BEHIND VAN GOGH’S SIGNATURE: “VINCENT”

words by NIA TOPALOVA

Artists are often said to be their own harshest critics; Van Gogh appears to have taken the principle painfully far. A recent study of his signatures by the Van Gogh Museum found that, compared with his contemporaries, Van Gogh was remarkably reluctant to put his name on his work. In ten years of painting, he signed only 133 of his 840 known works, a number that seems to have followed the fluctuations of his confidence, ambition, and mental state.

Van Gogh did not begin signing his paintings until 1884, three years after he first began working with oil. Until then, he considered what he made to be practice and preparation. His letters offer the clearest explanation for this reluctance to sign, although they also reveal how closely his sense of artistic ambition was tied to his sense of himself.

Sometimes he would sign paintings that he intended to exchange with artist friends. Three Pairs of Shoes (1886), now at the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, was traded with the Australian artist John Peter Russell and contains two signatures. Van Gogh's own is small, scratched into the surface in his usual manner and easily overlooked. Above it, in large block letters, is another “Vincent,” written in a hand that strongly resembles Russell's. We do not know why Russell added it; perhaps he could not read Van Gogh's modest signature, or he decided to give his friend's name a more prominent place.

In Paris, the signatures became more frequent, and so did the ambition. After his arrival in Arles, he continued to sign his paintings regularly. The pattern changed as his mental health deteriorated: the signatures became fewer, and nearly disappeared. By the time he was admitted to the institution at Saint-Rémy in 1889, he was signing almost nothing. Some of the paintings from this period would become his most celebrated works. In Auvers, he placed ‘Vincent’ on a painting exactly once: a portrait he gifted to the sitter, Adeline Ravoux (Adeline Ravoux, 1890, private collection).