The Meteorological Odyssey of Vincent van Gogh

The author explores the meteorological sources and content of Vincent van Gogh’s art. Wherever van Gogh lived, he recorded both day-to-day changes in the weather and dominant characteristics of the climate with only the small degree of exaggeration typical of many artists. Van Gogh represented atmospheric visibility as lowest in Paris, where urban air pollution had already become a serious problem. Although he seldom devoted great attention to precise cloud forms, the obviously distorted cumulus and mountain wave clouds he painted in Saint-Rémy reveal with a perspicacity exceptional in Western art how clouds mark the air’s flow patterns. Even the bleak settings of his final works in Auvers had their meteorological underpinnings, for the weather of the first 3 weeks of July 1890 was truly dismal.