Harmony and Calmness in the Depths of Misery:Van Gogh and Britain.

"I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process" - Vincent van Gogh.

"Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me". - Vincent van Gogh.


Pretty much everyone knows that Vincent van Gogh was unsuccessful in his own lifetime, that he suffered with his mental health, that he cut off (or possibly severed) his ear with a razor, and that he eventually took his own life by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver at the age of just 37 in the suburbs of Paris.

It's one of the most famous stories in all the world of art. What's less well known - but hardly obscure - is that van Gogh spent nearly three years living in England in his early twenties where he developed a love of both British culture and British art. Tate Britain's current Van Gogh and Britain show takes a look at how these years affected van Gogh's art and it doesn't just include work by the Dutchman himself but also by those who inspired him and those whom he inspired.

There's a minor problem though. Van Gogh didn't become an artist until 1880, four years after he left England. It means the general idea behind the exhibition is a bit flawed but if you can get over that obstacle, and it shouldn't be difficult, there is much to admire about the Tate show. Not least a loan of Starry Night and the really rather wonderful Avenue of Poplars in Autumn, both of which seem to contain a rendering of light and shade that appears simultaneously real, unreal, and even beyond reality. 

Vincent van Gogh - Avenue of Poplars in Autumn (1884)

Vincent van Gogh - The Arlesienne (1890)

We begin with a brief scene setting for van Gogh's time in England. He loved to read books by Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, and George Eliot. He admired Victorian novels for having, like his later paintings, a "reality more real than reality" and he wrote that his whole life was "aimed at making the things from everyday life that Dickens describes". A painting he made in the last year of his life, The Arlesienne, of his friend Marie Ginoux who ran the train station cafe in Arles shows two books on her table. Dickens's Christmas Books and Harriet Beecher Stowe's American anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Van Gogh arrived in London in 1873, aged 20, and lodged in Stockwell and Oval while working at an art dealers' office in Covent Garden. He'd traverse the river by boat, travel on its still infant underground railway, and, most of all, he'd walk. He'd soak up both the city and the radical ideas that were thriving in Victorian London. When he lost his job in Covent Garden he worked for a while in Ramsgate as a teacher and he even tried a bit of preaching. His experiences gave him a sense of how life was for the ordinary and the marginalised and this love of the common man became a theme that would never leave his art

He wrote to his friends to say he'd not had time yet to visit Madame Tussauds or the Crystal Palace because he was so immersed in the city, its museums, and its art galleries. As if to forewarn us of the melancholy journey his life would take he was drawn particularly to paintings of people on, often uncertain, journeys and was fond of The Avenue at Middelharnis by Dutch artist Meindert Hobbema that was on show at the National Gallery. It surely inspired Avenue of Poplars in Autumn.

Meindert Hobbema - The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689)

John Constable - The Valley Farm (1835)

John Everett Millais - Chill October (1870)

Years after leaving London, van Gogh  would write to his brother remarking on how he'd still not forgotten the paintings Chill October by Millais and Constable's The Valley Farm. An anecdote tells how van Gogh never forgot meeting Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter Millais on the street but a more telling detail is perhaps his quote that he felt nature was "more serious and intimate in autumn", to the extent he copied out the Keats poem To Autumn. It's probably a novice error to try to see everything van Gogh read, admired, and wrote as signs of his later mental breakdown but this attraction to the autumnal certainly lends itself to an understanding of a man with a naturally gloomy air. Certainly when he tried to incorporate those autumn feelings into his painting the results were outstanding.

Vincent van Gogh - Autumn Landscape at Dusk (1885)

Vincent van Gogh - The Bois de Boulogne with People Walking (1886)

He wrote "how perfectly simply death and burial happen. Coolly as the falling of an autumn leaf". When he moved to Paris in 1886 and became inspired by the impressionists he still managed, despite adding brighter colours to his palette, to keep that love of, or respect for, autumn in his work.

