Vincent van Gogh: Endgame in Auvers (Part 4)

Did Vincent van Gogh intend to kill himself? How would his art have developed if he had lived even just a few months more? And what role did his sister-in-law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, play in establishing his reputation? Join Alastair and James as they chart the final, tragic years in the life and art of Vincent van Gogh. Follow Stories of Art on Instagram: @storiesofart.heni If you want to see the artworks discussed in this episode you can switch on video in your podcast app at any time. Artworks in this episode: Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889, Courtauld Gallery, London Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait with bandaged Ear and Pipe, 1889, Private Collection Vincent van Gogh, Irises, 1889, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Vincent van Gogh, Almond Blossom, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Doctor Gachet, 1890, Private Collection Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890, Musée d'Orsay, Paris Vincent van Gogh, Tree Roots, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Social Producer: Grace Dewar Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm James Fox.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  And I'm Alastair Sooke.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  In the darkness before dawn, a small French village curls up among the olive groves. The cottages are still, the bell tower silent, but above them, the sky is very much awake. Nocturnal currents hurl themselves across the firmament like crashing waves. Eleven golden stars and one enormous moon detonate the darkness into a giant fireworks show, thick brushstrokes dancing around each other in psychedelic circles. Has anyone on the ground noticed this spectacular display? Only, it seems, the man who painted it. Now, that, Alistair, is my description of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night,

• 0:51Speaker 00

  an intensely romantic image of joy and wonder that's adored all over the world. But it's not quite what it seems, is it?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  No. I mean, as you say, this is... Do you think this is the most famous painting?

• 1:03Speaker 00

  I think it probably is alongside the Sunflowers.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so popular. It's in New York in MoMA. And as you say, if you didn't know the context, it would be very hard to predict or imagine what it is. Because Vincent van Gogh painted this image in the summer of 1889, when he was in a psychiatric clinic, not in Arles, which is where we left him at the end of last episode, but nearby, just outside a village called Saint-Rémy. And he was there for about a year. And one of the fascinating things is that it was this feverish period, wasn't it, of creativity, where he was just knocking it out of the park again and again in terms of canvases.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  And it's a sort of strange idea, because, as you say, it feels like a very romantic image. Here's this big epic sky, that sort of whirling, turbulent, agitated sky. And yet, he was probably inspired when he was just in this very small bedroom on the second floor with terracotta tiles and a window with iron bars. And looking out of that window, he would have seen... Well, we know he would have seen some of the stars clearly up in the night sky. We know that as he was waiting for the sun to rise, he also saw the so-called Morning Star, which I think is one of the 11 stars you mentioned. It's in fact Venus.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Venus, yes.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  As well as that crescent moon. I remember talking once, this is a slight random detour, but to an astrophysicist about the picture. And the first thing she said was like, well, of course, that's Venus. I thought, well, that's how you know someone with real expertise is involved. But he couldn't have painted it, obviously, at night. And he would have painted it in his studio in a separate part of this asylum, which was on the ground floor, looking out on a completely different vista, which was an internal walled garden.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  So this is an image of immense imagination, as much as anything else.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  But painted really very close towards the end of his life, he would be dead within a year or so of painting this picture. So let's do a little recap before we get into the episode proper. Listeners, last time, Alistair, will remember that we ended the previous episode of Christmas of 1888, six months before he painted Starry Night, in a clinic in Arles, in the south of France, where Vincent was recovering after cutting off his... Did you call it at one point a facial appendage?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  I think you did. We'll call it his ear.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  His elegance with words, yes, his ear.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Let's go old fashioned and call it his ear. It was probably Vincent's first psychotic episode, but it would not be his last. And in this part, we're going to focus on the final 18 months of Vincent's life, which was marked, as you have suggested, by ever greater artistic achievement, but also ever worsening mental health, concluding, of course, with his tragically premature death the following year in 1890. So this then is the devastating final episode in our four-part series on the life and work of Vincent van Gogh.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Alistair, let's begin this episode on Christmas Day, 1888. Vincent, of course, has chopped off his ear. His brother Theo has come down to see him on the overnight train from Paris. And he walks in, he finds him in the hospital, and he discovers that Vincent is actually in pretty good state. He's sane, he's lucid, he's sitting up in his bed. They chatted. There's a lovely moment when Theo actually climbs into bed with Vincent, and they hold each other, and they reminisce about their childhood. But Theo is, it seems, sufficiently reassured about Vincent's condition that that evening, I think on Christmas Day evening, he gets on a train with Paul Gauguin.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  The big betrayal.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  The big betrayal, and they travel back up to Paris. And this coincides with, and probably actually precipitates, a massive and very rapid decline from Vincent. As soon as Theo leaves, really, he plunges into anguish again. He's tormented by these regrets. He's not eating, he's not sleeping.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I think he goes to the hospital, doesn't he, in Arles? And this is according to Gauguin. He was describing Vincent's behaviour. He said that he wants to sleep with the patients, he chases the nurses, and washes himself in the coal bucket.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  So it's not good, is it? It's not good at all. And actually, Vincent is in a terrible state for another fortnight or so. It's not until the 6th or 7th of January 1889 that he is finally considered fit and healthy enough to leave the clinic and to return to the Yellow House. And one of the first things he does when he gets to the Yellow House in January 1889 is he paints two self-portraits. Now, you, Alistair, have been badgering me for several weeks about these self-portraits with the bandaged ear. We actually discussed one at the very start of this series. This is finally your opportunity to discuss these two paintings.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Quid's in.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  What do you want to say?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  So, yes, as you point out, one of them, we began this whole series with, and it's the one that is now at the Courtauld Gallery in London. And do you remember, we described he's in this kind of beautiful, big, green greatcoat, and he has this furry hat? And you can see his left ear, which, because it's a mirror image, it appears in the painting as if it's his right ear, but it was painted in a mirror, it has this big bandage on it. He looks slightly to me haunted and quite sort of yellow, sickly. He's clean-shaven, very rare for self-portraits of Van Gogh, which you really don't see in the 30, 35-odd self-portraits. And I went to see that painting again recently. And one of the things I'd forgot to mention last time but was really struck by is, when you look at it up close, it has so much thick

