I thought you’d be interested to hear that on my January 2018 flight on Singapore Airlines I watched two documentaries and two films, covering architect Frank Lloyd Wright and painters Van Gogh and Gaugin.
It was interesting to learn about their ancestry and their ups and downs. As I learned about their ancestry and lives, I kept thinking about the phrase 'into every life a little rain must fall'.
1 'Data Mining’ about the founding of Ancestry.com was the first film I watched. It covered the origins of commercial Ancestry.com and also covered the free to access site run by the Mormons and their archives in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. You can visit them in person, as well as online. No mention of Find a Grave, which is a quick source of where you can see the grave plus a short read of the life story of famous people.
Frank Lloyd Wright
2 A film on Frank Lloyd Wright, father of American / world modern architecture. I have visited two buildings he designed. It starts with his Welsh ancestry which gave him his middle name Lloyd, typically Welsh with the double l.
Frank Lloyd Wright late in life designed New York’s much visited world-famous spiral Guggenheim Museum. The museum is named after and founded with money from the Guggenheim family, whose fortune was inherited from their ancestor who was of one of the Jewish victims on the Titanic).
I also visited the architect’s Fallingwater, which is built over a waterfall. Tragically, he lost his second wife and children. Other setbacks included being out of work in the Thirties until he founded a school of architects he taught. But later he became increasingly famous.
Then I watched films about Van Gogh and Gaugin.
The ancestry of Van Gogh is also important to his story. He was named Vincent after a son his mother lost in a miscarriage, and always felt he could not live up to the love she had for her lost boy baby.
The film Loving Vincent is created from animating characters in his colourful paintings, his landlord of the house where he died, his brother, his doctor who was an amateur artist. The narrator of the film is a character, the son of the landlord, wearing a bright yellow jacket. Only spoiled by the British regional accents and Irish regional accents. I feel French and Dutch accents would have sounded better. One of the big surprises was how medical problems such as disease and madness seem to go hand in hand. Vincent’s brother Theo was dying of Syphilis, knowledge of Theo's illness could have contributed to Vincent’s suicide, and the Theo died shortly after Vincent.
In addition to the paintings brought to life, the expressions and emotional voices of the characters contribute a lot. The story has a lot of conflict and is presented rather like a detective story, chasing all the characters for their memories of Vincent, trying to establish if his death was suicide or murder. Theo's young widow published Vincent’s daily letters to his brother. The remarkable letters helped propel him into being such a posthumously lucrative creator of paintings. The haunting soundtrack 'starry starry night' quotes one of his letters.
You can visit the Van Gogh museum in the Netherlands, where is it the most visited museum after The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Many of the paintings by Gauguin are in the Wikipedia article.
Both Van Gogh and Gaugin artists spent lots of time with other artists or at art schools - they all painted each other, and were not the isolated amateurs one might imagine. Gauguin painted van Gogh.
Gauguin
The film about Gaugin was great in different ways, revealing life on the French islands. Gauguin is presented as a tragic and forgotten figure. The action starts with his life in France and his marriage to a non-French wife who goes back with five children to her family when Gaugin cannot support her.
However, he knew all the leading painters of the day. He lived with Vincent van Gogh a short while, argued with Vincent, and reconciled. Reading Wikipedia I was astonished to see the numbers of children Gaugin had from his two wives plus other girlfriends.
Dates and Times
Vincent Van Gogh 1853-1890
Seeing Paintings
You can see many Gaugin paintings in the Wikipedia article.
Van Gogh's SunFlowers is in the National Gallery of Art on Trafalgar Square in central London, England. Van Gogh intended a series of paintings of yellow sunflowers to decorate the room of The Yellow House he was renting for the stay of Gaugin. Gauguin stayed with Van Gogh over three months.
Buying Paintings
Prints and book about Van Gogh from the National Gallery of Art, London.
Visits
FRANCE
Musee D'Orsay, Paris, France
NETHERLANDS
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Holland, The Netherlands
TAHITI
Paul Gaugin Museum, Tahiti
USA
Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
Useful Websites
Frank Lloyd Wright
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Frank_Lloyd_Wright_works
Amazon - book of Van Gogh's letters to Theo and others
Wiki Van Gogh
Wiki Loving Vincent
Wiki Gauguin
Movies
Loving Vincent
Gaugin - Voyage de Tahiti
More on Ancestry in my next post on Einstein. Please share links to your favourite posts.
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
