‘Why did the greatest colourist of all, Eugène Delacroix, judge it indispensable to go to the south and as far as Africa? Obviously, not only in Africa but even from Arles onwards, you’ll naturally find fine contrasts between reds and greens, blues and oranges, sulphur and lilac. And all true colourists will have to admit that another colouration exists than that of the north.’
These were the words Vincent van Gogh sent to his brother Theo from Arles on 18 September 1888. He had arrived in Provence just seven months earlier and, in that brief span, had painted some of his greatest masterpieces, from Starry Night Over the Rhône to The Poet, from The Sunflowers to The Poet’s Garden, from The Peasant to The Lover, immersing himself body and soul in the beauty of the place, in his observation of its people, and in the poetry of his art. ‘At the moment, I have a clear head or a lover’s blindness toward my work’ he declared several days later – ‘un aveuglement d’amoureux’ in the original French.
It is precisely this Vincent, a man in love with art and painting like a river in flood, that we see displayed in the exhibition now open at the National Gallery, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers (until 19 January 2025). The exhibition, curated by Cornelia Homburg and Christopher Riopelle, explores Vincent’s creative process, focusing on his two years in Provence, first in Arles and then Saint-Rémy (1888-90). With over 60 works, essential loans from museums around the world and several private collections, the National Gallery marks its 200th anniversary, as well as the centenary of the Gallery acquisition of the artist’s Sunflowers and Van Gogh’s Chair in 1924. Strange but true, the National Gallery has never dedicated an exhibition to Van Gogh until now.
Vincent’s Provence period is like a precious fresco that blends a bold use of colour and forms with inspiration from literature and the artist’s poetic imagination. Thus, he developed a unique, unmistakable style. His desire to create an ‘art of the future’ clearly emerges in his works, often conceived as a series to be displayed in a precise sequence. Never before have so many masterpieces from this period been brought together, from iconic paintings to works rarely leaving private collections.
The exhibition does not follow a chronological order but unfolds thematically, highlighting how Van Gogh repeatedly took up the same subjects, rethinking them from scratch, from landscape to portrait. This innovative approach is captivating and stands out across the various themes: Poets and Lovers; The Garden: Poetic Interpretations; The Yellow House: An ‘Artist’s Home’; Montmajour: A Series; Decoration; Variation on a Theme.
Vincent’s Poetic Vision
The Poet’s Garden, which welcomes us at the entrance with two splendid portraits, The Lover and The Poet, immediately draws the eye: two lovers, hand in hand, come to meet us under the shade of a magnificent tree described in taut and decisive brushstrokes, a symphony of greens with a sprinkling of orange. This public garden in front of the Yellow House became an irresistible attraction for Vincent. He returned to it repeatedly, recording his sensations on canvas or paper. After all, he wrote, it was an ‘unremarkable ‘ garden. Yet he found it so beautiful because of the ‘plants and bushes that make one dream of landscapes in which one may readily picture oneself Botticelli, Giotto, Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio’. He wrote these words to Paul Gauguin on 3 October, using a literary strategy, as he often did to stimulate his friends’ imaginations. Vincent read widely, and it was an article by the critic Henri Cochin published in the Revue des Deux Mondes that touched his imagination, inspiring several paintings.
And so, in this creative vein, the canvases on the gardens came to life – the drawings are filled and emptied with small touches of ink, now hatched, dotted, undulating, kissed by a poetic breeze or a pale sun. Garden with Weeping Tree is a small jewel from the artist’s new phase, rarely exhibited: they might almost be brushstrokes, but they are strokes of ink executed with his reed pens.
Vincent’s poetic vein should come as no surprise. In his youth, he had admired the Romantic and Post-Romantic poets when he was still working in the galleries of Goupil & Co. He loved Keats, Longfellow, and later Alfred de Musset, who he quoted to his brother: ‘Know that in us there is often a sleeping poet, ever young and alive’. In these paintings and drawings, the poet is not the unseen Dante or Boccaccio – who would never come to mind unless we had read his letters – but Vincent himself; his vision is that of a poet. Like Rembrandt, who, as Vincent said, ‘could make poetry, be a poet, that’s to say Creator’.
