A statement about normalcy attributed to a Dutch artist has gone viral on the Internet. We decided to check if Van Gogh said anything similar.
This phrase indicating authorship Van Gogh meets on many websites With selections quotes from famous people. Users post it social networks ("VKontakte", Twitter, Instagram*) And blogging platforms (LiveJournal, "Zen"). You can find many on the Internet pictures with this statement and attribution to the artist. The phrase is discussed by service visitors questions And answers, it is found even in articles dedicated to the artist in Media and in artistic literature modern authors.
Vincent Van Gogh was active correspondence - with his brother Theo, friend and mentor Anton van Rappard, artists Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard and many others. After his death, 820 letters written to various addressees survived, although researchers note that, apparently, Van Gogh wrote about 2,000 messages in total during his life. Correspondence served as an alternative to diaries, which, as far as is known today, the artist did not keep. All letters preserved after his death were digitized and posted on database Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam with translation into English.
A quote about normality spread in the English-speaking segment of the Internet earlier than in the Russian-speaking segment, in the following formulation: “Normality is a well-paved street; it is good for walking—but no flowers will grow there.” However, “Verified” could not find anything similar to this phrase in the email database. Moreover, neither the word normality nor the expression well-paved street appears in the letters. Van Gogh wrote a lot about flowers, but never in this context. We were unable to find this quote indicating the authorship of Van Gogh and in memories the artist's contemporaries.
The earliest mention of this phrase in connection with an artist's name that Verified has been able to locate appears on dust jacket catalog exhibitions artist Vincent van Gogh. Between Earth and Heaven. The Landscapes, which took place at the Basel Art Museum in Switzerland in 2009. The compilers do not indicate where exactly they took the quote from.
Van Gogh died in 1890, all of his surviving letters, later included in the database of the museum in Amsterdam, were for the first time published in 1914. It is unlikely that in 2009, more than a hundred years after the artist’s death, new written sources belonging to his hand and containing this quote appeared. At least in this case, the world media would definitely have written about this sensation, which did not happen. Therefore, based on the data available today, we can conclude that the quote was attributed to Vincent Van Gogh by the compilers of the catalog erroneously.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: photo of a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, Willem van de Poll, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Incorrect quote attribution
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