4/4/2019 Van Gogh and Britain review – gaslit London inspired his starry night? Come off it!

starry night? Come off it! | Art and design | The Guardian

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Van Gogh and Britain review gaslit London inspired

his starry night? Come off it!
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4/4/2019 Van Gogh and Britain review – gaslit London inspired his starry night? Come off it! | Art and design | The Guardian

his starry night? Come off it!

Tate Britain, LondonThere’s a good show trapped within this flabby blockbuster, which
suggests Britain’s peasoupers and smoky tube stations inspired Van Gogh’s light filled hymns to
life
Jonathan Jones
Mon 25 Mar 2019 12.15 GMT

I
never thought I’d see Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers wilt. Yet, in this exhibition about his
relationship with Britain, this incandescent painting is embalmed in a kind of floral chapel
of rest. Dull homages to Van Gogh’s blooms by such early 20th-century British painters as
Frank Brangwyn, Matthew Smith and Samuel Peploe only serve to smother the power and
heat of the painting they imitate. How could the curators think this is a good way to show
Van Gogh’s art?

This version of the Sunflowers normally hangs in the National Gallery, London, where it’s
surrounded by revolutionary art made in late-19th-century France. That’s how we picture Van
Gogh, staggering in the Provençal sun with his easel and brushes, in search of his vision. Cézanne
is at work a few miles away; Gauguin comes to stay. This exhibition wants to shift that familiar
scenery. Forget cypresses waving in the heat haze. Think pea-soupers and smoky underground
stations. The curators even suggest Van Gogh’s glorious blast of gold and blue, the Musee
d’Orsay’s version of Starry Night, is inspired by gaslit London. Somehow we’re supposed to agree
that in 1888, when he painted this ecstatic nocturne of the lights of Arles reflected in the river
Rhône under a cloudless southern night that shudders with celestial energy, he was thinking of
the Thames embankment. We are supposed to swallow the idea that the true genesis of Van
Gogh’s art lies in a youthful sojourn in Victorian England.

Celestial energy … Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888).
Photograph: Hervé Lewandowski/RMN Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)

Yet, imprisoned in this flabby blockbuster, there’s a smaller, more sensitive show struggling to get
out. Van Gogh spent three years in southern England at the start of his adult life. In 1873, he
travelled to London to work in the Covent Garden branch of the art dealers and print sellers
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Goupil et Fils. Things quickly went wrong. He fell disastrously in love with his Brixton landlady’s
daughter, left his job (which he wasn’t much good at) and embarked on the restless search for
meaning and purpose that was to turn him into a heroically brave painter before his suicide at the
age of 37.

The early part of this show does a good job of immersing us in the mind of Van Gogh. In his 1890
portrait L’Arlésienne, his copy of Charles Dickens’s Christmas stories is laid on a table. Van Gogh
spent lonely nights in his Brixton bedroom immersed in the novels of Dickens and George Eliot.
Dickens had died in 1870 and the English graphic artist Luke Fildes captured the national sense of
loss in an engraving called The Empty Chair. Years later in the Yellow House in Arles, Van Gogh
would remember this print when he painted his own and Gauguin’s empty chairs as symbolic
portraits of their absent occupiers.

We see how as a young artist, after returning to the Netherlands in late 1876, Van Gogh tried to
emulate the compassionate social vision of Dickens. In an illustration by Charles Stanley
Rheinhardt to Dickens’s Hard Times, a man sits in despair resting his face in his hands with his top
hat on his head. Van Gogh’s 1881 drawing Worn Out takes this illustration and turns it into
something that breaks your heart. In his version, the old man is alone by a fire, seated in (what
else?) a plain straw-seated wooden chair, his body a kind of clay monument of grief from cap to
clogs.

Numb desolation … Van Gogh’s The Prison Courtyard (1890).

Photograph: Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Van Gogh in Britain makes you look afresh at Van Gogh in the Netherlands. It’s easy to see his
early art, which he created back at home after leaving Britain, as a plodding start, in comparison
with the light-filled hymns to life he was to paint after moving to the south of France in 1888. This
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exhibition dwells on the early, socially conscious works because it claims they are influenced by
Victorian art. Thus we are told that his 1880 drawing Miners in the Snow is inspired by George
Henry Broughton’s 1869 painting Pilgrims Going to Church. Come off it. The Victorian picture is
prosaic. Van Gogh’s drawing is a boldly naive, trenchantly emotional portrait of workers who have
a sculptural strength as they struggle through a brutal industrial world. It’s a brilliant existentialist
cartoon.

Van Gogh’s total freedom from rules and conventions gives his portraits of the poor a directness
that eludes his supposed Victorian models. His 1882 study In Church homes in on the beaten faces
of a sad congregation with a true lust for life. By comparison, its purported inspiration – a
Victorian depiction of Chelsea veterans – is heavy and static.

Is there any evidence at all that British art, as opposed to British novels, shaped Van Gogh’s
vision? That scene of a church congregation obviously owes more to the French artist Daumier
than it does to British art. Van Gogh painted one London scene. His 1890 canvas The Prison
Courtyard shows men in shapeless trousers and jackets walking in a nightmarish circle in the
gothic confines of a deep narrow hexagonal yard, based on London’s Newgate Prison. Their blue
and yellow faces are masks of numb desolation as they retrace their own steps to nowhere.

It hangs here next to the engraving that inspired it, from Van Gogh’s own copy of Gustav Doré’s
1872 book London: A Pilgrimage. Doré was French, his engraving an outsider’s view of British
society. There’s a selection of paintings Van Gogh saw in London, but the only one that echoes in
his own tree-lined avenues under brooding skies is a Dutch 17th-century masterpiece from the
National Gallery, London.

British art was not likely to teach much to a Dutchman whose own heritage included Rembrandt.
He could see bleak northern skies at home. It was the light of the south that would blow his mind.
And that’s where this exhibition goes south. An entire room is dedicated to showing how Van
Gogh in Arles met various minor British artists. Then, just when we should be building to the
climax of Van Gogh’s tragic journey, we are diverted by a section on how the Bloomsbury critic
and painter Roger Fry exhibited his art in London for the first time.

After this are even more early-1900s British paintings of France to distract from Van Gogh’s might.
They look like painting by numbers next to his turbulent revelations. But we do learn something
from the contrast. The south is not what made Van Gogh great. He already had a profound vision
of human sorrow when he got off the train in Arles. The anguish and tension that’s in his drawings
of miners is what makes his sun so different from the insipid orb painters like Fry saw. In the end,
this exhibition just shows how incredibly un-British this European was.

• Van Gogh and Britain is at Tate Britain, London, 27 March to 11 August.

Topics
Van Gogh
Painting
Art
Tate Britain
Exhibitions
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