Still Life with Bible
Vincent van Gogh, 1885
Still Life with Bible is a still life that Van Gogh painted in 1885 in Nuenen, in the months after the death of his father, Theodorus van Gogh, a Protestant minister. On a table covered with a cloth sit two very different books: a large, open Bible placed at the centre, and a smaller, closed and rather worn copy of Émile Zola's novel La joie de vivre near the edge. Beside the Bible stands an unlit candle.
The contrast between the two volumes is the heart of the picture. On one side is a religious book, rooted in an old tradition and concerned with transcendent themes; on the other, a novel with a realist outlook and a secular view of life. The arrangement also sets the majestic, well-kept object against the modest, battered one, as if the canvas were weighing two ways of understanding the world. Zola was a leading figure of realism, yet the painter's father judged his novel badly written, which adds a generational tension to the scene.
The picture has been read in several ways. The most common reading connects it with Vincent's grief and with the distance that existed between father and son. It can also be seen as a kind of memento mori, in which the extinguished candle suggests the end of both the father's life and a hope. It is striking that the painter waited about six months before bringing this loss onto canvas, which invites caution toward any purely sentimental explanation.
Another hypothesis, strengthened by a letter in which Van Gogh states that he intends to sell the work, treats the painting as a psychological self-portrait: a contrast between his earlier self, from the Borinage period, and his present one. Both readings can coexist without fully cancelling each other, and that ambiguity is what makes this small still life notable within his Nuenen production.
- Painter
- Vincent van Gogh
- Date
- 1885
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 66 × 78 cm
- Museum
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
- Genre
- still life
- Depicts
- La Joie de vivre, candle, table, Bible, bougeoir, tablecloth, book
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