Arbitrary colourist & abstract forms
‘As for me, I’ll work; here and there, some of my work will last. But the painter of the future is a colourist like there hasn’t been before.’ Vincent made this decisive reflection as early as the spring of 1888, as we find in a letter to his brother commenting on the Parisian art scene that he had recently left behind: ‘Manet prepared the ground, but you’re well aware that the Impressionists have already used stronger colour than Manet’s’. In the two years he spent in Paris, Vincent quickly absorbed and liquidated the Impressionist lesson and then fell in love with Japanese prints. Now he was ready to blaze new trails: he wanted to become ‘an arbitrary colourist’. We are surrounded by a multitude of canvases that demonstrate this, such as The Bedroom or the magnificent portrait of The Peasant (Patience Escalier) or the extraordinary turquoise sky in The Alyscamps. But it is with The Sower that Vincent finally came to terms with one of the most important figures in his artistic career, inspired by Jean-François Millet, ‘counsellor and guide in everything’. The sacredness inherent in a gesture as simple yet grandiose as sowing was a theme that Vincent had always pursued, whether in drawings, sketches, or paintings. This work celebrates art as a mission, with a huge yellow disc above the Sower’s head like a symbolic halo. A large trunk crosses the canvas diagonally, evoking Japanese prints, while a dark figure absorbed in the sowing advances towards us. Vincent’s words to his brother were almost telegraphic, an ‘immense lemon yellow disc for the sun—green-yellow sky with pink clouds. The field is violet, and the sower and the tree are Prussian Blue.’ As a true lover of nature, he camouflaged his signature, ‘Vincent’, on the trunk itself, on the bottom right of the canvas (nobody notices it!).
Further on, we find ourselves immersed in a room full of olive groves, a theme that absorbed him for months as soon as he was allowed to venture beyond the walls of the Saint-Rémy hospital (summer 1889). The painting and the drawing of The Olive Trees, displayed here side by side, take us to the heart of Vincent’s creative process. The drawing was executed after the painting and not before, as we might imagine the traditional approach would be. An abstract creative energy pulsates forcefully from both works made in the studio. In the drawing, the forms are barely distinguishable, repeated, and insistent, as if to continue shaping a landscape that is no longer a landscape but a new-found freedom.
Vincent’s triptych. Sunflowers and the Berceuse
One of Vincent’s wishes has been fulfilled for the first time in more than a century: a triptych. He talked about it with Theo in late January 1889 when, soon after the ear incident on Christmas Eve, he was already busy with the canvas of the Berceuse (The Lullaby), ‘the very same one I was working on when my illness came and interrupted me’. The woman we see is the wife of his postman friend Roulin, who had had a daughter the previous summer. She became the idealized portrait of a comforting mother figure: in her hands, a cord to rock an unseen cradle. Vincent imagined her with two canvases of sunflowers next to her, ‘which thus form standard lamps or candelabra at the side’. He wanted their light on either side of la Berceuse.
The Sunflowers against a turquoise ground is on loan from the Philadelphia Art Gallery for the first time to join the yellow-on-yellow Sunflowers kept at the National Gallery, to recreate Vincent’s desired three-painting series. The visual impact is thrilling. Vincent firmly believed in this compositional scheme, so much so that in May, he had sketched it in his letter to Theo, repeating to him: ‘You must know, too, that if you put them in this order [sketch] that is, The Berceuse in the middle and the two canvases of the sunflowers to the right and the left, this forms a sort of triptych’. Unfortunately, we don’t have Theo’s reply. With “his” Sunflowers, Vincent struck ‘the high yellow note’, musical art. The previous summer, he had written: ‘I’m reading a book about Wagner, which I’ll send you afterwards – what an artist — one like that in painting, now that would be something. It will come. ‘Ça viendra.’
In 1924, Jo van Gogh Bonger (Theo’s widow and a key figure in promoting Vincent’s oeuvre), in a letter to the director of the National Gallery, decided that the time had come to part ways with Sunflowers, a picture that she had looked at ‘every day’ for more than thirty years. She wrote, ‘It’s a sacrifice for Vincent’s glory,’ and she was right; Vincent’s glory is now genuinely being celebrated in these halls.
Words: Mariella Guzzoni Photos © Artlyst 2024