Learn Ancestry of Frank Lloyd Wright, Van Gogh and Gauguin from movies before or after visiting art museums

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Paul_Gauguin

TV Series
Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man Who Built America
Data Mining The Deceased: Ancestry And The Business Of Family
Genius (Einstein) Emmy nominated series

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.

America in the 18oos - wagons, trains and the Donner party

When I went to the USA in the 1900s I heard about American history. The British were fond of saying, "America has no history." Absolutely not true.

The Donner Party
One of the dramatic stories I heard for the first time when I visited the USA was about the Donner party disaster. When was it? I just looked it up. 1846.

I am now writing a novel set in 1880, the time when my great grandfather in Europe would have been deciding whether to emigrate from Lemberg (Lvov, or Lviv) in Ukraine, to the UK or USA? What would have influenced his decision? How fast could he have travelled?

The pioneer Donner party were travelling overland to California, in a series of wagons.

The journey would have taken four to six months. That wasn't from New York to California. That was just the last leg of the journey.

Salt Lake City
Salt Lake City is a place everybody has hard of. Most tourists see the city but don't think much about the salt or the lake. The Donner party got caught in the salt flats which took much longer to cross than they'd expected. My family read a book about this and recall reading, "The people ran out of water. The wagons got bogged down in the salt. The horses went mad from dehydrating after licking on the salt."

One man killed another and was sent off to ride alone into the wilderness. He said. He survived.

Snow
The others were caught up in the winter snow before they could cross the mountains. Out of water and food. They started dying.

Cannibalism
The survivors resorted to cannibalism.

Railway Revolution
So what was the situation a couple of decades later? The railways were the revolution. America built more railways than anywhere else in the world.

In the time of my great grandfather, a train from New York could travel, leaving New York state on a Monday, arriving by Thursday night.

Travel Time
As my family point out, trains could travel overnight. Horses and drivers of wagons had to stop every night.

Only the rich travelled in comfort. According to an article in Wikipedia, the rich might be on business or pleasure, sitting in style on padded seats, made up into padded beds at night.

Seating and Bedding
The poorer emigrants sat on wooden benches. They slept at night on the wood, I presume. Even so a lot better than the wagon trains 1946.

Comfortable Modern Trains
Now you can travel in style by train, in cars designed to give grand views to tourists who are not in a hurry, across the USA or Canada. Again, its a scenic and comfortable journey, if you can afford it.

Cheaper By Bus?
I travelled on a Greyhound bus as a student. I loved it. I would not do that now. Even so, it's a lot better by bus than overland like the Donner party.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer.
Author of twenty books. To be published shortly: The Tailor And The Spy; The Tailor's Travels.