Underrated Van Gogh Paintings, Ranked by Style and Color

Feature image: Vincent van Gogh, Oleanders, 1888 via Google Arts & Culture

Vincent van Gogh is best known for his sunflowers, his wheat fields, and his portraits, works defined by saturated color and the thick, rhythmic brushwork that became his signature. Behind those famous images sits a much larger body of work that deserves far more attention. In the last three years of his life, he copied older masters and contemporaries, borrowed techniques from younger friends, and tested approaches to color and line that look very different from the style he is remembered for. The ten underrated works below are ranked by how closely they match his best-known aesthetic and use of color. Along the way, they trace how that style took shape, and how much of it he absorbed from the artists around him.

Opening the ranking is a work most viewers would never attribute to Van Gogh at all. When Paul Gauguin arrived in Arles in October 1888, he brought with him Émile Bernard's Breton Women in the Meadow (1888), a boldly flat, cloisonnist painting of women in traditional white headdresses at a religious festival in Pont-Aven. Van Gogh admired it enough to copy it in watercolor and gouache, inscribing the sheet at lower left as made after a painting by Bernard and signing it simply Vincent at lower right. Thin washes, simplified outlines, and broad fields of yellow, brown, and pale blue take the place of the thick impasto that defines his reputation, and the composition belongs entirely to his friend. Now in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan, it is a rare record of Van Gogh as a student of a younger painter, and proof of how openly he absorbed the experiments happening around him in the final years of his career.

The Dance Hall in Arles was painted in December 1888, during the roughly nine weeks Gauguin lived and worked with Van Gogh in the Yellow House. Gauguin urged his friend to work from memory and imagination, and the crowded interior of the Folies Arlésiennes shows that advice at work. Faces, hats, and dresses are reduced to flat shapes of color enclosed by heavy dark outlines, a style known as cloisonnism, developed by Bernard and Louis Anquetin and championed by Gauguin. The perspective tilts steeply, the figures crowd edge to edge, and a woman in profile at the right is often identified as Augustine Roulin, the wife of Van Gogh's friend, the postman Joseph Roulin. Now in the Musée d'Orsay, the painting looks more like the work of the Pont-Aven circle than of the artist who made it.

Painted in Paris in late 1887, Still life with plaster statuette belongs to the two years Van Gogh spent living with his brother Theo in Montmartre, absorbing Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Japanese prints. A plaster cast of a female torso, the kind of studio prop he had drawn repeatedly as a student in Paris, stands beside a fresh rose and two novels, Germinie Lacerteux by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt and Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant, both modern stories of Parisian life that he admired. The palette is pale and cool, built from short, parallel hatchings of yellow, green, and blue, and the mood is calm and reflective. With its literary references and soft pastel tones, the painting sits closer in spirit to a French studio still life of the period than to the expressive work he would make in Provence a few months later. It belongs to the Kröller-Müller Museum.

In November 1888, while staying with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin made a charcoal drawing of Marie Ginoux at the Café de la Gare. After the two artists' partnership ended in crisis that December, Van Gogh kept the drawing, and in February 1890 at Saint-Rémy he used it as the basis for several paintings of her, including this version in the Kröller-Müller Museum. He described the series as a synthesis of the women of Arles and intended it as a tribute to the months he and Gauguin had shared. The pink background, flat areas of color, and firm contours owe as much to Gauguin's style as to his own, and the books on the table, including a volume by Charles Dickens, add a literary note to a portrait that works as a collaboration across time.

Joseph-Michel Ginoux ran the Café de la Gare in Arles with his wife Marie, and Van Gogh lodged there from May to September 1888 before moving into the Yellow House. The café's interior is the setting of Van Gogh's The Night Café (1888). His portrait of Ginoux, painted in late 1888 and now in the Kröller-Müller Museum, is blunt to the point of caricature, with a heavy, lopsided face, drooping eyelids, and a skeptical set to the mouth, all placed against a flat field of acid green. Many of his Arles portraits approach their sitters with warmth and sympathy, while this one feels almost confrontational, closer to the expressive distortions of later painters than to the tender likenesses for which he is best known.

Evening (after Millet) brings the viewer indoors, into a peasant cottage lit by a single hanging lamp. A man weaves a basket while a woman sews beside him and a cat sits quietly by the hearth, the whole room bathed in a soft glow built from fine, radiating strokes. Painted at Saint-Rémy in the autumn of 1889, it is based on a scene from Jean-François Millet's The Four Times of Day, and its mood of quiet domestic warmth sits far from the intensity of the landscapes Van Gogh painted that same year. The muted blues, browns, and pale greens give the scene a hushed, almost devotional calm, and the painting now hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

In May 1890, Van Gogh worked from an etching by Rembrandt van Rijn, The Raising of Lazarus (c. 1632), and made a striking edit. He painted only part of the scene, leaving out the figure of Christ entirely and replacing him with an enormous blazing sun that floods the landscape with yellow light. Lazarus rises from the tomb at the left with a reddish beard, and scholars have long read the figure as a self-portrait, painted by an artist who had spent a year in an asylum and was imagining his own return to life. Two women recoil in astonishment at the right, their green dresses rendered in the long, sweeping strokes of his Saint-Rémy period. The painting belongs to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and is among the most personal of all his copies.

In May 1890, in his final weeks at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted his version of Eugène Delacroix's The Good Samaritan (1849), working from a lithograph of the composition. The Samaritan strains to heave the wounded traveler onto his horse while, in the distance, the priest and the Levite who passed the man by walk away down the road. Van Gogh kept Delacroix's dramatic figures and rewrote the setting entirely, turning the rocky landscape into flowing ribbons of blue and the road into bands of yellow and green, so that the whole scene seems to move with the struggle at its center. Now in the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, it is one of the last paintings he completed before leaving Provence for Auvers-sur-Oise.

Confined to the asylum through the winter of 1889 to 1890, Van Gogh turned to black-and-white reproductions of works by Millet, the French painter of peasant life he had admired since his earliest years as an artist. The Siesta translates Millet's drawing of two harvesters resting in the midday heat, also a part of his series The Four Times of Day, into blazing complementary color, with golden hay set against a deep blue sky and the sleeping couple dressed in pale blues. Van Gogh described this practice of copying as a kind of interpretation, comparing himself to a musician performing another composer's music. The painting now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and its colors are so fully his own that the borrowed composition is easy to miss.

In October 1889, during his year at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Van Gogh painted Les Peiroulets, a narrow gorge in the Alpilles hills not far from the hospital. The rock walls dissolve into currents of blue, green, and cream, each stroke laid down with the same rhythmic energy that animates his best-known landscapes, and a stream winds through the center of the composition between boulders outlined in dark blue. Two small women in red climb the path at the right, giving the cliffs their towering scale. He painted the ravine twice that autumn, and this version, with its churning surfaces and restless line, is the closest in this ranking to the Van Gogh most people know, which makes its relative obscurity all the more surprising.

©ArtRKL® LLC 2021-2026. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. ArtRKL® and its underscore design indicate trademarks of ArtRKL® LLC and its subsidiaries.