Two years later van Gogh moved to Arles, in the south of France, where his art became more dynamic, looser, and inspired by Japanese prints. It was in Arles where van Gogh first suffered severe mental illness and it was only another eighteen months later before his demons got the better of him for good. The subject matter of the garden of an asylum was not an affectation but just a detail of van Gogh's life at that time.

Vincent van Gogh - Path in the garden of the asylum (1889)

Van Gogh's personal copy after Gustave Dore - Katholieke Illustrate (1872-1890)

Vincent van Gogh - Starry Night (1888)

It's remarkable that a man so troubled could get it together to paint something so utterly absorbing, transfixing, and so modern as Starry Night. Unsurprisingly this masterpiece had attracted quite a crowd but, for me, it was interesting to see it paired with one of Whistler's equally wonderful, though not initially obviously so, Nocturnes. It seems that van Gogh had seen Whistler's work and was, instead of simply copying it, taking it to the next level. Then the next. Then the next.  

This part of the exhibition jumps back to van Gogh's time in London and his interest in social realism. There's Frank Holl's engraving of a poor flower seller which van Gogh personally owned,  and there's his own Mourning woman seated on a basket in which the wretched protagonist sits forlorn with her head in her hands, her woes very much her own private concern.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler - Nocturne:Grey and Gold Westminster Bridge (c.1871-1872)

Frank Holl - A Flower Girl (1872)

Vincent van Gogh - Mourning woman seated on a basket (1883)

Vincent van Gogh - Paul Ferdinand Gachet (1890)

Vincent van Gogh - Entrance to Voyer d'Argenson Park at Asnieres (1887)

That head in the hands look of despair became something of a leitmotif through van Gogh's short career. For all the Bonnard in second gear works like Entrance to Voter d'Argenson Park at Asnieres there seems to be just as much, if not more, like 1881's Worn Out (inspired by Dickens' Hard Times) and 1890's Sorrowing old man, the latter made when van Gogh was not well enough to leave the Saint-Paul hospital. Van Gogh's doctor noted than the patient/painter would often sit for long periods like this himself and took any attempt at conversation with him as almost an assault.

Vincent van Gogh - Worn Out (1881)

Vincent van Gogh - Sorrowing old man ('At Eternity's Gate') (1890)

Vincent van Gogh - Sorrow (1882)

Vincent van Gogh - Loom with weaver (1884)

Hard Times also features weavers (as does George Eliot's Silas Marner) so it's possible that 1884's Loom with weaver could be influenced by that book also. He'd lived in Nuenen in the Netherlands where he'd made sketches of weavers and he began to identify with them saying he had to "control and interweave many threads" and be "so absorbed in his work that he doesn't think but acts". 

Ever the drama queen, when van Gogh wasn't comparing himself to weavers he was identifying with prisoners. He wrote about a 'prison' of poverty and social prejudice that prevented him being the artist he'd like to be, holding him back essentially. It can be assumed that his translation of Gustave Dore's print of Newgate is something of a self-portrait and it's certainly one of the paintings in the show that's attracted the most attention. You'd normally have to travel to Moscow to see it.

Vincent van Gogh - The Prison Courtyard (1890)

Vincent van Gogh - Self-Portrait with Felt Hat (1886-1887)

Lucien Pissarro - La Maison de la Sourde, Eragny (1886)

Lucien Pissarro - The Garden Gate, Epping (1894)

Shortly after van Gogh's funeral in 1890, Lucien Pissarro moved to Britain - and here we commence, essentially - the show is not in strict chronological order, the section that starts to look at those inspired by van Gogh. In the case of Pissarro it would seem that it was both van Gogh's former country of residence as much as his style that was in his mind. The Garden Gate, Epping's bright colours suggest an artist of a rosier disposition than van Gogh but the way the trees twist and twirl in the low light and the shadows the gate makes on the pathway lend an air of melancholy to the work.

