Obviously this is an absolutely fabulous, to-die-for, once-in-a-century exhibition, 61 works showcasing van Gogh’s genius, half a dozen of them super-world famous classics (Self portrait, Starry Night over the Rhône, Sunflowers, Van Gogh’s Chair), many of them about as thrilling an encounter with a work of art as you could possibly imagine.

Self-Portrait by Vincent Van Gogh (1889) Image Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Surprisingly, this is the first van Gogh exhibition ever staged at the National Gallery; it’s been timed to commemorate a century since the Gallery bought the famous Sunflower and Chair paintings. But, as NG Director Gabriele Finaldi put it, a centenary isn’t enough – ‘every exhibition needs to have an idea, a concept’ and this one is no exception. It is very much a show with a thesis or argument to make, which it maintains across its six big exhibition rooms (which are):

• Room 1 Introduction
• Room 2 The Garden: Poetic Interpretations
• Room 3 The Yellow House: An Artist’s Home
• Room 4 Montmajour: A Series
• Room 5 Decoration
• Room 6 Variations on a Theme

And the thesis which holds it all together? Rather than summarise I’ll let the curators explain in their own words:

In February 1888, the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) went to live and work in the South of France. Over the next two years, in both Arles and Saint-Rémyde-Provence, he created an extraordinary and innovative body of work in which he transformed the people and places he encountered in life. Parks, landscapes and corners of nature became highly expressive, idealised spaces full of literary and poetic references. Similarly, Van Gogh chose individuals from his new surroundings to create portraits of symbolic types, such as The Poet or The Lover.

The careful planning behind Van Gogh’s art extended to creating works in groups or series, and to thinking about how these might be displayed both at his home in Arles and for exhibition in Paris. By gathering a selection of his most famous and beloved creations – and showing them alongside his carefully developed works on paper, a less familiar Van Gogh emerges: an intellectual artist of lucid intention, deliberation and great ambition.

So the curators raise and address about five themes (the ones I’ve put in bold, plus one more which emerges later):

1. Painting archetypes

So this is why the introductory room has just three paintings in it, all of which have the kind of generic, typical titles the curators are talking about, being The Lover, The Poet and the Poet’s Garden. And, indeed, why the entire show is titled ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’.

In later rooms we see many more paintings of The Garden, along with image of the beautiful Woman of Arles and The Peasant. The idea is to impress us that van Gogh was seeking for archetypes behind the everyday.

2. Literary references and poetic effects

On the walls are quotes from van Gogh’s letters which have been selected to show how he invoked poets and writers as he thought about his painting. Thus the park at Arles is said to be worthy of Dante or Petrarch while, later on (in the room full of landscape drawings) he says the countryside of Montmajour outside Arles strongly reminds him of a favourite Émile Zola novel, ‘The Sin of Abbé Mouret’. Wherever possible, the curators quote Vincent referring to literature or reflecting how views, scenes and people remind him of literary types.

3. Drawing

Room 4 is devoted to showing six amazing drawings. Drawings, being quicker and easier, are more given to being conceived as sets or series than paintings, which are often unique one-off works. As the curators put it:

Van Gogh marvelled at the landscapes surrounding Arles, some of which put him in mind of places mentioned in his favourite novels. Among the most evocative were the grounds surrounding the ruined 12th century Montmajour Abbey, a well-known landmark north of Arles. After making a number of drawings of Montmajour in May 1888, he returned in July to create a series of large-scale works on paper. These remarkable drawings depict a hybrid place; at once the result of meticulous observation and the artist’s imagination.

According to the curators it was during van Gogh’s 2-year sojourn that he realised for the first time that he could really draw, as opposed to paint, and the drawings here show him revelling in that discovery.

Landscape near the Abbey of Montmajour by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

4. Series

In Room 2 we see quite a few paintings on the theme of the garden, specifically 1) the public gardens at Arles and 2) the garden at the hospital of Saint-Paul de Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where he admitted himself in May 1889 after a series of mental breakdowns in the preceding months.

