Quotes of the Day

"This is how Rembrandt painted angels," Vincent van Gogh wrote to Emile Bernard in 1888. "He paints a self-portrait, old, toothless, wrinkled, wearing a cotton cap, a painting from life, in a mirror ... and, why or how I cannot tell ... Rembrandt paints a supernatural angel with a Da Vinci smile within that old man who resembles himself."

That description certainly fits the superb 1669 Rembrandt self-portrait, on loan from London's National Gallery, currently hanging beside Van Gogh's own 1888 Self-Portrait as an Artist. It is the centerpiece of "Vincent's Choice: The Musée Imaginaire of Van Gogh," a stunning new show at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum. Celebrating Van Gogh's 150th birthday, on March 30, this "imaginary museum" brings together for the first time 30 of Van Gogh's works with 196 paintings, drawings, prints and books that were among the artist's favorites — works mentioned in his letters, works he copied or whose printed reproductions he kept in neat scrapbooks or pinned up on his walls. "It was conceived as a sort of birthday gift for Vincent," says the museum's director, John Leighton. "We hope it would have made him smile."

The show offers a fascinating look at the making of an artist, an evolving portrait of Van Gogh as traced by the wide-ranging — and often surprising — roster of artists and works he admired. It ain't all Rembrandt, by any means, and along with Dürer, Honoré Daumier and Delacroix are unlikelier inspirations, such as Fritz von Uhde, Hubert von Herkomer and Albert Besnard. But the obscure artists are an intriguing piece of the artist's aesthetic puzzle, and some of them are, as Van Gogh said, "damned good."

The museum's researchers have tallied references to more than 1,100 artworks in Van Gogh's copious correspondence: 485 paintings, 52 drawings, 567 prints, 10 sculptures and three murals. The large number of prints reminds us that much of what this master of violent color first learned about art came from black-and-white reproductions.

As the son of a Protestant clergyman, the young Van Gogh had an early bent for pious, even saccharine religious works, including two big paintings by Dutch-French artist Ary Scheffer that he saw in the Dordrecht Museum, Christus Consolator and The Agony in the Garden. The latter he deemed "unforgettable," adding that "long ago that same painting struck Pa the same way." Van Gogh found landscapes and rural scenes just as uplifting — first Ruisdael and Constable, and then his contemporaries from the Hague School, Josef Israëls, Matthijs Maris, Anton Mauve and their Barbizon-School cousins Charles-François Daubigny and Millet. This makes for a wonderful triple play here, cloud-filled skies sweeping over broad plains painted by three generations: Ruisdael's pastoral View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, Georges Michel's barren and stormy Three Windmills and Van Gogh's powerhouse Wheatfield under Thunderclouds, a swath of chartreuse and emerald green beneath a bolt of cobalt and pale blue.

Millet was second only to Rembrandt in Van Gogh's pantheon, and he copied the older artist's works throughout his short life, working from prints or from memory, especially the iconic figure of the Sower. In 1889, he wrote to his brother Theo that "painting from these drawings of Millet's is much more like translating them into another language than copying." Here his free translation of the lamplit Night scene from the Four Times of the Day series, painted in strong pastels, vibrates with rays of pale yellow light in his signature staccato brushstroke.

Flanking it are two other night scenes: the Rembrandt Workshop's The Holy Family at Night (1638-40), a large Dutch interior plunged in darkness, with a young mother sitting near a baby's cradle, reading aloud to an older woman by candlelight; and Van Gogh's 1885 The Potato Eaters, his first major figure painting, so dark that its five peasants, seated at a table beneath a gaslight, seem covered in coal dust.

That palette of gray, black and bottle-green marked Van Gogh's somber style ("Painting peasants is a serious business," he observed) until he moved to Paris at the beginning of 1886 and, as the show's curators note, "underwent one of the greatest transformations in the history of art." In the Paris museums he could see original paintings, including Delacroix's Christ Asleep During the Tempest, and his letters abruptly start to exult about color over content: "Christ in the boat ... with his pale lemon-yellow aureole, luminous in the dramatic purple, dark blue, blood-red patch of the group of disciples, on that terrible emerald-green sea ... what an inspired conception!"

He had read about Impressionism, too, but imagined it to be simply the use of lighter tones. In Paris he discovered such older painters as Monet and Pissarro, and met the young avant-garde of the day: Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Signac, Gauguin, Bernard. His old palette went out the window ("Last year I painted almost nothing but flowers," he wrote in 1887, "so I could get used to colors other than gray.") He experimented with Impressionist brushstrokes and pointillist "stippling" — one superb gallery here pairs off Monet's Boats on the Beach, Etretat with Van Gogh's dappled Woodland Path, and the nearly identical Signac and Van Gogh views of the Boulevard de Clichy.

Toulouse-Lautrec's Young Woman at a Table, Poudre de Riz, an unusual pointillist portrait in soft pinks and grays that once belonged to Theo van Gogh, makes a perfect foil for Van Gogh's Portrait of Patience Escalier — a gnarled Provençal peasant in bright blue, red and yellow against a vivid orange background — just as Van Gogh suggested it would, because his peasant's "sun-steeped, sunburned quality, tanned and weathered, would show up all that more effectively beside all that face powder and elegance."

The exhibit has been elegantly arranged by interior designer Thierry Despont, including a replica of Van Gogh's small studio in the Yellow House in Arles, with his prized Japanese prints on the walls. Oddly, for a show dedicated to him, it seems a bit short on Van Goghs; but then the museum's unparalleled permanent collection is only an escalator away, and a shuttle bus out front makes 1 1/2-hour runs to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, whose Van Gogh collection has been redesigned (ineptly) to display its 93 paintings and half of its 183 drawings at once, for the first time, including a few interesting works that are now officially recognized as fakes. That too might have nudged from Van Gogh an enigmatic Da Vinci grin.

• JUDY FAYARD | Amsterdam
• Van Gogh's friends are invited to mark 150 years