• 6:40Speaker 01

  texture to the way it's painted, and that helps to describe the form. So all of the bristles of the fur hat, you know, they're 3D.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  They're actually bristly.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  They kind of are. He's using that thick impasto paint to create a sense of the fur hat. But this time, I wanted to talk about the lesser-known second self-portrait with a bandaged ear, which is in a private collection. It has sometimes been exhibited, but it's very similar but slightly different. And I think it might interest listeners because it's not probably quite as famous. You see him in the same sort of pose. He's got that big green greatcoat, it's buttoned up to the neck, and he's wearing that same bluish-blue-black bristly fur cap. And you can see again the bandage, which, didn't you call it like an errand scarf that's kind of let up his face? But this time, there are some differences.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  There's a background where you don't see, in the Courtauld version, there's that Japanese print with the tarrant. Do you remember that seemed to be pecking at the ear?

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Love that observation.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  And a sort of easel, which is showing that he's back and he's painting again. But this time, you just have a two-tone colourful background of, in the upper third, a scorching orange, and then a deep red beneath, which complements or contrasts with his green coat.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  And interestingly, the line where these colours meet seems to bisect, if you continued it through his face, right through his eyes, which has been suggested helps to accentuate that gaze as he's looking out. He's also smoking a pipe. He loved his pipe.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  He did.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  And the smoke of it is, creates a great sense of animation to the picture because you have the puffs of smoke which seem to move up one side of the painting. He looks slightly to me, I always think, this is a very trivial, flippant observation, but something of George W. Bush?

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Yes, because the eyes are very close set, aren't they?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  It's very different to the Courtauld. And so I wonder what you think both of these paintings are really saying about his state of mind, how he's feeling at this moment? Because bear in mind, he's just come back from the hospital. This is post that catastrophe that we examined and interrogated in some detail last time. He doesn't have to paint himself in this way, and he doesn't have to present his bandaged ear. And the more I've been sort of thinking about Van Gogh during this series, the revelation for me has been how religious, in a sense, and religion is so important for him. And I just wonder whether here, he is self-consciously presenting himself almost like someone in a classical religious painting presenting their stigmata, the wounds of Christ. I don't know.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Very interesting. I mean, I think, with all due respect to the Courtauld, I think this other version is even better. And the Courtauld one is great, obviously. But this one is tighter, it's more intense, it's got that wonderful background you've described. I love the motif of the smoke rising up through the canvas. And you just, you mentioned that it's in a private collection. Can you imagine if, and probably when, this comes to auction?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I mean, a self-portrait by Van Gogh with a bandage, it will break all auction records.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  So I think the current record is 2022, Orchard with Cypresses, which was painted in April 1888. So he's arrived in Arles, and we spoke about that moment where he's really excited by springtime in the south of France. That sold for... Use British currency, £103 million.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Now, we do know with the pipe self-portrait with the bandaged ear that it was bought, I think in the 70s, by the Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niakos. And the detail I love about this is that apparently he had his chalet in Samaritz in Switzerland, and he used to chopper this painting in so he could enjoy it when he was there, supposedly. This is what I read in one of Martin Bailey's excellent blogs in the Art Newspaper, which I may have mentioned once or twice.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Well, I think this will blow that record out of the water, without question. I think both of these paintings are probably trying to do the same thing. I think he is trying to prove to his doctors, I think he is trying to prove to his brother, I think above all, he is trying to prove to himself that he's up and running again. You know, that he's had this, he's had this episode, he's lost his facial appendage, but he's now back in the studio, back in the Yellow House, he's painting, he's dressed up warm, which is what his doctors told him to do on a cold January day.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  He's, he's wearing his bandage, as he's supposed to be, and he's, he's on the road again.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  The thing is, he doesn't really look totally balanced and well, which you might expect, given what he's just been through, in terms of the facial expression. It sort of betrays some sense of unease as well. It's, it wouldn't fill you with confidence necessarily.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  And, and indeed, if you know the story of Vincent van Gogh, you wouldn't be confident. Because indeed, within a few weeks of painting this picture, within a month, I guess, he suffers a relapse, and then another relapse. And his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, so erratic, in fact, that 30 of his neighbours actually petition the police to have him arrested. They don't feel safe on the Place La Martin. Now, there are lots of hagiographies of Vincent out there. I hope we haven't been producing one ourselves. I think we've been pretty balanced in the way we've described him. But some of the accounts from the witnesses are pretty worrying and concerning. So they describe, for instance, Vincent drinking too much. They say he's chasing children on the street, that he's grabbing and touching women,

• 12:10Speaker 00

  that he's being obscene, that he's following women into their homes. Now, some of those accounts may be exaggerated, some may be invented, but it's, it's not good. It's not good. And like a kind of celebrity who gets caught for sexual harassment and then quickly checks themselves into the priory to avoid any scrutiny, it seems that Vincent very quickly decided, perhaps for his own safety,

