Terribly, terribly bitter stuff.

And not terribly interesting, compared to any other alcoholic drink.

I’d also like to say something about this mythology of Vincent Van Gogh as some “impaired mad genius”.

Vincent Van Gogh – from a personal, life-perspective, may have had emotional issues, but I highly doubt he had much cognitive impairment going on when it came to his technical, artistic skill.

If you study his work as I have, you will observe that he was doing some very sophisticated thinking, about form, and color, and even some very cutting-edge human perception science. If you understand the technical complexity of Seurat’s work, then you’ll understand that Van Gogh’s technique had all of Seurat’s rigor – plus the sensitive expressionist/impressionist content. (not sterile and analytical, like most early pointillists).

For the post-Impressionist period, he had no peer. It’s also a mistake to say that he was an unsuccessful artist. Unlucky perhaps. Maybe, not as skilled a businessman. Before he painted, he also drew, and he was an extremely skilled draftsman, and he made a modest living selling drawings. It was unfortunate that when he became a painter, the works he made were perhaps not as well-promoted as some of his more famous peers, and this was certainly a large part of the reason why his more avant-garde work was not found to be in-fashion with the contemporary art world, until after his notorious death. Such is the unpleasant world, and ugly business of Fine Art. This is not the popular view of Vincent Van Gogh, but it is the more scholarly view.

Van Gogh is an interesting case and there are plenty of different theories and papers about his ‘madness’. I find it a bit sad that he was fully aware of his condition and spent his life battling it while society hindered his progress. Luckily he left behind his own thoughts on the matter in the form of letters to family members, especially his brother Theo. I would like to think that if he was around now he would have gotten the help he needed. Van Gogh is a great example of the myth of the depressed/crazy artist as most of his work was done during lucid sane periods of his life.

IMO his exact disease will always remain hazy partly because he knew about it and was self medicated or forcefully medicated. Since some madness cures were worse than the disease, I expect there were a combination of things driving him mad.

Just a quick remark about absinthe. I had never heard of the “special ingredient” in absinthe before. However, absinth produced at the time of VanGogh was mainly a homemade, backyard-distilled liquor, using low quality alcohol that probably contained substantial amounts of methanol. Methanol is a potent neurotoxic. Its consumption is known to cause blindness. It is well possible that its regular absorption, maybe combined with other drugs, could have caused madness or epilepsy.