Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers

The National Gallery’s miraculous 200th anniversary exhibition strips back the tragic legend to spotlight Van Gogh’s stupendous art

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night over the Rhône, 1888 (detail). Oil on canvas, 72.5 × 92 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Donation sous réserve d'usufruit de M. et Mme Robert Kahn-Sriber, en souvenir de M. et Mme Fernand Moch, 1975. Photo © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt.

The National Gallery, London
14 September 2024 –19 January 2025

by JOE LLOYD

It took me about 10 seconds to fall in love at Poets and Lovers, the National Gallery’s first-ever survey exhibition of Vincent van Gogh. An 1888 painting from a private collection shows a couple standing hand-in-hand in the public garden in Arles. Their faces and features are obscured; perhaps the only thing that matters about them is their identity as lovers. What truly sings is the flora and landscape they pass. Van Gogh captures the bushes and flowers in wild impasto, a whirling blur of vegetation. If his painting has a true main character, however, it is the sticky blue fir tree, rendered in spindly fingers of turquoise, with pine cones arranged like jutting teeth. Not for Van Gogh the refined dabs of Pissarro or the cloudy dabbles of Cézanne; this tree leaps out to touch your pupils.

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive trees with the Alpilles in the Background, 1889. Oil on canvas, 72.6 × 91.4 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest, 1998. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

What is left to say about Van Gogh? The Dutch post-expressionist is beloved beyond any of his peers. He has become the paradigmatic tragic artist: unsuccessful and tempestuous, a life of manic depression that climaxed in self-harm and suicide. For Poets and Lovers’ curators, Cornelia Homburg and Christopher Riopelle, the solution has been to say less. The exhibition gathers an extraordinary profusion of Van Gogh’s work, 61 paintings and drawings, corralled from museums and private collections around the world. It focuses on the painter’s two years in southern France, first in Arles and then at the Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint-Rémy. It is an extraordinarily rich assemblage. No exhibition is truly unmissable, but few can have come closer.

Where Poets and Lovers dials back is on biography. There are a few scant paragraphs signalling thematic rooms, as well as quotes from Van Gogh’s letters that inform particular paintings. Given his subject matter, Van Gogh’s life is at times unavoidable. Can anyone see the Museum Folkwang’s 1889 depiction of the Saint-Paul Asylum without noticing the enclosing fence, or seeing the russet earth and broken tree trunk as shot through with despair? But as far as possible, the paintings are left to speak for themselves. The wall labels even neglect to provide the works’ mediums.

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grove, 1889. Oil on canvas, 73 × 93 cm. Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden. © Photo: Gothenburg Museum of Art / Hossein Sehatlou.

Yet the exhibition does have some theses, expounded further in the catalogue. First, that Van Gogh was not as neglected or isolated as is often believed. He was a man of culture, abreast with trends in poetry, music and painting. The myth that he only sold a single painting is just that; and before he died his career was on an upward trend, with an invitation to the prestigious Les XX exhibition in 1888. Second, that Van Gogh was not a wild genius, but someone committed to refining his painting – a generous selection of works on paper allows us, at times, to see his progress from ink to oil.

And finally, that Van Gogh was committed to painting archetypes. The first room contains two more portraits. One is Paul-Eugène Milliet (1888), a career soldier whom Van Gogh befriended and tutored. Van Gogh – or Vincent, as he would intimately sign many of his paintings – captures Milliet’s face with slight, tender brushstrokes. Milliet, a dashing figure in Arles, is depicted here in the exhibition as the lover. The turquoise background behind him churns with thumb-sized daubs of paint. The other is Eugène Boch (1888), a painter “with a look of Dante about him”, whom Van Gogh aimed to paint as an archetypal poet. While Milliet has a visage of almost naive nobility, Boch is pensive, with green eyes that suggest unfathomable depths.

Vincent van Gogh, Landscape near the Abbey of Montmajour, 1888. Chalk, ink, pencil, 48.3 × 59.8 cm. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Van Gogh hung Milliet and Boch in his bedroom, titled as the Lover and the Poet. These were not his only types. A never-before loaned 1888 work from the Norton Simon Art Foundation in Pasadena, we are told, transforms the gardener Patience Escalier into “the quintessential peasant”. Van Gogh wanted to capture “the very furnace of harvest time, deep in the south”, a romanticisation of a place, time and the people within it. Rather than pining aesthetes and dashing rakes, the prime subject of Van Gogh is the natural world: flowers, trees, gardens, fields, vineyards, olive groves, and the light that animates our vision of them.

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night over the Rhône, 1888. Oil on canvas, 72.5 × 92 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Donation sous réserve d'usufruit de M. et Mme Robert Kahn-Sriber, en souvenir de M. et Mme Fernand Moch, 1975. Photo © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt.

So ravishing are Van Gogh’s views of the world that his figures sometimes turn into observers. Starry Night over the Rhône (1888), painted by gas-lamp, feels like the sentimental climax of a golden age Hollywood film; Van Gogh adds another pair of lovers, as if willing there to be a besotted couple to witness the scene. The Stevedores (1888), inspired by Hokusai’s prints, captures a majestic sunset in teal, violent and orange so breathtaking that the eponymous workers have to stop to admire it. Van Gogh was fascinated by the subdued landscapes and rustic scenes of Jean-François Millet. But his vision of the countryside could not be more different. In The Sower (1888), he turns a simple farm worker into a near heroic figure, labouring over lavender fields behind the huge disc of the sun.

Vincent van Gogh, Oleanders, 1888. Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 73.7 cm. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Loeb, 1962. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Even the most naturalistic painter, to some extent, transforms the world; the materiality and sheen of oil is not that of the observed world. Van Gogh’s translations are far stranger than most. His paint churns and tunnels. His surfaces never seem to pause. Oleanders (1888) inch from their vase like curious eavesdroppers. The Guggenheim’s Mountains at Saint-Rémy (1889) looks as if it could melt and congeal at any moment. Single canvases become alchemical experiments, with needle-like strokes that barely rise about the canvas giving way to thick smudges. A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889) has pearlescent, whipped-cream clouds, brushy wind-caressed trees and fluffy wheat plants, each with its own brushstroke-created texture. His colours, too, are constantly morphing: a sickly green pallor lurks behind a rosy-red face, a cobalt-blue in an olive tree’s shadow. In Undergrowth (1889) his flickering strokes at once depict the weeds and shrubs in the asylum garden and the light strikes it, adding a dappled majesty to a forlorn scene. In front of paintings this enrapturing, all we can do is wonder.