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  or perhaps to reassure Theo and the community in Arles, that he would commit himself to a psychiatric hospital. And that is what he does. On the 8th of May, 1889, he goes to this small, I think it's a church-affiliated psychiatric hospital, an asylum, as it would be called back then, in a place called Saint Remy, which is, I think, about 15 miles or so away from Arles.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  It, it must be something like that. I mean, I'm only pausing because I have actually been there.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  As a patient?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  As a patient. I, it perhaps would be very beneficial for my state of mind. I was on a press trip. I was lucky enough to be on a press trip, which was run by the National Gallery ahead of their big Van Gogh exhibition a couple of years ago. And we went to Arles, didn't see the Yellow House, because as we established, it no longer exists. But we did go to what was the asylum at Saint Remy, where Van Gogh spent a year of his life. It is still a psychiatric clinic.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Oh, is it?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  But parts of it are open to tourists. And it was quite a special, I mean, you don't get to see the patients clearly, separated. It was, it was an odd experience, I can say, looking back. I was thinking about it, I sort of hadn't thought about it for a while, but obviously ahead of today, I was thinking about it. As a sense of place, you're plunged into his paintings immediately. So as you approach, you see all these olive trees. There are the Alpeel Mountain Range, which often features in the background of the paintings. You can see them. The, the building itself, which was originally this 12th century monastery, and it's a very beautiful building, quite low slung, big, thick walls. And you go in, and there is a wing where you go upstairs, and there's a little sign on a door, and it says Vincent's Bedroom.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  And in you go, and actually, hang on, I found the picture that I took on my phone. There are these terracotta tile floors, there's this iron bedstead with a tasseled white bedspread on it. There's an easel there, as if you've just stepped out of the room with a, with a painting on the go and a paint-smattered artist's smock. It's possible this is gone in the two years since I've been there, and a window. But the thing that became quite plain quite quickly is that although on the way in, you saw the sign, and there was a little reproduction of Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh on the wall, someone pointed out, possibly even Martin Bailey, someone pointed out, this wasn't his bedroom at all.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  And I thought, I thought I'd better check this. And so I did email Martin, who's the guru on all of this stuff. And he said, yep, you're absolutely right. In fact, his bedroom was in a different wing, which runs north from the cloisters, and it was on the upper level. And that interior of that wing has been remodelled some time ago.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  So that's slightly odd. What was really special was the director of the current institution allowed us, when there were no patients around, to go into the walled garden, where there were no current patients, and we could go in, which tourists don't normally get to do. And there were these undulating tree trunks and irises just springing up from the grass and winding paths and that low, yellowish building in the background, which you often see in his paintings. This is where Vincent spent a huge amount of time. And I think actually, this is my impression, seemed to find for a period quite a lot of peace. Because I think he recognised that he was potentially a danger to others. That's partly what all of that petition was about, that, that really sort of

• 15:46Speaker 01

  difficult behaviour you've just outlined. And when he was in the asylum, which, as you say, he took himself to voluntarily, he was not going to be a threat unto others. He did suffer attacks, didn't he?

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, but he loved it initially. He wrote, I think I have done well to come here. I have never been so peaceful as here. And I think, I mean, it sounds like bliss to me, I'm personally. Just being up in the mountains, away from everything, lots of time, time to write, time to read, time to paint. He took these very long baths. The one thing he complained about, he said, the one really bad thing about being there, is all the patients were eating so many beans that they were farting non-stop. So that was the big, the big setback for him. But he was taking these very long baths and, and having initially a lovely time.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Now, you mentioned baths. I saw a couple of baths. Now, again, I can't be sure, because as the bedroom wasn't actually his bedroom, maybe these baths weren't actually Vincent's baths. But what they appeared to be were enormous metal tubs

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  with this wooden panel leaving a neck hole at one end, so that you would have been put in for some sort of, it looked like slightly enforced treatment.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Oh, not quite how I envisaged the baths to be.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Impossible. So, yes, but you are totally right. It clearly was, the vision of this place originally set up was that it was quite progressive. It was trying to utilise nature as a form of therapy. And the people who ran it when Vincent was there clearly were quite enlightened, because he desperately needed still to make art and to paint, and they allowed him to paint.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Not all the time. There were some moments where, in some of these, I think there were, were there four serious attacks when he was there? And he did, in one of them, I think, he, he was even eating dirt and eating oil paint. And so they said, hmm, maybe don't paint for a little bit after that. But he could do the thing that he loved, and which, in a sense, this is the, the big argument that we touched on already in this series about Vincent. He was painting in moments of calmness, lucidity, when he was sane,

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  rather than the great myth of the madman, sort of slapping paint onto his canvases in a frenzy.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  That's absolutely true. Yeah, it was, it's a lovely place. It was an expensive, private clinic that Theo was, was paying for. It was only half-full. And so soon after he arrived, he said, well, can I have a, a room to be my studio? And they said, yes, take a ground floor room. And he got an extra, a separate space for his painting. And very quickly, in May, June of 1889, he starts painting some real bangers. I mean, he paints the irises, you mentioned seeing irises there. Just a stunning painting.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  I prefer it even to the sunflowers. Beautiful. He paints the very famous wheat field with cypress trees. And of course, he, he paints the picture that we started this episode with, the so-called Starry Night.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Can I, just before we get stuck into the Starry Night, I want to respond to what you're saying, because I think he really does see landscape as a form of escape.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  You know, you have to remember, there were iron bars on the window. And when he looked out, there was an enclosure, more walled gardens. It's sort of like double sense of confinement. And it does feel as though through painting, he's finding a way to escape perhaps those circumstances. And I think it's also worth, just very quick aside, observing something that he didn't paint, which I would not have known about had I not gone to Saint Remy into what was the quote-unquote asylum, which is that very nearby, there are these ancient, really quite good, ancient Roman ruins. Because back in the day, there was a, a wealthy ancient city called, I think, Glanum, G-L-A-N-U-M. And there is still, there's the remains of a triumphal arch,

