The National Gallery surveys two crowded years in the career of the Dutch master, writes John Westbrooke
Vincent Van Gogh, whose work provides the National Gallery with a brilliant 200th birthday treat, is probably the best known of all artists. His paintings are instantly recognisable, and so are his stories: religious, lived in Brixton, produced subdued art till he encountered Impressionism in Paris, blossomed in the sunny South of France, had a breakdown, cut off his ear, went back north and shot himself – having sold just one painting.
The gallery focuses on his astonishing output in the South, in Arles in 1888 and an asylum in Saint-Rémy in 1889 before returning north to Auvers in 1890. Crammed into 27 months – less than he’d spent in London, where he painted nothing – he produced something like 300 oils, that’s three a week, as well as numerous drawings.
The curators don’t want to say that everything we know about him is wrong but, as the subtitle suggests, they’d like to emphasise the romance and the deep thought and planning, rather than the mental illness, that drove him.
Perhaps. Though his copious letters to his brother Theo do mention poets and lovers, the exhibition is light on people. There are seven portraits: one lover (actually a soldier who had more luck with women than the painter ever did), and one poet (a Belgian painter), both depicted against starry skies; one self-portrait, two of a woman in Arles, a gardener and a mother.
Most of the figures here are distant, though, strolling in the park, picking olives or ploughing fields. There are other potential self-portraits: the yellow house in Arles, where Paul Gauguin briefly joined him; his bedroom, originally with the lover and poet portraits on the wall (a different version is on show here); and his chair, with his pipe and tobacco. But mostly, Vincent is responding to the natural world and the open air; he claimed it was better to listen to the voice of nature rather than that of painters.
His flower paintings are virtually a genre of their own. Some, like the two Sunflowers paintings on display, are in vases, though always too vibrant to be thought of as still life; others are in the garden. He painted roses, oleanders, irises, poppies, gladioli and more.
But he’s attentive from the ground up. One painting is just called Undergrowth, a downward-looking impasto of light and shade with tree trunks rising out of it and ivy dappling them at soil level. When he lifts his gaze for The Poet’s Garden (Public Garden at Arles) it’s to show a couple – lovers maybe – on a path bleached almost white by the sun, in the shade of a blue and green fir tree.
Standing back further he depicts a peasant in Landscape at Saint-Rémy gathering hay in roughly ploughed fields, a neat village on the hill behind – and above it a turquoise and blue sky with white clouds that seem to move. Vincent’s skies take on a life of their own: in Starry Night over the Rhône the stars are so bright they echo the street lights reflected in the water, and you hardly notice the people in the foreground. (It was inspired by a much less vivid vision of the foggy Thames painted by Gustave Doré, a view Vincent saw every day going to and from work in Covent Garden).
The most famous of his night skies, Starry Night, with its whorls like breakers crashing on a beach, isn’t on show here (it’s the one Don McLean’s song is about) but it demonstrates how far he’d got from simply depicting fleeting moments as Impressionists did.
The exhibition’s argument is that this was method, not madness. His correspondence with Theo shows him thinking deeply about what he wants to depict and how to do it. He reworked themes over and over: there were seven versions of the Sunflowers (and another series he painted earlier in Paris).
He painted five versions of La Berceuse, a woman rocking her child in a cradle, and proposed hanging one of them between two of the Sunflower paintings: the gallery has done this, for the first time. He and Gauguin both painted Mme Ginoux, L’Arlésienne – but the two versions on display are Vincent’s reworking of Gauguin’s portrait, in varying colours, not his own.
He thought a lot about colour: “I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour,” he wrote. Of The Yellow House he wrote: “It is fantastic, these yellow houses in the sun and also the incomparable freshness of the blue. All the ground is yellow too.” But he acknowledged of another work: “There are many touches of yellow in the soil … but I don’t really care what the colours are.” Just transcribing reality wasn’t enough.
Form too: View of Arles shows rows of blossom in an orchard, broken up by the vertical lines of three trees: it has the contemplative look of Japanese painting, with which Vincent was well acquainted, but it’s also like seeing through barred windows. But three months afterwards, in Mountains at Saint-Rémy, form has almost dissolved; a cottage sits at the foot of what seem like waves of molten lava. A couple of days after painting it he had a breakdown and consumed some of his lead paints, acknowledging that he’d been trying to die. He explained his artistic aim lucidly enough, but it’s hard not to read his mental turmoil into it.
Vincent’s fellow painter, Camille Pissarro, predicted: “This man will either go mad or leave us way behind.” In the end, it was both. He remains the prototype of the artist starving in a garret and appreciated only when dead – indeed, this exhibition also marks the centenary of the gallery’s purchase of Sunflowers, decades after it was painted: Britain was very slow to accept “modern art”. But the exhibition makes a strong argument that his two years in the South changed the face of painting.
He’d begun with gloomy pictures of Dutch peasant life and blossomed on encountering the work of Impressionists in Paris, but the South freed him to experiment and innovate. He’s usually categorised as a Post-Impressionist (a term invented retrospectively in 1910) but for my money he’s the original Expressionist and the gateway to 20th-century painting. This is one of the exhibition highlights of the year.
Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers is at the National Gallery, London, until 19 January 2025. Tickets £24, under 18s free.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/van-gogh-poets-and-lovers
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