Vincent Van Gogh’s Admiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin

During our recent volunteers Zoom meeting participants were asked to answer 7 multiple choice trivia questions. Only one of these failed to get one correct response from the over 20 folks participating:

“Which painter wrote of Harriet that she “helps us to understand how applicable the Gospel is in this day and age,” and later included Uncle Tom's Cabin in a still life?
a.            Winslow Homer
b.            Thomas Kinkade
c.             Georgia O’Keefe
d.            Vincent Van Gogh”
No one chose the correct answer – “d”.

I learned of Van Gogh’s admiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe this past July from an article written for a daily email newsletter which I receive, the “Literary Hub.” Entitled “The Writers Vincent van Gogh Loved, From Charles Dickens to Harriet Beecher Stowe: 6 Books Essential to Our Understanding of the Artist,” it was written by Mariella Guzzoni, an independent scholar and art curator living in Bergamo, Italy. Over many years, she has collected editions of the books that Vincent van Gogh read and loved.  In March the University of Chicago Press published her study “Vincent's Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him.”

Ms. Guzzoni writes of Van Gogh: “Vincent was an avid and multilingual reader, a man who could not do without books. In his brief life he devoured hundreds of them in four languages, spanning centuries of art and literature. Throughout his life, his reading habits reflected his various personae—art dealer, preacher, painter—and were informed by his desire to learn, discuss, and find his own way to be of service to humanity.” 

In June 1880 Van Gogh wrote in a letter that he had been reading Beecher Stowe.
Ms. Guzzoni writes: “Vincent, 27, is in the mining region of the Borinage, in Belgium. For a year and a half he has been among the miners, seeking to console the workers of the underworld. He is at a dead end. He cuts himself off from the world, and immerses himself in reading. Two books were crucial in what was to become the period of his rebirth as an artist: Histoire de la révolution française (History of the French Revolution, in 9 volumes), by the greatest of the French romantic historians, Jules Michelet, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novel that helped foment anti-slavery sentiment in the United States and abroad.

Michelet’s new approach to writing history dared to give the People agency, placing them firmly at the center of the revolutionary dynamic. Vincent, too, would put the faces of the People at the center of his revolution in portraiture. Michelet himself described Beecher Stowe as “the woman who wrote the greatest success of the time, translated into every language and read around the world, having become the Gospel of liberty for a race.”

What are the common themes? The fight for freedom and independence; the moral importance of literature; the plight of the poor and deprived. Both books were modern gospels for Vincent in a moment of great doubt, when he rejected the “established religious system.” “Take Michelet and Beecher Stowe, they don’t say, the gospel is no longer valid, but they help us to understand how applicable is it in this day and age, in this life of ours, for you, for instance, and for me…”

In Van Gogh’s painting “L'Arlésienne (portrait of Madame Ginoux),” of which there are more than one version, there are two books on the table. One is Dickens' Christmas Tales and the other Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. 

About the author:
Frederick Warren is a docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, as well as a tour guide for the Friends of Music Hall. He is a retired estimator for a book printing and binding firm in Cincinnati.