How Brixton put a smile on young Van Gogh’s face
Major Tate exhibition will highlight artist’s brush with British life during his three years as a trainee art dealer
THINK of Van Gogh and the sunflowers or starry skies of the south of France come to mind.
An exhibition, however, will focus on the artist’s years in a somewhat greyer environment: Brixton, the London suburb where he lodged as a young man.
Van Gogh and Britain, opening at Tate Britain next year, will suggest that this little-known period of the painter’s life “changed his vision of the world and himself ”.
It will show how he was inspired by the city and its inhabitants, by British artists and writers, and how he in turn inspired British artists from Walter Sickert to Francis Bacon. The show will bring together the largest group of Van Gogh paintings to be shown in the UK for nearly a decade – more than 40 works loaned from public and private collections.
Tate Britain expects the show to be its 2019 blockbuster. Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, said: “I’m confident it will be our most popular show next year. Van Gogh is a perennially popular artist but I think this show will be quite a revelation to people – to see both the impact that London had on his work and that Van Gogh himself had on British art.”
Van Gogh was 20 when he moved to London in 1873 to work as a trainee art dealer, long before he became an artist.
He lodged at 87 Hackford Road in Brixton, before moving to homes in Lambeth and Isleworth. A prolific letter writer, he sent regular updates to his brother, Theo, about the delights of London over the three years he resided there. The joy and optimism in his writing stands in marked contrast to the final years of his life.
“Things are going well for me here, I have a wonderful home and it’s a great pleasure for me to observe London and the English way of life and the English themselves, and I also have nature and art and poetry, and if that isn’t enough, what is?” he wrote in 1874. He visited art galleries and auction houses, and John Constable and John Everett Millais became favourites. “English art didn’t appeal to me much at first, one has to get used to it. There are some good painters here, though,” he said.
He described walks by the Thames gazing at the “splendid villas”, the “grey rainy sky” above Hyde Park, and the “shimmering lights of street-lamps that hadn’t yet been put out” on the way to Westminster.
The Brixton and Lambeth districts in the 1870s were more bucolic than they are today. “I’m doing a lot of gardening and have sown sweet peas, poppies and reseda, now we just have to wait and see what comes of it,” he said. He soaked up London life on his 45-minute walks to his Covent Garden office and back again. “It’s wonderful to be finished so early here; we close at 6 o’clock and yet we work none the less because of it,” he said.
But it was his encounters with the works of Charles Dickens, and the poorer areas of the East End, which the exhibition will claim to have been the greatest influence on his work. One of the paintings on show will be
L’arlesienne 1890, a portrait he created in the last year of his life in the south of France. In the foreground of the painting is a book by Dickens. Another late work, Prisoners
Exercising, was his only image of London and was based on Gustave Dore’s print of Newgate Prison. Shoes, another picture in the exhibition,
‘English art didn’t appeal to me much at first, one has to get used to it’
depicts a pair of workers’ boots.
Alex Farquharson said: “Charles Dickens’s sympathy for the downtrodden, the way he made their predicament and their interior world part of great literature – that was a very big influence on Van Gogh’s thinking. What he took from Dickens was a moral vision.”
Van Gogh’s works were first exhibited in London in 1910 – among them Starry Night on the Rhone, which will be included in the show on loan from the Musee d’orsay in Paris. A second London show followed in 1922. “His works will have been seen by a huge number of British artists at that time. You can see his influence on them in the more liberal use of brush marks following those artists’ exposure to Van Gogh.”
Van Gogh and Britain will run from March 27 2019 to Aug 11 and will conclude with a group of works by Francis Bacon based on a Van Gogh self-portrait.