Vincent van Gogh, in a Nutshell

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Holland Cotter, Exploring the Outside World. New York Times, June 12, 2015.
www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/arts/ ... in-high-relief.html

Note:
(1)
(a) This is an exhibit review: Van Gogh and Nature. The Clark, June 14-Sept 13, 2015.
www.clarkart.edu/Exhibition/Van-Gogh-and-Nature
(b) Clark Art Institute
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Art_Institute
(usually referred to simply as "The Clark"/ has the dual role of serving as a museum and a research institute; 1955- )

(2) Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890; Dutch)
(3) “ 'Nature is very, very beautiful here,' van Gogh wrote to his younger brother Theo in the summer of 1890, a few weeks before he took his own life. He was referring to the landscape of olive groves and grain fields surrounding the town of Auvers-sur-Oise northwest of Paris, where he had moved, after a hospitalization, to be closer to family."
(a) Auvers-sur-Oise
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auvers-sur-Oise
(a commune located 27.2 km (16.9 mi) from the centre of Paris)
(b) Oise (river)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oise_(river)
(section 1 Places along the river:

(4) French English dictionary
* sur (preposition): "on, above"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sur
  ^ English: surmount (v; from Anglo-French surmunter, from sur- + munter to mount)www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surmount

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(5) "His [van Gogh's] father was a Dutch Reformed minister in southern Holland. * * * The parsonage came with a sizable garden. * * * As a young adult apprenticed to an art dealer in London, he sent letters home about springtime in the city, describing * * * the flowers — 'lilacs and hawthorns and laburnums' — he found in parks."
(a) parsonage (n): "the residence of a parson who is not a rector or vicar [because it is a 'parsonage'], as provided by the parish"
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/parsonage

The English noun parson and person share the same Latin root persona--originally a mask (one speaks through), evolved into assumed character or an actor in a drama, and then human being.
(b)
(i) hawthorn
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorn
(may refer to Crataegus, a large genus)

Its red fruit is a haw (plural: haws).
(iii) 山楂 is Crataegus pinnatifida.
(c) laburnum (genus name; is a genus of two species; native to the mountains of southern Europe from France to the Balkan Peninsula)  Wikipedia

Laburnum alpinum
www.desert-tropicals.com/Plants/Fabaceae/Laburnum_alpinum.html

(6) "Finally, approaching 30, he decided to take it seriously, make it his work. The earliest piece at the Clark is an 1881 ink drawing called 'Marsh With Waterlilies: Etten,' and it’s great. Done near his family home, it’s a light-soaked vista with a small bird hovering at its center. But it’s something else, too: a weave of thousands of filament-fine lines, as energy-charged as an [electro]encephalogram 腦波圖."
(a) It was a drawing of pencil, pen and India ink on paper, create in Etten. See Etten-Leur
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etten-Leur
("Its name is a combination of the two towns from which the municipality originally arose: Etten and Leur. * * * the painter Vincent van Gogh briefly lived [here]")
(b) Van Gogh was born "in Groot-Zundert, a village in present-day municipality of Zundert, in the predominantly Catholic province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands.
(c) As one can see from maps of respective Wikipedia pages for Etten-Leur and Zundert, Zundert is the southern neighbor of Etten-Leur.
(d) Dutch English dictionary
groot (adj): "big"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/groot
(e) Google with "Marsh With Waterlilies" and you will see the painting (on pinkish background).

choi

(7) "Others were shadowed landscapes inspired by earlier 19th-century French Barbizon artists like Charles-François Daubigny."
(a) Barbizon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbizon
(section 2 Art history)
(b) Charles-François Daubigny
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles-François_Daubigny
(1817 – 1878)

(8) "And there were still lifes, many, of flowers, bird nests and sheaves of wheat."