The Irish painter Roderic O'Conor (a new name on me) owes a more considerable debt. It's plain to sea. Look at that stripey deck chair sky, the bedspread rolling hills, and the trees that belong more in some kind of jungle fantasy than anywhere in Europe. It's a wonderful painting but it's about as realistic as van Gogh's basket of apples from five years earlier. These artists weren't painting, necessarily, what things looked like as much as they were painting what they felt like!

Roderic O'Conor - Yellow Landscape (1892)

Vincent van Gogh - Still Life, Basket of Apples (1887)

Vincent van Gogh - Plaster Cast of a Woman's Torso (1887)



Vincent van Gogh - Still life with plaster statuette (1887)

Van Gogh's reputation was starting to grow and twenty years after his death, in 1910, the Grafton Galleries in Mayfair hosted Manet and the Post-Impressionists which introduced the British public to van Gogh's art (as well as Cezanne and Gauguin). In fact this was the show that bequeathed us the term post-impressionism, a label that soon widened to include artists as diverse and as similar as Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, Signac, Seurat, and Felix Vallotton.

Attracting 25,000 visitors, the show shocked some but others loved it. Virginia Woolf wrote "on or about December 1910, human character changed"! Two years later Woolf was adapting the style of van Gogh's 1889 painting of Augustine Roulin for a portrait of her friend, the art critic Roger Fry. People were beginning to understand van Gogh's art - but they were still a long way from understanding van Gogh the man. One commentator described him as "a madman and a genius" which is possibly true but that suggests that he was a genius because he was mad and that's a highly debatable point and one this exhibition appears to hold no truck with.

Vanessa Bell - Roger Fry (1912)

Vincent van Gogh - Augustine Roulin (Rocking a Cradle) (1889)

The curators don't waste too much time going down that route. Instead they're more interested in the debt the next generation of British painters owed to van Gogh. To the fore were artists like Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, and, apparently, Matthew Smith - who, I must admit, was another new name to me. Before beginning to paint, Gilman would raise his brush to a van Gogh self-portrait he had on the wall of his studio and announce "A toi, Van Gogh".

"Cheers, Van Gogh". But these artists weren't mere copyists. They put a particularly British spin on the Netherlandish painter's style. Gilman spent time in Gloucestershire painting trees and look how dark his painting is in comparison to his hero's Provencale yew. When Spencer Gore painted trees he really went to town. His fig tree is almost too hectic and, as the curators correctly suggest, it appears it was the decorative nature of van Gogh's work rather than its expressive qualities that Gore was interested in.

Harold Gilman - In Gloucestershire (1916)

Vincent van Gogh - Trunk of an Old Yew Tree (1888)

Spencer Gore - The Fig Tree (c.1912)

Walter Richard Sickert - The Juvenile Lead (Self-Portrait) (1908)

Harold Gilman - Eating House (1914)

I'd had a reproduction of Gilman's Eating House in a book about art for many years and had often admired it but had never seen it in the 'flesh', it's usually housed in Sheffield, so it felt like catching up with an old friend when I spotted it on Tate Britain's walls.

It didn't disappoint. Colours so bold they seemed to come out of the painting and physically grab you. It's remarkable that Gilman could interpret van Gogh this way while Walter Sickert drilled down on the darkness and dying of the light in his paintings. Van Gogh, of course, would manage to somehow get both those elements on to one canvas as the same time. Check 1889's Hospital at Saint-Remy in which the sheer exuberance of the trees and sky give way to a rather sombre, if gaily painted, mental institution.

Vincent van Gogh - Hospital at Saint-Remy (1889)

Winifred Nicholson - Honeysuckle and Sweetpeas (1945-1946)

My friend Shep rushed past most of the flowery paintings because he wasn't interested in flowers (it's waterfowl for him or nothing) but I'd have to disagree. For a start I like flowers but more importantly, it's not what you paint, it's how you paint it. 'T ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. That's what gets results!

