James Baquet

    As a boy, I read some pretty “adult” books, including Irving Stone’s 1934 “Lust for Life,” about the life of Vincent van Gogh.

    I learned that van Gogh was a tortured soul, a failure at the ministry and at love (although the famous incident of him cutting off part of his left ear with a razor was not a result of a woman, but from a fight with his friend, artist Paul Gauguin). And I learned that van Gogh died by his own hand at 37.

    What I did not learn, until many years later, was the depth of beauty that he had plumbed. The Internet was decades away, and the few art books I had access to had pretty poor reproductions. A little later, I was able to see a handful of originals in local L.A. museums.

    We are lucky to have the accessibility we have today, where a vibrant van Gogh can be called up on our smartphones.

    While I was in high school, we first heard Don McLean’s evocative song “Vincent,” starting with the words “Starry, starry night” — an allusion to one of van Gogh’s best-known paintings.

    That painting was made in 1889, the year Van Gogh took his life. At the time, he was staying in a mental asylum in the south of France (a place since renamed the “Clinique Van Gogh”). This stay was voluntary — he was admitted at his own request — but resulted from the mental turmoil after the self-mutilation of his ear.

    The painting is done from the perspective of van Gogh’s barred bedroom window, a scene he painted over 20 times, though this is the only version showing a night view. The brightest “star” in the image, just to the right of the cypress tree, is the “morning star,” actually the planet Venus — named after the goddess of love — which experts have determined was indeed visible and at its brightest at the time of the painting.

    Not that the painting should be considered “photographic” by any means. The heavens are stylized, the moon is not portrayed accurately, and the village depicted could not have been seen from his window. This is rather the interior perception of a man popularly thought to be a “mad genius.”

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. found out how deep something is

    2. state of confusion or upset

    3. person who has mental pain

    4. brilliant but crazy person

    5. strong desire, passion

    6. calling forth strong emotions

    7. done in an “artsy” way

    8. hospital for insane people

    9. recording precise details

    10. lively, full of energy