Flowering of a Tragic Genius

National Gallery, London
Wheatfield, with Cypresses by Van Gogh, 1889

By Roderick Conway Morris

LONDON 1 November 2024

'Van Gogh is at last adequately represented in England,' wrote Charles Aitken, the director of the gallery that would become the Tate, a century ago this year. He had at last acquired one of the artist's 'Sunflower' paintings and 'Van Gogh's Chair' for the National Gallery.

The pictures had been inherited by Vincent's sister-in-law, Jo Van Gogh-Bonger, and her infant son, also named Vincent. Following the deaths of the artist - after he had shot himself, on 29 July 1890 - and, six months later of syphilis, of his brother, Theo, Jo's art-dealer husband, Jo and her son had initially found themselves the owners of an astonishing 361 works. Nonetheless, it was with great reluctance that they parted with these two pieces some thirty years later, Jo writing to Aitken: 'It is a sacrifice for the sake of Vincent's glory.'

The placing of two of Van Gogh's now most celebrated images in Britain's premier national collection was a landmark in Jo's campaign to win international recognition for the painter who, at the time of his death, was almost unknown. She did this by tirelessly arranging exhibitions of his work, persuading critics to write about him and judiciously selling selected pieces to important museums and prominent private collectors. She and her son nonetheless carefully kept a core of many of the finest works, which would eventually make possible the creation in 1973 of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, now one of the most visited in the world. Jo was also the first fully to appreciate the outstanding quality of her brother-in-law's surviving 820 letters, and she made it a lifelong mission to have them published in Dutch, English, French and German.

The story of Jo's selfless dedication and triumph in the face of a generally a patronizing art establishment and baffled public, was told fully for the first time in Han's Luitjen's revelatory 'Jo Van Gogh-Bonger: The Woman who made Vincent Famous'.

The National Gallery is marking the 200th anniversary of its foundation and the centenary of the purchase of its 'Sunflowers' and 'Van Gogh's Chair' with 'Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers', curated by Camilia Homburg and Christopher.

Van Gogh was born in the small village of Groot Zundert near the Belgian border in 1853. He met with little success as a junior art dealer in the Hague, London and Paris. He then became a teacher and lay preacher, in England, and later in an impoverished mining area in Belgium. It was his art dealer brother, Theo, in Paris, who suggested he might become an artist. Thereafter, despite Vincent's lack of commercial success, Theo paid him 15% of his own salary, meaning that from the age of 27 the artist could devote himself entirely to his new calling. Almost all the pictures he produced were amassed by Theo in Paris (who did his best to exhibit and market them). The artist's poor relations with his uncomprehending Dutch Reform Church pastor father, stimulated him to renounce the family name and sign his works simply as 'Vincent'.

Van Gogh moved to Paris in March 1886 and remained there for nearly two years. He won the esteem of other avant-garde artists, such Louis Anquetin, Émile Bernard, Gauguin, Pissarro, Seurat, Signac and Toulouse-Lautrec, and exhibited in cafés and a colour shop, exchanged pieces with his confrères, but sold nothing. He was then visibly, under the influence of Impressionism and the emerging Pointillist style. His varied self-portraits attracted praise and Toulouse-Lautrec made a sympathetic likeness of him.

The National Gallery's impressive exhibition of over 60 canvases and drawings, with multiple loans from other museums and private collections, focuses on the time - just over two years - that the artist spent in Provence, during which he forged a style distinctly his own and became the Van Gogh the world knows today.

When Vincent descended from the train in Arles on 20 February 1888, he may have intended to continue on to Marseilles and even further afield in the Mediterranean, but he was to remain there over a year.

Both he and Theo were keen collectors of Japanese woodblock prints (some of which he copied) and it was in Provence that their influence on him became most apparent in terms of colour schemes, foreshortened and bird's-eye-view perspectives and miniature figures in landscapes. He wrote to Theo of the scene that presented itself on his arrival in Arles: 'The landscape under the snow with the white peaks against the sky as bright as the snow was just like the winter landscapes the Japanese did.' Of another scene of barges on the Rhône there, he recorded: 'It was pure Hokusai.'

