VAN GOGH, THE LITTLE GARDENER.

VAN GOGH, THE LITTLE GARDENER. In light of Robert Lane Fox’s appreciation of Van Gogh as a lover of gardens, I was struck by another passage in Letter 537. Van Gogh compares the contemporary art market to the tulip mania in the Dutch flower market in an earlier century. The comparison is poignant because Van Gogh never sold a painting during his lifetime. The comparison is also comforting because Van Gogh expresses the joy he gets from painting even without a market for his work. He writes: “Suppose, I say, that like tulip mania at the end of the previous century, the art trade, with other branches of speculation, were to disappear at the end of this as it came, that’s to say relatively quickly.
Tulip mania may have perished, BULB-GROWING REMAINS. And for my part I’m content, for better or worse, to be a little gardener who loves his nursery.”