• 19:16Speaker 01

  and there's this big, quite intricate, I think it's a, a sort of mausoleum, funery monument, within walking distance of the entrance of the asylum. And sometimes Vincent was allowed to go outside, and he spent time outside, and was within a few hundred yards. He doesn't seem to have depicted those Roman monuments at all. Similarly, in Arles, which is dominated by the great Roman amphitheatre, he never paints that either.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, very interesting. Well, let's talk about the Starry Night. You, you've mentioned actually about the view that Vincent had. So he had this room that had a barred window that looked east over the landscape. And the first thing he saw was, I think you've mentioned it, an enclosed wheat field, surrounded by a dry stone wall. There were some cypress trees, and there was the Alpeel Mountain Range behind. He became really transfixed by this view. He painted lots and lots of paintings, lots and lots of drawings as well, of this view. But the Starry Night is, is the most celebrated. What's your view of the, the Starry Night? I've described it already at the start of this episode. Are you a fan?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  I adore this painting, like everybody else, so I've really stuck my neck out there.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  I don't like it.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Do you not? Oh, good. Okay, well, we can have a bit of an argument about that. The thing for me that you have to always remember is that this isn't a view out of his bedroom window at all, because no night sky really in the world has ever looked like that. You see in amongst those glowing stars and the crescent yellow crescent moon and Venus, the white sort of orb in the sky towards the lower part of the sky. You also see these kind of big swirling forms, like, almost like two letter S's, which seem to be coming in from the left of the canvas, which suggests, what, some sort of cosmic winds, some sort of, could that be, is that the Mistral?

• 21:04Speaker 00

  I think it's the Mistral wind.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  You know, the wind was such an important feature of his life there, it really bothered him. It actually brought on one of his nervous breakdowns. And so it was very windy. It was very difficult to paint outdoors.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Practically speaking, when there's a, there's a blowing, howling wind. I think it is the wind that he's painting.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  I can't help but see a reference as well, though, to something that we've covered already in this series, which is the great wave, Hokusai. He loves Japanese prints. Hokusai, who was sometimes called the Dickens of Japan, he also loves Charles Dickens. This is perhaps slightly fanciful connections, but it feels like this cascading wave, something of great drama and import, this sort of pyrotechnics in the sky. But the thing that I was going to say about it not being a realistic view is you look beneath that and there's a village.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  As you said, there was no village when he looked down. So you might think, okay, maybe it's the nearby village of Saint-Rémy. It looks nothing like the village of Saint-Rémy, partly because it has this church in the middle with a tall tapering spire that's much more reminiscent of the kind of architecture you would have found in his homeland, in the Netherlands. So there feels like there's this idea of, he's playing with imagination and memory. And do you think perhaps deriving some comfort in this moment in the asylum from, in the same way that in the crisis itself, and you just said, he was, the day after, reminiscing about his childhood with Theo, and he had said that he, on that fateful night in December 1888, he'd suddenly had pictured himself back in his childhood home

• 22:31Speaker 01

  and its surroundings. You know, he's being taken back to his earliest beginnings.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  I think nostalgia is an important part of this. He's probably also experimenting with what Gauguin had been telling him to do, which is work from the imagination, work from memory, don't just work from observation.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  That is for me, my problem with the picture.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  I find it too fantastical. I think in my view, Vincent is an artist who observes nature and he is at his best when he is observing the world very closely, particularly banal things like shoes and chairs and flowers. And this just seems to me, it feels too invented. It feels synthetic. It feels like if you told ChatGPT to make a Van Gogh nocturnal image, it will come up with this.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Well, it would now, because this is so effing famous.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  It certainly would now. But also, the other problem with it being an invention is the composition isn't actually very interesting. He made a lot of pictures of that view out of the window that have such visual interest. They have these slanting walls, the foreground and the background don't really make sense. They're so hard to make sense of and they're brilliantly exciting. This is just quite a four-square composition. It's parallel to the picture plane. He's plonked a cypress tree on the golden section. It feels just, it feels too pat for me.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  So the cypress tree is one of the things that I love the most about it. It has this kind of dark, sort of very dark green, almost sort of dark brownie-blackish green, these cypress trees, which they're snaking. They look a bit like those sort of snake plants. They seem to be themselves, you know, could be like a rearing cobra, which is being tarmed at the front, tapering right up to the very top. And part of the reason I love that is, I, I think it's, that really is about observation of the landscape and the natural world. And he is really thinking like an original inventive artist. There's that very famous quote, isn't there, where he's thinking about, he's already made sunflowers his own motif, and he suddenly realizes that cypresses, they're obsessing him, and he's

• 24:29Speaker 01

  realizing that no artist has depicted them as he sees them. He says they have a beauty of line and proportion like that of an Egyptian obelisk, which I love. I think as well that this is this sort of hinge moment in Vincent's career, but also avant-garde art at this moment, where we're moving away from a sense of trying to transcribe the real world, and it becomes about feeling, yearning, something inside, agitated emotion, a sense of turbulence, but something also quite wonderful. There is a kind of cosmic display here, which is, it feels as though, you know, we're still in that sub-lunary, which is a posh way of saying this world bit at the bottom, with that make-believe

• 25:14Speaker 01

  village, but the spire is aspiring to get up to the heavens, the cypress tree is yearning to really get up there, to be part of this great fantastical display. And I think that's something which certainly I respond to, I think a lot of people respond to.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  You heartless.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Well, look, let me also say that Vincent didn't like this picture either.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  This is true. And indeed Theo, right?

