I agree this article doesn't present any evidence for the question it poses, but it's ridiculous to say Van Gogh couldn't be color blind. Especially given your examples are not impacted by the most common forms of color blindness.

His pictures are full of subtle shades-play of every color.

I'd expect that even if he'd been totally blind, given the normal process of mixing paints on the palette before painting with them and that this is imprecise.

(Obviously I don't think he was totally blind, I'm only saying subtitles of colour aren't evidence of anything).

He would not had subtle shade play in all those colors. You would expect shades to be used subtly badly.

That's exactly what the researcher found -- excessive green where it didn't belong, but brown did.

Completely agree. These articles seem at odds with how Van Gogh described colour in his letters:

> I am crazy about two colors: carmine and cobalt. Cobalt is a divine color and there is nothing so beautiful for creating atmosphere. Carmine is as warm and lively as wine… the same with emerald green.

> The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.

I'm colorblind, and those two colors seem to be two of the most vibrant colors I experience. Cobalt being my all time favorite, and I see depth to it also as he describes.

In my opinion the best museum to see van Gogh is the Kröller-Müller museum. At the beginning of the 20th century the couple Kröller-Müller was the first to collect his works. They have all the best paintings. The van Gogh in Amsterdam got the second choice works.

I don’t agree with you that Van Gogh couldn’t have been colorblind but that museum is absolutely the best museum I’ve ever been to so yes anyone stumbling upon this comment should do yourselves a favor and patronize it at some point.

Vincent Van Gogh understood color so well that he made paintings that dissected the essence of our color perception. He was hanging with Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec and Gaugin. He wrote thousands of letters, mostly about his paintings and the usage of color, and his painter friends wrote him back.

Quick excerpt of a letter to Theo:

"I still often run up against a blank wall when undertaking something, but all the same, the colours follow one another as if of their own accord, and taking a colour as the starting-point I see clearly in my mind’s eye what derives from it, and how one can get life into it.

Jules Dupré is like Delacroix in landscape, for what enormous diversity of mood he expressed in symphonies of colour.

Now a seascape, with the most delicate blue-greens and broken blue, and all sorts of pearly tones.

Then an autumn landscape with foliage from deep wine red to vivid green, from bright orange to dark havana, with yet more colours in the sky in greys, lilacs, blue, white, forming another contrast to the yellow leaves.

Then again a sunset in black, in violet, in fiery red.

Then again more capricious, like the corner of a garden by him that I saw and have never forgotten; black in the shadow, white in the sun, bright green, a fiery red, and then again a dark blue, a bituminous greenish brown and a light brownish yellow. Truly colours that can have quite a lot to say to one another."

Here's the most important part of that letter:

"Still, it doesn’t satisfy me. To my mind there’s far more behind not doing it in the local colour. True painters are the ones who don’t do it in the local colour — that was what Blanc and Delacroix discussed once."

At the time the impressionists were discovering that our color sense is counter-intuitive. They were developing methods of painting a color by using contrasts near a gray to imply the inverse color, etc. That's what he means by not "[doing] it in the local color."

You put red by gray and the gray looks green by contrast.

To look at those paintings and say "I guess he painted this way because he couldn't see the color right" is incredibly ignorant. His choices were deliberate and he documented them in excruciating detail.

Look at the images in the japanese source.

They look incredible, and significantly more life-like in the simulated colorblind version compared to the regular version.

I would have expected he was our go to example for possibility of human Tetrachromacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

The link labelled as "seen some of van Gogh’s work in what he calls a color vision experience room" is a better link than the one labelled as "a number of striking examples of the master painter’s works reimagined"

thanks for saving us some precious time!