Rhythmic Brushstrokes Distinguish van Gogh from His Contemporaries: Findings via Automated Brushstroke Extraction

Authors:
Jia Li;Lei Yao;Ella Hendriks;James Z. Wang
Affiliations:
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park;The Pennsylvania State University, University Park;Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam;The Pennsylvania State University, University Park
Venue:
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Year:
2012

Citing 0
Cited 7

Computer analysis of art

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH)
Guest editorial: Special Issue Guest Editor's Foreword

Signal Processing
When Van Gogh meets Mandelbrot: Multifractal classification of painting's texture

Signal Processing
Artistic image classification: an analysis on the PRINTART database

ECCV'12 Proceedings of the 12th European conference on Computer Vision - Volume Part IV
Quantitative modeling of artist styles in Renaissance face portraiture

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing
Recognizing the royals: leveraging computerized face recognition for identifying subjects in ancient artworks

Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Multimedia
Computer analysis for visual art style

SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 Technical Briefs

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.14

Visualization

Abstract

Art historians have long observed the highly characteristic brushstroke styles of Vincent van Gogh and have relied on discerning these styles for authenticating and dating his works. In our work, we compared van Gogh with his contemporaries by statistically analyzing a massive set of automatically extracted brushstrokes. A novel extraction method is developed by exploiting an integration of edge detection and clustering-based segmentation. Evidence substantiates that van Gogh's brushstrokes are strongly rhythmic. That is, regularly shaped brushstrokes are tightly arranged, creating a repetitive and patterned impression. We also found that the traits that distinguish van Gogh's paintings in different time periods of his development are all different from those distinguishing van Gogh from his peers. This study confirms that the combined brushwork features identified as special to van Gogh are consistently held throughout his French periods of production (1886-1890).