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you read Vincent's correspondence, he really felt this didn't work, and he was completely right. It doesn't work at all.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Anyway, for me.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  But anyway, he paints this picture, he paints a number of very important pictures and some stunning cypress trees. And I completely agree with you that when you actually look at the drawings of the cypress trees, they are breathtaking. But after six weeks of this, he begins to relapse again. By mid-July, I think I mentioned this earlier, he's out painting in a quarry, the Mistral winds pick up, they scatter his painting equipment, he loses consciousness, and really, he doesn't really recover for almost two months. So that's when he's, you know, he's suffering hallucinations throughout the midsummer, he's fainting, he's suffering vertigo, he begins, as you say, he's eating dirt, he gets very paranoid, he thinks the, the staff, the hospital are plotting against him, they find him drinking

• 26:27Speaker 00

  kerosene, they find him eating his paint. We don't know whether he's just very confused or whether he's trying to poison himself. And he ends up being confined to his bedroom, in fact, perhaps even just a bed, for about two months. And it's only really by the end of August 1889 that he begins to emerge again. And he paints some beautiful pictures through the autumn. That's when he paints all these Olive Grove series, absolutely beautiful. But then, as autumn turns to winter, the ghost of Christmas past begins to haunt him again. And indeed, on the 23rd of December, I think it's a year to the day since he cut his ear off, he has another relapse. And he spends much of that Christmas period, Alastair,

• 27:11Speaker 00

  huddled in the corner of his room, under his sheets, head in his hands, speaking in tongues. He recovers again briefly, then he relapses again in the spring. The thing to say here is what's happening is Vincent's relapses are coming ever more quickly and with ever greater severity. It's very ominous for what is to come. By the end of April, Alastair, this is now 1890, he writes, what am I to say about these last two months? Things didn't go well at all. I am sadder and more wretched than I can say, and I do not know at all where I have got to. So Vincent's health, Alastair, is in a very fragile state. And by the middle of 1890, he decides to leave the asylum and

• 27:53Speaker 00

  to begin a new life elsewhere. And that will not go well either. So join us after the break, when we will conclude the story of Vincent van Gogh.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Here at Stories of Art, we are so grateful to all of you all over the world for listening, watching and commenting. We've been thrilled with the response so far.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  And some good news. You can now find us on Instagram at storiesofart.henny. So please do follow us, comment, and by all means, suggest topics for future episodes.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. It's the 16th of May, 1890. Vincent, now 37 years old, checks himself out of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and he travels to northern France.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Why is he going?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Well, it's a good question. Why is he going?

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Well, I can tell you. So the first thing he does, he stops in Paris for a few days. Because his brother Theo and his sister-in-law Jo have just had a baby, whom they've named

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Vincent.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  They have named Vincent in his honour.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  He wasn't very happy about that, was he?

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Well, he, was he not?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  No, he actually sort of went back and suggested, look, I wish that you could have called him Theo, so that his nephew would have been named after his father and Vincent's dad. And, but this was an interesting moment of respect, wasn't it? And love, that sort of fraternal bond between Theo and Vincent, that's such a constant of this story. I think it's really rather sweet, but it's also, I don't know whether we're going to get into this now, but that sense of Theo having other priorities, he has a wife, they have a child. These are quite important moments for Vincent, because they add in a sense to his concerns that he himself might be too much of a burden on his brother.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Now that he would be preoccupied with the new baby.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  But there is a lovely little moment, Alastair, he travels up to Paris, he spends a couple of days with Theo, and there's a moment when he and Theo, they stand by the crib of the baby, and they both sob with joy.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  So lovely, but Vincent is only going to stay in Paris for a few days. His real destination is a little place, little village or a small town, just on the outskirts of Paris called Auver.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Now, I was slightly being, I don't know why I responded in that fashion, I can tell you about Auver. Auver is this, I guess it was a bit of an artist commune, sort of slightly untouched, it wasn't really industrialised, this pastoral setting. But one of the things that Vincent would find there was a person.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  And this person is called Paul Gachet, Dr Paul Gachet. Theo had found him, Theo had been recommended, or rather, a different artist called Camille Pissaro.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Your favourite?

