| Cart with Black Ox | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Vincent van Gogh |
| Year | 1884 |
| Catalogue | |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 60.0 cm× 80.0 cm(23.6 in× 31.5 in) |
| Location | Portland Art Museum, Portland |
Cart with Black Ox, or The Ox-Cart, is an oil painting created in 1884 by Vincent van Gogh. It has been cited as one of his important early works. [1] [2]
Created in the village of Nuenen before Van Gogh went to the South of France, the painting has a dark palette [1] and has been described as "disquieting"; the ox and cart are both decrepit. [3]
Cart with Black Ox was owned by a family who had bought it in 1950. It was donated in 2007 to the Portland Art Museum, [1] and as of 2010 [update] is the most valuable gift yet made to the museum. [1] [2]
Curator Bruce Guenther argued, "The way the wheel becomes a definition lifted off the surface of the painting with the brush is Van Gogh establishing his vocabulary as a painter. He becomes Van Gogh here." [1]
In 2010, the painting was analyzed by digital X-ray and CT scanning to look for information on the artist's working methods and to add to the database at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. A painted-out flying bird was discovered. [2] A related painting made the same year, Cart with Red and White Ox , is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands.
The Portland Art Museum (PAM) is an art museum in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. The Portland Art Museum has 240,000 square feet, with more than 112,000 square feet of gallery space. The museum’s permanent collection has over 42,000 works of art. PAM features a center for Native American art, a center for Northwest art, a center for modern and contemporary art, permanent exhibitions of Asian art, and an outdoor public sculpture garden. The Northwest Film Center is also a component of Portland Art Museum.
Vincent van Gogh lived during the Impressionist era. With the development of photography, painters and artists turned to conveying the feeling and ideas behind people, places, and things rather than trying to imitate their physical forms. Impressionist artists did this by emphasizing certain hues, using vigorous brushstrokes, and paying attention to highlighting. Vincent van Gogh implemented this ideology to pursue his goal of depicting his own feelings toward and involvement with his subjects. Van Gogh's portraiture focuses on color and brushstrokes to demonstrate their inner qualities and Van Gogh's own relationship with them.
Vincent van Gogh made many copies of other people's work between 1887 and early 1890, which can be considered appropriation art. While at Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, where Van Gogh admitted himself, he strived to have subjects during the cold winter months. Seeking to be reinvigorated artistically, Van Gogh did more than 30 copies of works by some of his favorite artists. About twenty-one of the works were copies after, or inspired by, Jean-François Millet. Rather than replicate, Van Gogh sought to translate the subjects and composition through his perspective, color, and technique. Spiritual meaning and emotional comfort were expressed through symbolism and color. His brother Theo van Gogh would call the pieces in the series some of his best work.
Flowering Orchards is a series of paintings which Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh executed in Arles, in southern France in the spring of 1888. Van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888 in a snowstorm; within two weeks the weather changed and the fruit trees were in blossom. Appreciating the symbolism of rebirth, Van Gogh worked with optimism and zeal on about fourteen paintings of flowering trees in the early spring. He also made paintings of flowering trees in Saint-Rémy the following year, in 1889.
The Langlois Bridge at Arles is the subject of four oil paintings, one watercolor and four drawings by Vincent van Gogh. The works, made in 1888 when van Gogh lived in Arles, in southern France, represent a melding of formal and creative aspects. Van Gogh used a perspective frame that he built and used in The Hague to create precise lines and angles when portraying perspective.
White House at Night is an oil-on-canvas painting created on 16 June 1890 in the small town of Auvers-sur-Oise by Vincent van Gogh, six weeks before his death. It is displayed at the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Vase with Poppies is an 1886 oil painting created in Paris, France by Post-Impressionist Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh enjoyed making Paintings of Children. He once said that it's the only thing that "excites me to the depths of my soul, and which makes me feel the infinite more than anything else." Painting children, in particular represented rebirth and the infinite. Over his career Van Gogh did not make many paintings of children, but those he completed were special to him. During the ten years of Van Gogh's career as a painter, from 1881 to 1890, his work changed and grew richer, particularly in how he used color and techniques symbolically or evocatively.
Butterflies is a series of paintings made by Vincent van Gogh in 1889 and 1890. Van Gogh made at least four paintings of butterflies and one of a moth. The metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly was symbolic to Van Gogh of men and women's capability for transformation.
