, Vincent’s still life seems a simple and direct tribute to his father. But is there more to this image? I believe that Vincent’s Still Life with Bible also reveals the artist’s personal religious philosophy. It illustrates how Vincent, himself a failed minister, […]