"In a painting I'd like to say something consoling, like a piece of music" - Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo
The Yellow House (The Street) (1888)
It's the colour that struck me the most, so vivid, so powerful, so expressive that some of the paintings almost seem to move as you look at them. In that it would seem that Vincent van Gogh's desire to create paintings that consoled like music does was a desire he met. Even if he struggled to find consolation in his life.
But these paintings don't just console, they fascinate, they excite, they move the viewer. I was, along with several hundred others, spending a Monday afternoon at The National Gallery's Van Gogh:Poets and Lovers exhibition, an exhibition that has received rave reviews all round and, spoiler alert, will receive another one. If you love Van Gogh, if you love painting, you will surely love this show.
The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Millet) (1988)
Astoundingly, it is first time the National have ever devoted an exhibition to Van Gogh (it's part of their centennial celebrations, and it also marks one hundred years since they bought Sunflowers and Van Gogh's Chair - both of which we'll get to).
A small first room contains a portrait of Van Gogh's friend Lieutenant Millet (whom the painter was jealous of because had success with women, unlike Van Gogh it seems) and a fairly ordinary public garden in Arles that's brought to life by Van Gogh's expressive brushwork. As well as another portrait, that of Eugene Boch, a poet whose narrow face reminded the artist of Dante. The deep blue sky, on what looks like a starry, starry night, is intended to show a man "who dreams great dreams". Van Gogh was big on his symbolism.
The Poet's Garden (Public Garden in Arles) (1888)
The Poet (Portrait of Eugene Boch) (1888)
Entrance to the Public Garden in Arles (1888)
Undergrowth (1889)
On painting the public gardens of Arles, Van Gogh wrote to his brother:- "sometimes in passing I find such beautiful things that in the end you have to try to do them anyway". Even the undergrowth of the neglected garden at the hospital in Saint-Remy, which he'd admitted himself to in 1889 after a series of mental breakdowns, became a fascination for him.
Perhaps he saw something that reminded him of the state of his own brain but, no, let's not go there. Enough people have tried to interpret Van Gogh's art through the prism of his mental health. Could it be that he would have been a great artist anyway and that his mental health issues were hindering him in creating, rather than helping?
The Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Remy (1889)
Flowering Shrubs (1889)
The Park of the Hospital at Saint-Remy (1889)
Hospital at Saint-Remy (1889)
The show changes up a gear with The Park of the Hospital at Saint-Remy and then one more with Hospital at Saint-Remy. These works are superb. So full of colour and movement, a feast for the eyes and mind-bogglingly advanced for the era in which they were made. Van Gogh saw the chopped pine tree in the first of the two as a "dark giant - like a proud man brought low" and hoped, with both works, to capture something of the anxiety of the patients at Saint-Remy.
Yet, at the same time, he was making quieter, more melancholic, works like Iris or the pen and ink Weeping Tree. Then, of course, there's the far more famous Van Gogh's chair, a portrait of an artist in absentia. Painted in Arles' Yellow House which he used as a studio and painted at a time when Paul Gauguin had come to visit him. There's a version somewhere with Gauguin sat in the chair but Van Gogh, it seems, would prefer to let his pipe, his tobacco, and, most of all, his chair stand as a surrogate for him. It remains as iconic now as ever.
Iris (1890)
Weeping Tree (1889)
Van Gogh's Chair (1888)
Starry Night over the Rhone (1888)
But not as iconic, surely, as Starry Night over the Rhone. It's a painting pretty much everyone knows and most people adore. Don McLean started his song Vincent by singing about it. But when you see it in situ it is quite outstanding. It's usually at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris but I was lucky enough to see it back in 2019 when it came over for a Tate Britain show. I don't remember it having quite such a powerful effect last time. This time, I walked in to the room it was in, the best room of a show in which there are no bad rooms, and it just hit me.
