Vincent Van Gogh, aka "Colors Van Gogh"

Vincent Van Gogh, aka "Colors"

The emotionally charged Dutch son of a pastor, Van Gogh labored at varied stints before learning from Belgian and French masters his new craft.

Caught in a bout of epilepsy, he pursued a friend with an open razor and wound up severing a portion of his own ear lobe. After a period in Asylum, he seemed recuperated but committed suicide "for the good of all", having sold but one painting during his three years' artwork creating some of the greatest modern masterpieces.

For pool and billiards fans, Van Gogh's The Night Café (in the Place Lamartine in Arles, painted in 1888) is a classic. Many assume Van Gogh spent time drunk in this bar and painted the scene idly, but the true story is different.

As reprinted in The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, edited by Mark Roskill (Touchstone - 1997), Vincent wrote the narrative for the painting to his devoted brother and art gallery dealer, Theo. He had painted the scene on commission from his landlord.

"I made up my mind to take it gaily. I swore at the said landlord, who after all isn't a bad fellow, and told him that to revenge myself for paying him so much money for nothing, I would paint the whole of his rotten shanty so as to repay myself...

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green."

"The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of the sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, on vigil in a corner of this furnace, turn yellow, or pale luminous green."

We might be able to play better billiards, but the man surely could paint.