According to popular belief, van Gogh was a figurative painter. But his depictions of nature are even more interesting and progressive than his images of man. Rather than a landscape, a protected object, ordered by cultivated interventions and well-intentions, he intended to capture the other more unbridled vitality and wildness that the world still maintained.
He presented nature less in its own essence than as a creative force, transforming and constantly on the move ... .This is precisely why his paintings, that art history has described as "landscapes", are so astonishingly original. That is to say, van Gogh left them in their ignorance and followed the mood of the moment ...
How often has the work of van Gogh also evoked the calm and comforting thought of vanishing into infinity, a sense that, by his own testimony,
invades under the gaze of a child or the waves. In short, flirting with van Gogh with pantheism is trivial.
He defined the range of a relationship. Does he not urge his brother to seek consolation and breathe in his love of nature? ...
Every being, explained the cytologist Rodolf Virchow, is "a sum of vital units, each of which carries with it all the character of life", it is "a kind of social organization, an organism of social type where a mass of individual stocks depend on each other "...
The atom and the cell were discovered as the foundation of life, from which the most complicated creations could be built and especially imagined. The macrocosm and microcosm were made of the same material. The world was not homogeneous because the creator wanted it so, but because everything had developed from itself. "Intuition is one kind of intellectual insight," wrote Henri Bergson, referring to the vitality of the world's perception of the individual, "under which one is immersed within an object to find the one and only inexpressible thing it possesses. If there is a method to capture a reality in absolute form instead of a relative form, identify with it rather than adopting its views, grasp it without transposition or symbolic representation, this would be the metaphysical "... the veneration that humans feel for it, has nothing to do with their objective qualities, but is the result of their internal disposition, in a sense of clairvoyance ....
Van Gogh formula (letter B8): so, we have the idea that someday maybe we can paint in an existence under other, better conditions; an existence that might change from processes which are neither worse nor more surprising than the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly ... this life of painter-butterfly takes place in one of the innumerable stars "....
The painter condenses into what he had described as "essence of a landscape" in letter 595 ... It refers to the solidarity of all living things that acquire their full purpose in the conviction that they are born for each other ... "I think that what happens to man, animal or plant, is not unlike what happens with the sun, the earth or moon ..from an absolute point of view..
everything revolves around a common centre of gravity representing the entire system. A centre of gravity is nothing without the force that draws all parties together "....

Translation of Marianne Duncombe. F. Walther & Rainer Metzger. Vicent van Gogh. The complete paintings: pintura. Ed. Taschen GmbH. Köln. 2001