I love nocturnes anyway and, along with Whistler's, this is probably as good as they get. The lights of the city, the reflection of the lights on the ripples of the river, the couple in the fore of the painting. It all adds up to an almost overwhelming sense of awe and yet melancholia at the same time. And it's in a room with the incredible Yellow House (at the head of this blog) and the symbolist looking The Sower. It's a room in which you hardly know where to look. The enormous golden sun, like the Yellow House, seemed to glare as if lit from behind. How can a painter do that? Why weren't people at the time blown away?
The Sower (1888)
The Bedroom (1889)
Self-Portrait (1889)
The Alyscamps (1888)
The hits keep coming with The Bedroom, a masterly Self-Portrait, and a less frantic than many work in The Alyscamps. Yellow autumn trees (cypresses) flank two lovers as they walk away from the industrial buildings behind them into a more romantic past - or more romantic future.
There's a room devoted to pen and ink works that Van Gogh made in and around the grounds of the ruined 12th century Montmajour Abbey and though they, quite obviously, lack the colour of Van Gogh's greatest work it gives us an insight into the mind of the man who made them and the way he worked up a picture. He didn't just make them up. He thought about them. He worked hard on them.
The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees (1888)
View of La Crau from Montmajour (1888)
The Stevedores (1888)
View of Arles (1889)
The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Remy) (1888)
The Stevedores is just beautiful, again it's the colour and the way Van Gogh works with light. Van Gogh said when he saw the scene that inspired this in real life it was "pure Hokusai". There are trees, both in View of Arles and The Large Plane Trees, that seem to refuse to be held in by the edges of the canvas. Van Gogh, it seemed, was not just so much an admirer of a nature but a man who saw him as part of it.
Patience Escalier, an old gardener that Van Gogh had met in Arles was not really a peasant but it's telling to see the dignity that Van Gogh gave to a humble gardener and would, surely, also have given to an actual peasant. The use of colour is electrifying. However, most people were not giving it all that much attention because nearby was the big set piece, the big selling point - if one was needed and with Van Gogh one is certainly not needed - of the show.
Van Gogh had always intended for his two Sunflowers paintings (one owned by the National, one usually on show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) to hang either side of his La Berceuse (normally found to be hanging in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts). Considering he is said to have only sold one painting in his lifetime that's pretty bold of him but he's finally got his dream because here, in London, all three of them hang together just as the master intended. Cameras out!
Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier) (1888)
Sunflowers (1888)
La Berceuse (The Lullaby) (1889)
Sunflowers (1889)
The first of the Sunflowers was hung in the guest bedroom of the Yellow House to welcome Gauguin to the 'artist's home' and although it's not specified where the second one was hung it seems that Van Gogh thought the three paintings together would look good hung on a ship and that the ensemble may bring comfort to a sailor returning home!
La Bercreuse features a favourite subject of Van Gogh's, Augustine Roulin, and is supposed to be an ideal depiction of motherhood. It's not my favourite work in the exhibition but in its flattened areas of colour it does seem to pre-empt Fauvist artists like Matisse and Derain who, of course, would go on to inspire the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Van Gogh as a forebear to Picasso? I'm sure I'm not the first to go there.
Still Life with Coffee Pot (1888)
Landscape with Ploughman (1889)
There's a Still Life with Coffee Pot which is as still as Morandi yet as lively as a Cezanne and then there's one final room full of landscapes and olive trees. Lots of olive trees. As I walked out through them I almost felt like one of Van Gogh's lovers (even though I was on my own) flanked by the beauty of the natural world.
Although it wasn't the natural world's beauty but the incredible work of one of art's greatest ever painters. What an amazing show and, one last thing you may not have noticed, all of these paintings were made in one single three year period. The last three years of Van Gogh's life Imagine what he could have gone on to do.
Landscape from Saint-Remy (Wheatfield behing Saint-Paul Hospital) (1889)
The Olive Trees (1889)
Olive Trees (1889)
Oliver Grove, Saint-Remy (1889)
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