15 November 2024
This truly landmark show, the largest-ever Vincent van Gogh exhibition staged in the United Kingdom, celebrates two significant anniversaries: it’s 200 years since the National Gallery’s opening and 100 years since the first acquisition of work by the iconic artist. It is without doubt the art show of the year, if not the decade: electrifying, mesmerising, intensely affecting, every brushstroke alive with joyous energy. It shows the Dutch master off to breath-taking effect.
In 1888 Van Gogh left Paris and moved to Arles, claiming that “It seems to me almost impossible to work in Paris unless one has some place of retreat where one can recuperate”. Arles would go on to inspire the artist, with its rural scenes and quality of light. It proved to be a prolific period during which — despite emotional turmoil, mental breakdowns and periodic institutionalisation — he produced some of his most famous, inventive and moving works.
From the Yellow House in Arles to the asylum at Saint-Rémy, the exhibition features 61 works from the final two years of Van Gogh’s life, many never seen in Britain before and drawn from galleries in all four corners of the globe and a clutch of private collectors.
A highlight sees the National Gallery’s ‘Sunflowers’ – a favourite with London visitors all year round – hung with another of the seven that he painted while in Arles, usually on display in The Philadelphia Museum of Art, together again for the first time since they were in the artist’s studio. They join La Berceuse (Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle) which has travelled from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Van Gogh sketched out a plan for two sunflowers to be displayed as a triptych on a ship with a version of La Berceuse (Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle) in a letter to his brother Theo. What a joy to see these three paintings – and the sketch – as Van Gogh dreamt they would be.
Another highlight is Portrait of a Peasant, a painting of an old gardener, Patience Escalier, with a green-tinged beard, which has never before left the Norton Simon collection in Pasadena, California.
Walking through the exhibition is an intoxicating experience; the landscapes of Provence morph and throb and spin as the world Van Gogh interpreted through breakdowns and illness becomes a bunch of swirling, seasick vortices of colour. To see all 61 paintings together again as they were in his day is ultimately overwhelming.
Of course Van Gogh had no idea that the pictures that he often traded for bar bills and gave to friends would one day sell individually for tens of millions.
Orchard with Cypreses sold in 2022 at Christie’s, New York for $117m – a record price for a Van Gogh painting
Other notable recent sales include:
Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet sold for $83m in 1990
Labourer in a Field, $81m, 2017
Self Portrait Without a Beard, $72m, 1978
Wooden Cabin Among the Olive Trees and Cypresses, $71m, 2021
The Avenue of Les Alyscamps, $66m, 2015
Poppies and Daises, $62, 2014
Landscape Under Stormy Sky, $54m, 2014
Irises, $54m, 1987
Young Man With a Cornflower, $47m, 2021
Sunflowers, $40m, 1987
And this is to say nothing of his wildly original drawings, filled with the energy and dynamism of his hand, also in the exhibition…
In my favourite Dr Who episode of all time, Vincent and the Doctor, written by Richard Curtis in 2010, The Doctor (Matt Smith) and Amy Pond Karen Gillan) take Vincent Van Gogh (Tony Curran) in the TARDIS to the preset day to the Van Gogh exhibit at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Vincent is stunned by the display of his collected paintings and becomes emotionally overwhelmed when he overhears art curator Dr. Black (Bill Nighy) proclaim Vincent as “the greatest painter of them all” and “one of the greatest men who ever lived”. I would love to see Van Gogh’s reaction to the current much larger and exhaustive exhibition. I can only imagine that he would be completely overwhelmed. As was I.
The exhibition is running until January 19, 2025.