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Not my favourite, but the senior, rather sweet man, impressionist. He had suggested that Theo should perhaps talk to this man, Paul Gachet. Little bit of an eccentric.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's a crank, isn't he?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  He was quite into palm reading.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  But he was also an amateur artist himself, he had a printing press, he was friends with lots of artists in the avant-garde. And Auver was a place where artists had gone to create works of art. So I guess what Vincent is finding, what the sort of benefit of Auver is, is he's left the asylum behind, but if he's going to carry on painting, he either needs to find another institution where he can paint, or someone who can keep an eye on him.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  And Paul Gachet, Dr Gachet, who he does paint, two stunning portraits, maybe we can talk about briefly. But Paul Gachet would keep an eye on him in Auver whilst he's staying in this inn. And of course, it also has proximity to Paris.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  So he can see Theo and that new nephew, in whose honour he painted that wonderful picture of almond blossom, which you see in close up, like a sort of Japanese print against this bluish turquoisey sky, stunning painting.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Stunning picture. Yes, he goes to see Gachet. I mean, Vincent is not impressed with Gachet, I think he turns up on the first day and he says to Theo, this is not the man for me. In fact, he says, this man's sicker than I am. But they do actually build a relationship over time, and he ends up painting two portraits, as you say, of Gachet. I think the first art news I ever remember hearing about was when in 1990, when I was eight years old, one of the portraits of Dr Gachet was sold to a Japanese collector, I think for 82, 83 million dollars or something like that. Complete record auction price at that point. That was the first time.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  And that picture, and the other picture, shows Gachet in the melancholic pose, the hand on the face. Because Gachet was, I think he was lonely, I think his wife had died, I think he was suffering from mental health issues himself.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  He looks like a patient.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  He does.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  It's sort of, you wonder whether there's a sense of projection from Vincent. Interestingly about that Japanese businessman, do you remember the sort of, the added component of that story is that he generated headlines when he suggested that when he died, he wanted the painting he had bought for that world record price to be cremated with him.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Really?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  He eventually rode back from this.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Oh, good.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  And it was sold again in, I think, 96, and presumably is somewhere in a private collection, I don't think it's really known where. The second Dr Gachet portrait, very similar, but there are differences, is in Paris, at the Musée d'Orsay. And he has that same slumped pose, a face almost like melting wax, which seems to be sort of disintegrating before your eyes. And there's a fox glove prominently, and I think both pictures, which has curative properties. I think you can derive some medical drugs from fox gloves. And so that's a hint at his medical expertise, certainly a hint at the fact that he was this homeopathic doctor. Vincent talks about seeing in the portraits of Dr Gachet,

• 33:53Speaker 01

  he's painting something which he describes as the desolate expression of our time. And I think one of his great inventions is he makes portraits of people around him, but they are these sort of new, modern portraits of, in a sense, an era, a zeitgeist. As much as an individual, and indeed as much as they may be, to some extent, a quasi-self-portrait.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're both ginger as well, aren't they? I wonder if that helps them bond. But Vincent settles in Auver, and just like in the Boreenage, just like in Aul, just like everywhere he goes, he's bullied. He's harassed. People are actually more mean to him in Auver than anywhere else.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  What happens?

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Well, particularly, there's a group of boys, these bully boys, who are in the town, and they torment him. So they put salt in his coffee when he's not looking. They find a snake and they put a snake in his paintbox, and when Vincent was terrified of snakes, when he opens up his paintbox, this snake comes out and he virtually faints. They notice that when he's painting, he absentmindedly licks his brush, and so they dip his brushes into chili oil. And so, you know, his mouth kind of explodes when he's painting. So they're really, really tormenting him, they're making his life a misery. But there is a lovely moment while he's in Auver. A couple of weeks after he arrives, on a Sunday, Theo and Jo and little Vincent come to visit him for lunch.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Vincent meets them at the train station, he's collected a little bird's nest that he gives to his nephew as a present. And then he takes them for lunch, and after the lunch, Vincent insists on carrying his nephew, his namesake. And he takes him around the farmyard, thrusting him at the farm animals, and this baby is screaming, the poor baby. But it's a lovely moment where he can sort of envisage what the future might be. But Vincent is once again producing incredible works, and it's in Auver, Alastair, that he starts making these so-called double-square pictures. These extra-large paintings, they're a metre wide, half a metre high, they're the largest pictures I think probably he ever makes. And they are pretty extraordinary pictures.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  And the one I want to focus on is a picture called Tree Roots, which is in the Van Gogh Museum. It's not his most famous picture, but it is probably his very last painting. He makes it in July 1890, it might well have been made on the final day of his life. And it depicts some gnarled trees and tree roots on the side of a road in Auver. It's very interesting, the roots and the trees are still there. I went down a little rabbit hole in this, because you know, there was a couple, a few decades ago, a couple who were such fans of Vincent Van Gogh that they retired to Auver, and they bought this property,

• 36:36Speaker 00

  and they did not realise that in their back garden were the tree roots that were the subject of probably his last painting.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  And only recently, there's been a big legal dispute, because the roots are visible, they're right next to the road.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  And the council is trying to claim that that land is actually council-owned.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  While they are claiming, in fact, they were successful in their case, is actually their private property. But this is what Vincent paints, he probably sits on the road and paints these roots.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Can I say that, I mean, I think it's important just to point out that lots of people think that his last painting was the famous wheat field with crows. And it feels like it's a really somber, ominous painting, with these kind of black crows flitting around, and there's a path that leads nowhere, and sort of ominous, somber sky, sense of menace, you know, maybe the end of his life is approaching. But that isn't the case, he paints several works after that picture.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  And Tree Roots, which looks, to me anyway, and I think to others initially, because of the crop, the tightness of the way he's composed the image, it feels like it's a proto-Jackson Pollock, piece of kind of abstract painting. If you really look close, because, you know, you're describing, it's so interesting that these roots still exist. But they're quite oddly positioned, aren't they? There's quite a sort of steep limestone-ish, what would you call it, bluff or something? And then these big gnarly roots, but he focuses on the roots. If you look at the top left of the painting, there's a patch of blue, that probably is the sky, in fact, you can see through. But you don't read it as that initially at all. And I think for a long time, until they discovered this exact spot,