Later on, the last room – Room 6: Variations on a theme – shows how he worked on series or sets depicting variations on several themes, notably 1) the Arles woman, 2) views of the mountains and 3) most brilliantly of all, an amazing series of paintings of wild, writhing olive groves.

Olive trees with the Alpilles in the Background by Vincent Van Gogh (1889) © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

5. Displaying his work

Finally, the idea that van Gogh put a lot of thought into how he wanted his work displayed. This is based on what he did with the house he rented in Arles.

Initially Van Gogh only used the Yellow House, which he rented in early May 1888, as a studio because it needed both renovation and furniture. By September he moved in and had bold plans to turn the modest house into an ‘artist’s home’ and a communal ‘studio of the South’ in which his artist friends from Paris could join him to work. He devised a decoration for the house that included his major paintings. This then evolved into carefully conceived ideas about how to present his
art to the public.

So, again, the curators are are at pains to overhaul the image of van Gogh as a kind of naive or mad genius, instead bringing out the sophisticated, calculating, planning and designing part of his personality. A lot of the evidence for this is based on the famous painting of his bedroom.

The Bedroom by Vincent van Gogh (1889) © The Art Institute of Chicago

All very casual, you might think, but the curators bring out van Gogh’s conscious effort to hang and display his works in a deliberate way to create an effect and so describe the 6 paintings you can see hanging in this picture, what they meant to the artist, and why he arranged them the way he did.

6. In the studio

Not mentioned in the curators’ initial survey, as the show progresses another theme emerges, which is Van Gogh’s work painting in the studio, composing scenes from memory.

It came as a surprise to learn that when he was a patient in the asylum he was given a room as a studio to paint in. Some of the paintings in The Garden part of the show (Room 2) depict the view from this ‘studio’ out over the asylum gardens, but we also learn that – in line with the curators’ emphasis on the artifice and intentionality of his work – a number of paintings were painted entirely in the studio, from memory and imagination, as he mixed and matched elements from the real world to achieve a creative and ‘poetic’ effect.

A small example is how in the classic ‘Starry Night over the Rhône’ can Gogh added in the constellation of stars in the sky and the lovers walking in the foreground, to create the poetic effect.

Starry Night over the Rhône by Vincent van Gogh (1888) Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Larger-scale inventions included adding trees to the garden views of the asylum, along with female figures (which we know are fictional because no women were allowed into the asylum).

And, in the last room, we see many more examples of this invention: landscapes where he added in mountain backdrops to fields or groves which didn’t, in reality, have them. And learn that, lastly, the fabulous rhythmic elements in the paintings of olive trees which cover the last wall in the show, were products of the studio i.e. depicting trees and landscape which he’d certainly seen, but reconfiguring their shapes and layout to create the swirling rhythm he was seeking (see below).

Drawings

I’ve mentioned drawing several times. I think about a dozen of the 61 works are drawings and they serve a number of purposes:

One, they are preparatory studies. Vincent drew and sketched a scene before he painted it to work out his composition and treatment. This applies to the several drawings of the garden at the asylum which he made before he painted the scene.

2) Sometimes he made a drawing after he’d made the painting. These were drawings he sent to his brother Theo as quick guides to paintings he had just made and was describing.

3) Lastly, as indicated above, he realised that he could make series of drawings with a thematic unity, that drawing was a new and distinct medium separate from oil painting. Hence, as I’ve mentioned, the room here devoted to the six brilliant Monmajour drawings.

What you get from the drawings (apart from their intrinsic beauty) is a sense of how his pictures are built up from different types of markings. There are lots of the arrays of dashes and hatching, blizzards of centimetre-long rectangular marks, in sets or groups which you see in the paintings. But there are also dots, intense patches of cross-hatching. If I were a teacher I’d ask my pupils to count how many different types of hatching, shading, stippling and so on he uses in this drawing.