Roger Fry claimed that "modern European art has always mistreated flowers, dealing with them at best as aids to sentimentality until van Gogh saw - the arrogant spirit that inhabits the sunflower". Others understood this also. Winifred Nicholson was hardly a plagiarist but so indebted was her style to van Gogh, and so did she understand the power of contrasting colours, that she became known as the 'female van Gogh'.

Matthew Smith and Samuel John Peploe seem, in fairness, and to this observer, to be more the fruit of the ideas of, respectively, Matisse and Cezanne than van Gogh. They've possibly been shoehorned a little into the exhibition but I'll forgive that because (a) they're both great paintings and (b) there's just enough of van Gogh's DNA in there to make a difference.

Matthew Smith - Flowers in a Vase (1913-1914)

Samuel John Peploe - Yellow Tulips and Statuette (c.1912-1927)

When, in 1920, William Nicholson was commissioned to make a portrait of garden designer Gertrude Jekyll he didn't paint her face or even one of her gardens but instead, harking back to van Gogh's 1886 painting of his worn out old shoes, he chose to use her gardening boots as subject matter. A portrait of the gardener, of course, but a highly unorthodox one.

William Nicholson - Miss Jekyll's Gardening Boots (1920)

Vincent van Gogh - Shoes (1886)

By this time van Gogh was becoming ever more widely known and revered by the British public. Galleries and individuals were collecting his work and he was starting to pop up regularly in exhibitions. Soon he came to be seen as a 'modern master' and with the release of two biographies and publication of some of his personal correspondence there was soon as much, more even, fascination with his tragically short life as there was with his art.

Something that's long since continued. Earlier this year the gun he used to kill himself with was auctioned and went for £144,000. If he'd had that sort of money, or anything close to it, he'd have been able to afford a decent cobbler.

At least 'the stronger light, the blue sky (that) teaches one to see' was free in the south of France and it wasn't long before British artists, looking for a bit of that ol' van Gogh magic - as well, maybe, as some sunshine and maybe a drop or two of the region's finest reds, were (after the cessation of hostilities in the First World War) following in the footsteps left by those disintegrating boots. Augustus John even rented a house in the twenties near the Saint-Paul hospital where van Gogh had been a patient.

The lively, yet still brooding, colours of his Almond and Olive Trees certainly doff their cap to van Gogh but they also, and this might just be me, seem to speak of a scarred post-war landscape and a scarred post-war psyche.

Augustus John - Almond and Olive Trees, Provence (after 1927)

Matthew Smith - Winter in Provence (c.1937)

Vincent van Gogh - Olive Trees (1889)

"Agitated", John's work may be but compared to the maelstrom in van Gogh's 1889 painting it's positively placid. It's possible van Gogh's Olive Trees was painted on a particularly blustery day with the artist seated at an unusual angle, it's more likely that this somehow reflects his disturbed state of mind at the time, but the reading I like to take from it is that van Gogh was pushing forward with new, innovative, and inventive ideas about what art is, what art can be about, and what art can do.

It's quite a contrast with the straight lines and orderly behaviour another admirer, Christopher Wood, would paint thirty-eight years later in Cassis. Wood's is not a bad painting by any stretch, in fact it's rather lovely, but it lacks the vitality, the urgency, and the desire to go one step further that seemed to push van Gogh onwards and possibly even into spirals of depression. Perhaps it wasn't his mania that informed his art, but his art that informed his mania.

Christopher Wood - Cassis, France (1927)

Vanessa Bell - The Vineyard (c.1930)

Vanessa Bell, like van Gogh, also suffered depressive episodes and, like Wood, she also painted Cassis. Whilst clearly not as tumultuous as van Gogh's later work she does capture the feeling of the sun going down on both a landscape and, potentially, a life. It's truly beautiful while at the same time being heartbreakingly sad.