The plural form of life is lives. Yet the plural form of "still life" is "still lifes,"  One says the noun "still life" has morphed into a standalone word, and another says still lifes is not hte same as "still lives."  (Some people say the plural form of the computer peripheral "mouses," whereas others use mice.
(9) "in 1886 he went to Paris to get them. There he roomed with Theo. To save money, they lived away from the center of the city, in Montmartre, a neighborhood that retained the atmosphere of a village, with windmills, cow paths and vegetable patches, but was also plenty urban with an active night life."

Montmartre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montmartre
(a hill of 130 metres high; section 1 Name origin)

(10) "his ideas of how nature could be depicted changed after he was exposed to the radical style of the day, Impressionism. He took lessons from it: He turned up his color, broke down and abstracted his forms. This might have been expected to lead him farther away from naturalism, but it pushed him toward it. In an extraordinary 1887 painting called 'Undergrowth,' he’s deeper into nature than ever."
(a) impressionism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism
(b) realism (arts)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(arts)
(or naturalism)
(c) The print edition of New York Times has a photo of the Undergrowth painting, which is displayed as the one on the left (owned by "Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands") of section 2 Paris in
Trees and Undergrowth (Van Gogh series)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trees_and_Undergrowth_(Van_Gogh_series)

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(11) “In February 1888, he left, heading south [from Paris] to Provence * * * Arles [was] where he ended up”
(a) Arles
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arles
(in the former province of Provence; on the Rhône (a river))

Quote: "The city became an important Phoenician trading port * * * The Romans took the town in 123 BC * * * The town was formally established as a colony for veterans of the Roman legion Legio VI Ferrata, which had its base there. Its full title as a colony was Colonia Iulia Paterna Arelatensium Sextanorum, ‘the ancestral Julian colony of Arles of the soldiers of the Sixth.’ Arelate was a city of considerable importance in the province of Gallia Narbonensis

(b) Nick Earls and Terry Whidborne, The Word Hunters; The lost hunters. University of Queensland Press, 2013, at page ?
books.google.com/books?id=i3pGlWp7K2wC&pg=PT217&lpg=PT217&dq=Arles+Arelate+name+origin&source=bl&ots=8xOg1UVZGK&sig=9ayllwW9Yh8FFT_MLmPfRnhQ86g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAWoVChMIzOeKl7KQxgIVw5eACh01_wkp#v=onepage&q=Arles Arelate name origin&f=false
("About the Author[:] While the English origin of the name Earls is the old Saxon word 'eorl' or 'jarl,' meaning 'village elders,' in Nick's family's case it began somewhere totally different -- in Arles in France. It is a place-based name. The family story behind it goes like this. When Hannibal of Carthage set out to attack Rome in 218BC, he established a base on the Rhone River before crossing the Alps. That base became a permanent settlement and took the Roman name Arelate, meaning 'town by the marshes.' Over time that name became Arles. (History records that some Greeks or phoenicians were there before Hannibal, but the town was called Theline then.)  Around 800 years ago, someone from Arles who had taken the place name as a family name moved to England.  Over the years, various spelling emerged, 'Earls' among them”)
(c) The English surname Earls: “from Earl with genitive -s, probably referring to a servant or retainer of a particular earl”
Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press

(12) “Van Gogh signed himself into the local mental hospital, and from there went to another, larger one in nearly Saint-Rémy. * * * In Saint-Rémy, he collected specimens the way he had as a child, but this time through art: an ethereal drawing of a dead sparrow, a life-size painting of a large moth, a painting of a patch of dandelions seen at kneeling-down eye level.
(a) Saint-Rémy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Rémy
(French for Saint Remigius; may refer to the following communes in France: Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the Bouches-du-Rhône département)
(b) Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Rémy (Van Gogh series)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Paul_Asylum,_Saint-Rémy_(Van_Gogh_series)
(from May 1889 until May 1890 [committed suicide on July 29, 1890])
(c) Studies of a Dead Sparrow. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, undated
www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/d0200V1962v
("Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, autumn 1889 - spring 1890")
(d) “a life-size painting of a large moth”
(i) Giant Peacock Moth
www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/d0185V1962
(“Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, May 1889”)
(ii) Giant Peacock Moth and Poppy Seed Pop
www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/d0313V1970r
("Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, May - June 1889")
(iii) Giant Peacock Moth and Beetle
www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/d0313V1970v
("Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, May - June 1889")

