Van Gogh’s swirling intensity finally gets a viewing at National Gallery

“The painter of the future is a colourist such as there hasn’t been before,” Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo shortly after he moved to the south of France in 1888.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the National Gallery in London – and the 100th of its acquisition in 1924 of two of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings: Van Gogh’s Chair and one of several versions he painted of one of his most loved pieces, Sunflowers. What better time for the gallery to host – surprisingly enough – its first-ever major exhibition of his work.

In the last two years of his life, Van Gogh experienced an explosion of creativity in his art. When he was living in Paris shortly before, he’d spent a lot of time with other artists and writers; he was inspired by them, and realised he needed to establish his own creative identity. This exhibition, “Van Gogh – Poets and Lovers”, displays the colourful and sometimes astonishing fruits of this.

Van Gogh moved to Arles in Provence in February 1888. He rented what became known as the Yellow House; initially he used it as a studio, but moved into the house in September. From the start, his dream was that it would become a place for other artists to visit and work, though the Yellow House was tiny. As one of the curators told me: “It would have been the world’s smallest artists’ colony!”

His friend Paul Gauguin joined him at the Yellow House for a couple of months, but by December Van Gogh had had a mental breakdown, famously cut off a piece of his left ear, and admitted himself to hospital.

This was to be the pattern of the next 18 months, with stays both at the hospital in Arles and at a mental-health hospital in nearby Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Both hospitals, in a move that would put much of today’s mental health provision to shame, provided him with a room to work in; he continued to paint at a prodigious rate. Some of the paintings here are of hospital gardens.

It was during this period, when he was in and out of hospital, that he produced some of his best-known paintings: several versions of Sunflowers (including four in just one week), his Chair and Bedroom and the stunning Starry Night Over the Rhône – which much later inspired Don Mclean’s song “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)”. These are among the highlights of the exhibition.

But why “Poets and Lovers”? This was the question on my mind the whole time I was there. As a title it’s catchy, but the theme is a little vague. It’s not brought out at all clearly in the exhibition itself.

True, the first room holds three paintings, The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet), The Poet (Portrait of Eugène Boch) and The Poet’s Garden (Public Garden in Arles).

The first is of a soldier he befriended, who had a reputation as a ladies’ man – Van Gogh wrote that he “makes love so easily that he almost has contempt for love”.

In contrast, the artist himself was an inveterate romantic – but a failed one. His artistic scenes of courtship, we’re told, were “born of wishful reverie”; their poetry comes from his imagination rather than from reality – whether his own, or even observing courting couples. His own attempts at finding love, from his late teens onwards, ended in heartbreak if they ever began; he received one amatory rebuff after another throughout his life.

The Poet was not actually a poet at all, but a somewhat mediocre Belgian artist he knew – but Van Gogh thought he had “a Dante-like face” so, in a theme common to much of his work in this period – and this exhibition – imagination overcame mundane reality.

This was the case too with the third painting in the room. The public garden at Arles was utterly undistinguished, but Van Gogh transformed it into a place of creative possibility, of life, of promise. Poetry was the framework to let his imagination flourish.

He did this, most of all, by using colour to express emotion and character. He wrote to his sister Wil about one painting: “I don’t know if you’ll understand that one can speak poetry just by arranging colours well, as one can say comforting things in music.”

His use of colour made the ordinary extraordinary; colour was a symbolic language; it could express love, joy – or deep sadness. Of The Park of the Hospital at Saint-Rémy, he said: “This combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines…gives rise to…the feeling of anxiety.”

“Green saddened with grey” is perhaps the perfect description of Van Gogh’s own state of mind during this period. He used the motifs of nature to create works of art. He took the unremarkable and created imaginative reinterpretations. He preferred “colour suggesting some emotion” to colour that’s “true from the realist point of view”. And so in this painting what, in a different emotional (or poetic) interpretation, could have been a garden of love became a garden of sorrow – through the grey-greens.

Dutch-born, he was not used to the mountains in Provence. The landscape didn’t fade “into grey” like in the flat Netherlands: “it stays green to the last line – and that’s blue, the range of hills”.

It’s all about colour, and the exhibition is a glorious blaze of it. So it’s a little starling to encounter monochrome drawings among them, and even filling an entire room: six pen and ink landscapes at Montmajour – very different when we’re used to his vibrancy.

He also often used a heavy layering of paint, giving texture, ripples, almost movement in some of his paintings. The sheer physicality of the canvas – the bright fields, the swirling clouds – draws you right into the landscape, and the mood, the emotion, that he is expressing.

Van Gogh is perhaps best known for his Sunflowers. Two of the several versions are reunited here for the first time since they left his studio – one owned by the National Gallery, the other by the Philadelphia Museum of Art – displayed as he intended them in a triptych, flanking his painting La Berceuse (The Lullaby) in which a woman is holding a cord which rocks a cradle: both the painting and the grouping are intended to be consoling.

“Whether I’ve actually sung a lullaby with colour I leave to the critics,” he wrote, clearly conscious that his emotional intent in a painting might not always be perceived by others. As always, the impact of colour is at the forefront of his mind: in different letters he describes the two sunflower paintings as “standard lamps or candelabra at the sides”, and that “the yellow and orange tones of the head take on more brilliance through the proximity of the yellow shutters”.

“Van Gogh – Poets and Lovers” is a beautiful, often stunning collection, though it feels quite small: only 61 paintings and drawings altogether.

It makes you wonder what further glories Van Gogh might have produced. But in July 1890, mere months after creating several of the paintings here, the troubled artist died, aged just 37, two days after apparently shooting himself in the chest.

Photo collage: (left) ‘Self-portrait’ by Vincent Van Gogh (detail), 1889. Oil on canvas. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (Screenshot from nationalgallery.org.uk.) / (right) ‘A Wheatfield, with Cypresses’ by Vincent van Gogh (detail), 1889. (Screenshot from nationalgallery.org.uk.)

‘Van Gogh – Poets and Lovers‘ is at the National Gallery, London, until 19 January 2025.

This article will appear in the October 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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