Bell's vineyard was painted around the same time that the Royal Academy were hosting a large survey of Dutch art which included eighteen van Goghs. The catalogue described him as a "brilliant and unhappy genius" further cementing ideas about him in people's heads. Not untrue ideas, for sure, but not the whole story.

The self-portrait below, for instance, was painted from Saint-Paul hospital during a recurrence of his illness when he was "thin, pale as a devil". Certainly he looks gaunt but he's working and some observers have read this painting to be his attempt to reassure friends and family that he was getting better. A feeling anyone who's ever suffered with depression or anxiety will be only too painfully aware of.

Vincent van Gogh - Self-Portrait (1889)

Vincent van Gogh - Farms near Auvers (1890)

The unfinished Farms near Auvers is the last painting van Gogh ever worked on, painted in the location in which he shot himself. A beautiful location for such a sad act. After Europe had been savaged by World War II, many started to identify even further with van Gogh's tragic life story and his art of mixed and confusing emotions.

His paintings had been hidden during the war to keep them safe but following VE Day there was a flowering, sorry, of van Gogh fandom. Books, films, and a 1947 exhibition at the Tate. It brought in crowds of nearly five thousand every day and was dubbed 'the Miracle on Millbank' before later travelling to Birmingham and Glasgow.

Poster for Van Gogh exhibition at Tate Gallery (1947)

Francis Bacon - Study for Portrait of Van Gogh VI (1957)

'Van Gogh is one of my great heroes (and he) speaks of the need to make changes in reality. This is the only possible way the painter can bring back the intensity of the reality" said one of the titans of twentieth century art, Francis Bacon. The Irish born Bacon was perhaps the first artist from these isles that didn't tone down van Gogh, but instead ramped him up.

For Bacon, famously described as "like a bomb exploding in reverse", it wasn't just the brush strokes that could be used to express inner rages and fears but the application of paint itself. Bacon seemed to come from almost nowhere but this show makes a good fist of showing that he did take van Gogh's ideas and move them to the next level.

Others like the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka and the French dramatist, and creator of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud spoke passionately in favour of van Gogh and his expressive style too. As the exhibition comes to a close we're treated to a painting of a young airman by Matthew Smith. Possibly one of his two sons, both of whom died serving in WWII causing Smith to become a recluse. As a fan of both Smith and van Gogh, the children's writer Roald Dahl paid Smith a visit and Smith painted Dahl in the style of van Gogh.

Unlike van Gogh's story, that's a sad one that has, at least, a happy ending. There's a couple of more than decent David Bomberg works to take in in the last room but the show peters our rather than goes out, like van Gogh's life, with a bang. Where are today's heirs to van Gogh? They surely exist as anyone who's seen the work of Jenny Saville or Cecily Brown could attest.

Obviously not every exhibition can be so extensive as to cover every permutation and every angle but it was a misstep not to have at least a smattering of contemporary works. One of very few in a show that seems to have been strung together on a very flimsy premise but turned out to be a close to encyclopaedic look at how Britain shaped van Gogh, how van Gogh shaped British art, and, most of all, to get away from such narrow ways of looking at things, how van Gogh shaped all art and, even more, our understanding of how mental illness affects people.

Like art, it's always been there and it probably always will be and like art, we shouldn't take one quick look and make our minds up about it. Sometimes, mental illness, as with art and even love, can take years, decades, even centuries, to reveal itself. Van Gogh once said "I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made". It may not be paintings for all of us but it seems like a sentiment we should all aspire towards.

Matthew Smith - Young Airman (c.1941)

David Bomberg - Tregor and Tregolf, Cornwall (1947)

David Bomberg - Flowers (1943)

Vincent van Gogh - Sunflowers (1888)

Thanks to Shep for his company, his input (he didn't like it as much as last year's Picasso exhibition in Tate Modern), and helping me debrief over a few beers afterwards. A toi, Goober!