* All these three are in Van Gogh Museum.
* You can put the cursor in the sketch to move it around to see the margins of the paintings.
(e) “a painting of a patch of dandelions seen at kneeling-down eye level”
(i) KunstmuseumWinterthur
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstmuseum_Winterthur
(section 3 Collection: Dandelions, Vincent van Gogh (1889))
(ii) German English dictionary  Kunst (noun feminine): "art"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kunst

choi

(13) “But danger is near. Monumental, solidly grounded images of cypress trees come from this period. But so do fantastic mountain landscapes set at a tilt, as if they were sliding sideways off the surface of a capsizing planet. Van Gogh made one last retreat, to Auvers, where he continued to paint the world in high relief and on high boil, and produced at least one picture like no other. Titled ‘Rain-Auvers’ (1890), it was partly inspired by a Japanese print of figures dashing over a blond-wood bridge in a downpour. In van Gogh’s version, the bridge becomes a horizontal, plateau-like wheat field, split down the center by a kind of valley-crevasse from which flame-shaped purple trees lick up, as a black crow floats in midair. Most arrestingly, the entire painting is covered with a net of descending diagonal lines, lines of rain.
(a) “mountain landscapes set at a tilt”

There are many paintings. One can use imges.google.com with the search term (vincent van Gogh mountain landscapes set at a tilt)--no quotationmarks.
(b) Sudden Shower Over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake (Ohashi Atake no Yudachi), No 58 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Brooklyn Museum, undated
www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencolle ... Famous_Views_of_Edo
(i) Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake  大はしあたけの夕立
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Shower_over_Shin-Ōhashi_bridge_and_Atake
(photo caption: "The modern Shinohashi bridge in Tokyo in a very similar location to the old bridge")
(A) This is No 58 of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo 名所江戸百景, by UTAGAWA Hiroshige 歌川 広重.
(B) Shin-ō-hashi  新 大 橋
(C) The modern 新大橋 (164.5m) is concrete and was constructed in 1932. Prior to that, the 新大橋 was wooden, built in 1659. See Sumida River  隅田川
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumida_River
(The Ryōgoku-bashi 両国 橋 (Ryōgoku Bridge), dating from 1932, replaced a bridge built in 1659. This bridge was immortalized many times by Hiroshige)

Both the new and old 新大橋 were and are colloquially called 両国橋 -- because "西側が武蔵国、東側が下総国." ja.wikipedia.org for 両国橋, which also states that the first bridge (1659-1693) was called 大橋 and the second (1693-1932) was 新大橋.
(D) Atake?
* For definition of “atake, see (E).
* 新大橋
ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/新大橋
(section 3 絵の中の新大橋: "「あたけ」というのはこの新大橋の河岸にあった幕府の御用船係留場にその巨体ゆえに係留されたままになっていた史上最大の安宅船でもある御座船安宅丸（あたけまる）にちなんで、新大橋付近が俗にそう呼ばれていたからである")
* That is why the title of English Wikipedia is “over * * * bridge and Atake.”

translation: Atake, because 幕府の御用船 or 御座船安宅丸 (Atake-maru) moored at the banks by 新大橋, which was the single largest warship in Japanese history, rendering the banks colloquially called "Atake."
(E) Japanese English dictionary
* atake-bune 安宅船; 阿武船 【あたけぶね】 (n):  "large warship of the Muromachi and early Edo periods"   (The "bune" is softened from "fune"--Japanese pronunciation of 船--because the kanji is not the first word (and thus syllable).)
* yūdachi 夕立【ゆうだち】 (n): "(sudden) evening shower (rain)"
Jim Breen’s online Japanese dictionary