The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees by Vincent van Gogh (1888) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

In this respect the drawings are like x-rays of the paintings. In the paintings you can see the same technique at work but the paint is ‘joined up’ to cover the whole canvas, creating a kind of continuous sea of marks and ridges. In the drawings the marks remain isolated, more distinct, much clearer. In this sense the drawings are much more conventional but still radiate the Vincent intensity.

And it’s fascinating to learn that all the drawings were done with reed-pens and quills that he carved and made himself.

Impasto

Impasto is the Italian word used as a technical term in painting and meaning ‘the process or technique of laying on paint or pigment thickly so that it stands out from a surface’ – and, my God! van Gogh is a genius at it.

All the reproductions in this review are useless. They make the paintings seem flat and slick whereas, in the flesh, they are tormented with whorls and ridges of paint applied as with a trowel, building up landscapes of paint across the surface which work with or against the landscapes of the composition. Here a close-up of leaves on an autumnal tree.

Detail of The Public Garden, Arles, by Vincent van Gogh (1888) (photo by the author)

Seeing them so close up, seeing the great ridges of impassioned paint, is like being swept up in a maelstrom of emotions.

Detail of Starry Night over the Rhône by Vincent van Gogh (1888) (photo by the author)

The tiles on the floor of the famous picture of his chair seem to be melting and reforming, rising and rippling from the surface.

Detail of van Gogh’s Chair by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © The National Gallery, London (photo by the author)

In some his technique goes way over the edge, leaving realistic depiction far behind in the really heavy, clotted effect seen in the frankly bizarre ‘The Green Vineyard’.

Detail of The Green Vineyard by Vincent van Gogh (1888) (photo by the author)

This felt like an experiment which he took as far as he could in a particular direction, although there are one or two others of the same murky heaviness. And yet in the same painting, he uses the same technique to create a bird-haunted sky with spectacular results. You feel as you’re entering another universe.

Detail of The Green Vineyard by Vincent van Gogh (1888) (photo by the author)

Maybe simply because it was hung at head height so that my eyes were exactly level with it, but I found that in the painting of his bedroom it wasn’t the table or chairs or paintings hanging on the wall, but the wooden floor which I became more and more mesmerised by, transfixed by.

Detail of The Bedroom by Vincent van Gogh (1889) photo by the author)

Amazing! It’s like a modern abstract painting, a delirious adventure of industrial green and scrappy pink, sculpted into abstract patterns. It feels like the paint has not been applied but has been scraped away to reveal another world beyond, as if we’re peering through a dirty windowpane into a different reality.

Genius

It’s not very often you find yourself in the presence of real genius but in painting after painting, and before some of the drawings, you feel yourself in the presence of a mighty power, a primal energy, a supernatural ability to carve and sculpt blotches and pads of primary colours so as to create great swirling images overflowing with life and energy. I was spellbound, I was overcome, I kept going back to the ones I really liked, it was like drinking sweet wine or strong liqueurs, drinking at the fountainhead, fuelling my eyes and soul.

More masterpieces

Van Gogh’s chair (in which, as I’ve said, it was the floor tiles which got me).

Van Gogh’s Chair by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © The National Gallery, London

The exhibition for the first time brings together two paintings of sunflowers, the one the National Gallery owns hung alongside the one owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, reuniting them for the first time since they were painted.

Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © The National Gallery, London

Another example of the vivid depictions of an olive grove which hang side by side in the last room, creating a tremendous impression.

Olive Grove by Vincent van Gogh (1889) © Photo: Gothenburg Museum of Art / Hossein Sehatlou

And an example of maybe his quieter more domestic style, one among several still lives and studies of flowers, in this case a vase of oleanders but still done with his vibrant use of dramatic colour contrast and, when you look close, great swirls of impasto paint.

Oleanders by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The promotional video

This is the best exhibition in London for years, outclassing everything else. Go along and be rhapsodised and bewitched by works of unique genius and intensity.

Related links

• Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers continues at the National Gallery until 19 January 2025

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