REFLECTIONS OF ENGLAND
As Tate Britain looks back at Van Gogh’s connection to these shores in a visionary exhibition, Frances Hedges examines the artist’s life in letters and discovers how a passion for literature informed his work
Tate Britain explores how Vincent Van Gogh’s British sojourns influenced his most famous works
‘Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure… above which in the morning I see the sun rise in its glory.’ So wrote Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo, from the asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1889. The image of a solitary, tortured genius finding inspiration even in the depths of his misery persisted for much of the 20th century, with Van Gogh’s creative brilliance often interpreted as a product of his so-called madness. Yet this mythology is at odds with the artist’s own, clear-sighted view of his sporadic – and unwelcome – manic episodes, which he described in letters as symptoms of ‘an illness like any other’. Contrary to popular opinion, his talent endured in spite of, not because of, his mental instability.
Although he had periods of loneliness during his year in the asylum, Van Gogh was never entirely disconnected from society. Not only did he correspond regularly with his close circle of friends, but he also contributed materially to a much wider cross-cultural dialogue, his multilingual fluency enabling him to devour
information from an array of international sources. ‘I’m gradually beginning to turn into a true cosmopolitan, meaning not a Dutchman, Englishman or Frenchman, but simply a man,’ he wrote proudly in 1874. Born in the North Brabant province of the Netherlands in 1853, Van Gogh led a nomadic lifestyle that saw him take up residence at 38 different addresses across his native country, England, Belgium and France during his 37 years. He might well have travelled further afield had he lived for longer. ‘I should also very much like to see Africa, but I hardly make any definite plans for the future, it will all depend on circumstances,’ he wrote in one poignant letter of 1888. No wonder even his most vibrant landscapes, such as Path in the Woods (1887), have a certain sense of mystery about them, their narrow, twisting avenues hinting at journeys he had yet to make.
Nonetheless, Van Gogh’s peripatetic existence and
voracious appetite for knowledge meant that he was constantly absorbing ideas from the cultures he came into contact with. Especially formative was the time he spent in London, as a new Tate exhibition titled ‘Van Gogh and Britain’ shows. He first travelled to the capital city in 1873, where he was to spend two years working for the Dutch art dealer Goupil & Cie (he subsequently returned to England in 1876 to take up a teaching post in Ramsgate and then Isleworth). Although he had yet to adopt painting as a career, the city clearly ignited his creative urge. ‘When I was in London, how often I would stand on the Thames Embankment and draw as I made my way home from Southampton Street in the evening,’ he wrote in 1883, recalling his nightly commute back to Brixton, where he lodged with a widowed landlady and her daughter. That view of the river, reflecting light from lamps along the bank, is believed to have influenced the composition of one of his best-known paintings, Starry Night (1888).
While in London, Van Gogh often visited the National Gallery to discover the work of British artists such as Constable and Millais, as well as becoming an avid collector of engravings from English publications such as The Illustrated London News. With their graphic shapes – much like the Japanese woodblock prints Van Gogh was later to discover in Paris – they were influential in the development of his post-Impressionistic style of painting, characterised by stronger, more dynamic lines than the Pointillist tradition he left behind. Thematically, too, the engravings were significant: depicting scenes of working life, they fuelled the artist’s natural compassion for the poor and inspired in him a sense of moral duty that he shared with the great realist writers of the age. A prodigious reader, Van Gogh admired novelists he saw as chroniclers of social change, from Victor Hugo and Emile Zola to Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë. He made direct comparisons between their writing and the prints that he collected, stating in an 1882 letter that ‘my whole life is aimed at making the things from everyday life that Dickens describes and these artists draw’. His 1884 print Weaver, with a Baby in a Highchair appears to have been based on George Eliot’s Silas Marner, while the illustrator Luke Fildes’ engraving The Empty Chair, created to commemorate Dickens’ death, was almost certainly the model for the two 1888 masterpieces Van Gogh’s Chair and Gauguin’s Chair. It is clear that Van Gogh was still contemplating the work of those British artists and writers at a very late stage in his career. We know that he purchased new copies of many of his favourite books to take with him when he committed himself voluntarily to the asylum in 1889, presumably deriving comfort from their familiarity. In February 1890, just five months before his suicide, he returned to a series of portraits he had begun in Arles, featuring a local café owner, Madame Ginoux. Titled L’Arlésienne, the later versions show her with a copy of Dickens’ Christmas Stories – a volume that Van Gogh had a habit of rereading every year. As a young man, he had written lucidly about mortality, declaring that ‘the memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us in the evening of our life. They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.’ In his final months, perhaps it was the consolation he drew from those recollections – of the art, literature and people he had cherished – that spurred him on to continue painting until the very end. ‘The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain’ is at Tate Britain (www.tate.org.uk) from 27 March to
11 August.