Almond Blossoms is a group of several paintings made in 1888 and 1890 by Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Saint-Rémy, southern France of blossoming almond trees. Flowering trees were special to van Gogh. They represented awakening and hope. He enjoyed them aesthetically and found joy in painting flowering trees. The works reflect the influence of Impressionism, Divisionism, and Japanese woodcuts. Almond Blossom was made to celebrate the birth of his nephew and namesake, son of his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo.
Dr. Gachet's Garden in Auvers and Marguerite Gachet in the Garden were both painted in 1890 by Vincent van Gogh in the gardens of his homeopathic physician, Dr. Paul Gachet. Both paintings reside at the Musée d'Orsay.
Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Rémy is a collection of paintings that Vincent van Gogh made when he was a self-admitted patient at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, since renamed the Clinique Van Gogh, from May 1889 until May 1890. During much of his stay there he was confined to the grounds of the asylum, and he made paintings of the garden, the enclosed wheat field that he could see outside his room and a few portraits of individuals at the asylum. During his stay at Saint-Paul asylum, Van Gogh experienced periods of illness when he could not paint. When he was able to resume, painting provided solace and meaning for him. Nature seemed especially meaningful to him, trees, the landscape, even caterpillars as representative of the opportunity for transformation and budding flowers symbolizing the cycle of life. One of the more recognizable works of this period is The Irises. Works of the interior of the hospital convey the isolation and sadness that he felt. From the window of his cell he saw an enclosed wheat field, the subject of many paintings made from his room. He was able to make but a few portraits while at Saint-Paul.
Hospital at Arles is the subject of two paintings that Vincent van Gogh made of the hospital in which he stayed in December 1888 and again in January 1889. The hospital is located in Arles in southern France. One of the paintings is of the central garden between four buildings titled Garden of the Hospital in Arles ; the other painting is of a ward within the hospital titled Ward of the Hospital in Arles. Van Gogh also painted Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey, a portrait of his physician while in the hospital.
The earliest known works of Vincent van Gogh comprise a group of paintings and drawings that Vincent van Gogh made when he was 27 and 28, in 1881 and 1882. Over the course of the two-year period Van Gogh lived in several places. He left Brussels, where he had studied for about a year in 1881, to return to his parents’ home in Etten, where he made studies of some of the residents of the town. In January 1882 Van Gogh went to The Hague where he studied with his cousin-in-law Anton Mauve and set up a studio, funded by Mauve. During the ten years of Van Gogh's artistic career from 1881 to 1890 Vincent's brother Theo would be a continuing source of inspiration and financial support; his first financial support began in 1880 funding Vincent while he lived in Brussels.
Cart with Red and White Ox is an oil painting created in 1884 by Vincent van Gogh. It is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands and may have been made either before or after Cart with Black Ox. Van Gogh painted both some four years before leaving the Netherlands for the South of France. A similar painting made the same year, called Cart with a Black Ox, is in the Portland Art Museum in Portland.
Peasant Character Studies is a series of works that Vincent van Gogh made between 1881 and 1885.
Van Gogh's family in his art refers to works that Vincent van Gogh made for or about Van Gogh family members. In 1881, Vincent drew a portrait of his grandfather, also named Vincent van Gogh, and his sister Wil. While living in Nuenen, Vincent memorialized his father in Still Life with Bible following his death in 1885. There he also made many paintings and drawings in 1884 and 1885 of his parents' vicarage, its garden and the church. At the height of his career in Arles he made Portrait of the Artist's Mother, Memory of the Garden at Etten of his mother and sister and Novel Reader, which is thought to be of his sister, Wil.
Trees and Undergrowth is the subject of paintings that Vincent van Gogh made in Paris, Saint-Rémy and Auvers, from 1887 through 1890. Van Gogh made several paintings of undergrowth, a genre of painting known as sous-bois that was brought into prominence by artists of the Barbizon School and the early Impressionists. The works from this series successfully use shades of color and light in the forest or garden interior paintings. Van Gogh selected one of his Saint-Rémy paintings, Ivy (F609) for the Brussels Les XX exhibition in 1890.
Still life paintings by Vincent van Gogh (Paris) is the subject of many drawings, sketches and paintings by Vincent van Gogh in 1886 and 1887 after he moved to Montmartre in Paris from the Netherlands. While in Paris, Van Gogh transformed the subjects, color and techniques that he used in creating still life paintings.
Media related to Cart with Black Ox at Wikimedia Commons