Later in the same year he depicted himself in his Self Portrait as Bonze (a Japanese Buddhist monk). He also adopted some Japanese working methods, cutting his own reed pens for ink drawings. And his prolific output, which has left us with such a rich legacy achieved over a short career, may owe something to his admiration of the productivity and panache of the Japanese greats: 'The Japanese draws quickly, very quickly like a flash of lightning.'

In August 1888 Van Gogh decided to try to turn the Yellow House, a building he had rented as a studio at number 2 Place Lamartine, just outside Arles' ancient walls, into the home of the 'Studio of the South', where he hoped other avant-garde artists would join him. Across the square was a small public park, which he began to imagine as the Poet's Garden, where the Italian writers Petrarch and Boccaccio might once have walked. And indeed with the magic of his brush he turned this unremarkable municipal amenity into an oasis of enchantment.

He formed an ambitious plan for the décor of the house that would consist of an array of paintings with complimentary and contrasting motifs and palettes, a project he believed would 'broaden my way of seeing and doing things'. As he devoted himself energetically to this task, this collection of portraits, still lifes, flower pictures, interiors, landscapes and night scenes expanded from over a dozen to nearly fifty. By then he had hopes of exhibiting the ensemble at the Exposition Universelle in Paris the following year.

In September he was joined by Paul Gaugin and the experience of working together at first proved productive for both. But Jo Van Gogh justifiably disputed Gauguin's later claim that her brother-in-law had been somewhat directionless before he got there. Relations between the two artists became increasingly fraught and descended into furious, drunken arguments. One of these culminated in the notorious incident of Vincent's cutting off one of his ears. He was committed to Arles' mental hospital and repeatedly returned there during the spring of 1889.

In May of that year he moved to the Saint-Paul de Mausole asylum at nearby St Remy-en-Provence, a building outside the town with a large internal garden at the foot of the Alpilles Mountains. His bedroom there looked out on fields and peaks, but he was also given a studio facing in the other direction. This stimulated him to reassess the balance between working directly from nature and bringing to bear imagination and memory in creating his canvases. Although he was sometimes too ill to paint, when he was well and lucid, as Jo Van Gogh Bonger later emphasised, he carefully planned the themes he wanted to address and executed them meticulously. This new location encouraged him to concentrated his attention more on landscape, as well as close-up images of trees, flowers and undergrowth. Before he left the asylum for Paris on 16 May 1890, he had produced eleven superb canvases within less than a fortnight.

Vincent's works were increasingly being noticed. In February 1890 Theo sold the 'Red Vineyard' to the Belgian artist Anna Bloch at the avant-garde group Les Vingt's show in Brussels, and two other Vincent paintings (the details of which are lost). In March, when his recent canvases were displayed at the Société des Indépendants exhibition in Paris, Gauguin wrote to him: 'I offer you my compliments, and for many artists you are the most remarkable in the exhibition.'

The mental illness that plagued Van Gogh seems to have run in the family. His father's brother committed suicide in 1900. His sister Willemien had a breakdown in 1890. She was admitted in 1901 to a mental hospital where she remained until her death, at 79, in 1941. Touchingly, her care was paid for by the sale of the by then infinitely more valuable paintings that Vincent had given her.

But Jo Van Gogh-Bonger vigorously opposed the idea that the artist's pictures were in some way the product of his bouts of madness.

As Vincent once wrote to Theo: 'In painting I'd like to say something consoling, like a piece of music'. An aim, indeed, he achieved magnificently in many of his canvases.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery, London, 14 September 2024 - 19 January 2025

'Jo Van Gogh-Bonger: The Woman who made Vincent Famous', by Hans Luitjen (translated by Lynne Richards), Bloomsbury, £20

First published: The Lady