• 38:10Speaker 01

  lots of people looked at this when they realised the date of it and what was about to happen, and saw in it a great distortion of reality, a great reflection of tremendous unease within Vincent himself. But of course, actually, when you see the pictures, I think there's some old postcard, isn't there? And there's some, I don't know, glass plate photograph from 1907 or around 1910. He's doing the thing that he always does.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Which is he is engaging very closely with the natural world, and then transforming that in his inimitable style.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  I'm going to say this, Alistair, I think this is his single greatest work.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  I think this is his absolute masterpiece. I know it's not as famous as The Sunflowers. I know it's not as famous as Starry Night. You know I don't like Starry Night. This, for me, is absolutely stunningly good. The brilliance of the colour, the rhythm of the brushstrokes, the incredible bravery compositionally. I mean, this is a landscape without, I mean, maybe it does have a horizon, but I didn't think it did have a horizon. It's certainly a landscape without really a background, without really a foreground. He is dismantling hundreds of years of compositional artistic tradition in this picture. The whole thing is becoming this flat, latticework of brush and paint and colour and form right up in your face. I think it's absolutely stunning.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  It is like cubism, it is like abstraction, decades before cubism and abstraction comes along. I think it's incredible. And, you know, when I look at this picture, I think I mentioned this right at the start of the series, you know, when you think this is probably his very final picture, it makes you think, oh my god, if he'd had a few more months, a few more weeks, a few more days, if he'd had just one more session of painting, what would he have gone on to do? How would he have changed the history of art? How would he have changed the trajectory towards abstraction? It is so unbelievably good, this picture.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  I mean, he obviously, with a picture like this, he does change the history of art. That's the kind of glory of it. I think the fascinating thing is thinking about it in those biographical terms of what he's about to go and do, because, you know, what does this convey? Part of the interest with Vincent van Gogh all the time is the life as much as the art, because it's such an extraordinary story. What is this saying about his state of mind at this moment? Because in many ways, in Au Verre, things have been going really well.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  He's there for, until his death, I think it's about 10 weeks. And in that time, he's, as you say, like, producing all of these bangers. I think he's painting almost a painting a day. It's an extraordinary feat.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  And big ones as well.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Big paintings, great, intensive, creative effort. And you could look at this and see it as, it's almost as though he's peering into the undergrowth, it's sort of six feet under, you know, what's it suggesting? But on the other hand, it's throwing forward, as you say, it's a real hinge picture in the kind of history of art, to, you know, by the time you get to the mid 20th century and the abstract expressionists, I sort of mentioned Pollock, one of the phrases that's often used about those pictures is a kind of all-over composition.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  And that's exactly what you have here. There isn't initially seemingly an obvious focal point or depth. So he is depicting something in the real world, but he's also seemingly signalling that it's just paint on canvas. And that sense of proto-abstraction is certainly, for, I guess, the likes of us, really, really fascinating.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  But, you know, it's weird to think that things were deteriorating so rapidly, because he is starting, we'll come on to this, he's starting to find some success in his professional life. I didn't realise the extent of the bullying with the snakes and the chilli oil and all the rest of it. But in a sense, he is really in his prime.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  He really is.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  I think what suddenly happens in around about summer, just shortly before he's painting this, is there's this very telling letter, isn't there, where he writes to Theo, to his brother, about, this is when he's suddenly concerned about financial risk, because Theo's having a tough time at work, he wants to leave the gallery where he's worked, he wants to set up as an independent dealer, he has this new child, the baby's health, I think, is not great at this moment, so there's a lot of worry on that side. And I think there may be some climactic meeting, possibly takes place in Paris with Theo, Jo Bongar, Theo's wife, her brother Vincent. It makes him extremely anxious. And afterwards, he writes and says that his life has been, his life, Vincent's life, attacked at the

• 42:39Speaker 01

  very root. And this is what he then goes to paint. And so you do wonder whether, I don't know, I mean, sometimes it's sort of not the done thing, is it, to be projecting all the time biography on to painting? It's got nothing to do with the idea that this is a brilliant 20th century sort of abstract work, avant la lettre, if you like. But nevertheless, you take that quote, you look at this picture, and you realise what he's about to do, it's really upsetting.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I remember looking at this work in an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum quite a few years ago now, and talking to a curator there called Ninka Bakker. And she was making the point, which I thought was really worth repeating now, which is that, yes, you look at a picture like that, it seems agitated, it seems conventionally emotionally turbulent, but it's also, for the reasons you're outlining, it's really vigorous.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  It's an adventurous work of art. And so it's quite hard to believe that somebody who's painting that in the morning or at some point in the day is then going to subsequently attempt to take their own life. You know, there has been a description of this as a suicide note in colour. But she's arguing, and I think it's probably right, that's a bit too pat and rational, and perhaps does a disservice to the kind of explosive originality and creativity of the painting.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  I just think he's making great art at this point. I don't think there's anything else going on. And it's interesting, we've done other episodes and series on artists who died young. We did one on Jean-Michel Basquiat, he died very young, but he was already sort of over the hill at that point. We've done one on Frida Kahlo, she was slightly over the hill as an artist at that point. But Vincent, at his death, is just getting better and better and better, and this painting proves it. The last thing he paints, perhaps on the day he dies, he is producing his, for me, his greatest work to date. So should we talk about that death, Alistair?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  It's Sunday, the 27th of July. We know that he paints in the morning, possibly the tree roots. Then he comes back to the inn, he has lunch. At some point, he borrows a low-calibre pistol from the innkeeper. And then after his lunch, he heads back out with his equipment out to the countryside, we think to a wheat field. And at some point in the afternoon, he puts down his equipment, he pulls out the gun, and he shoots himself in the midriff. He passes out, and several hours later, he recovers consciousness, and after dark, staggers back to the inn. The innkeeper and his family are sitting outside the inn, they see Vincent returning. They're sufficiently worried about his condition

• 45:20Speaker 00

  that the innkeeper then goes indoors, and he listens at the base of the stairs, and he can hear Vincent moaning. So he goes upstairs, and he finds Vincent in his bed, and he says, what happened? And Vincent says, I wounded myself. So the conventional narrative is that Vincent shot himself in a wheat field. But not everyone agrees with this. So a major biography, published in 2011 by the American authors Stephen Navy and Gregory White Smith, they make a very different claim. They argue that there are enormous holes and inconsistencies in the existing account. Now, you know I've read this biography, it's over 900 pages long, it's one of the best books I've ever read

• 46:04Speaker 00

  about art, it is so gripping, so well-written. But this is a very controversial claim. What they say is this, they say, no physical evidence of the shooting was ever produced, no gun was ever found, none of the painting equipment that Vincent took with him was ever recovered, the location of the shooting was never conclusively identified, no autopsy was ever performed, the bullet that killed him was not recovered, no eyewitnesses to the shooting could be located. And they argued, Alistair, that the two brothers, these boys that were tormenting him with the snake and with the chilli oil, they actually shot him during an argument, then ran away and hid all of the incriminating evidence, including the gun. Now, I don't believe this, I don't think most people believe it.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  I mean, interestingly, the gun was probably discovered and was exhibited. And so almost a smoking gun, as it were, this pistol revolver that was found in the field, which I think had been discovered in the middle of the 20th century, but scholars were suggesting around about a decade ago that it was the gun with which Vincent shot himself. This suicide or murder theory has become one of the big contentious ideas and myths surrounding Vincent. And you can add it to that long list of myths that I think we sort of outlined a bit at the beginning of the whole series. That biography, which, as you know, I haven't read, I must read, but it made a lot of news, because I think

• 47:32Speaker 01

  it outlines that theory in an appendix, doesn't it, at the end?

• 47:36Speaker 00

  And they don't put it in the body of the book significantly.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  That is quite interesting. All I can say is that, again, as you know, I've deferred a lot in this series to the Van Gogh expert, British expert, Martin Bailey, he's written about this quite a lot. And I find his argument very compelling.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Which is, in a way, quite simple. It's if there was any suspicion at the time that someone had killed Vincent, surely there would have been some chatter about it. Some people would have been aware of this, had a sniff of this, they would have tried to follow up these leads. But nobody, the innkeeper, Theo, his artist friends, no one seems to suggest that he'd been murdered. Everyone just believed that he tried to kill himself, and effectively, obviously, when he died a little bit later, did kill himself. In a way, that's the sort of, is that the Occam's razor approach?

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Occam's razor, if in doubt, the simplest explanation is probably correct. Vincent did say he'd wounded himself, he did have a history of self-harm. For me, I'm not persuaded by the account that he was killed by anyone else. So he shoots himself, he returns to the inn, and on the 28th of July, 1890, the following day, poor Theo arrives yet again. And again, Vincent seems sort of okay, he's sitting in bed, he's smoking his beloved pipe.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  He's got his pipe.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  But he declines as the day goes on. And at 12:30 in the morning, on the 29th of July, this is so moving, on the

• 49:06Speaker 00

  I always find it moving, this bit. But at 12:30 in the morning on the 29th of July, Theo moves over to the bed and holds him in his arms. And Vincent says, I want to die like this. And about 30 minutes later, about 1:00 in the morning on the 29th of July, he dies in his brother's arms.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  Very, very moving. So sad. Such a tragic life. Shall we talk for a little bit about the legacy? Can I throw to you while I recover my...

• 49:36Speaker 01

  I think it's worth just saying, I mean, part of that is, there's a funeral quite quickly. I think it's the following day, on the 30th of July, takes place in a small cemetery in a field outside Auver. And one of the details that I love about it is that they make sure, I assume it's Theo, make sure that yellow flowers are on his coffin. So dahlias and also sunflowers. And I don't think there are a tremendous number of people there, but there are friends of both brothers from Paris. There's the innkeeper family, a few neighbours, some villagers. And then quite soon after the funeral, Theo writes to his mum. And he says, if he, talking about Vincent, could have seen how people behaved toward me when he'd left us and the sympathy of so many for himself,

• 50:21Speaker 01

  he would at this moment not have wanted to die. And there's a suggestion, isn't there, of tremendous loneliness, I think, that he experienced. Which is why I think that moment you've just described is so moving, that there could be a real, proper, human-loving, intimate moment of connection upon his death. And quite soon afterwards, Theo organises a memorial exhibition. And that is the beginning, isn't it, of this process? Of Vincent becoming the sort of superstar megastar that he is today, however many, 100 and what, 130 odd years later, more.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Well, there is a myth, isn't there, that when Vincent dies, no one knows who he is, no one recognised his brilliance, no one purchased his works. That's not true. In fact, in the last six months of his life, people were beginning to notice him. They were beginning to recognise some seriously important work was being produced. And the first person to do this was this ballsy young critic, the kind Alister used to be before he went grey.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  What a hero this man must have been.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  Called Albert Aurier. I think you've mentioned him before, actually. He writes this article, I think in January 1890, so six, seven months before Vincent dies, that really establishes the the framework for this idea of Vincent as the mad genius. I mean, can I read a few, I mean, it's real purple prose. You wouldn't write anything this bad. But this is what he writes. He says, "He is a fanatic, a sort of drunken giant. What characterises his work as a whole is his excess. It's excess of strength, of nervousness, it's violence of expression. His is a brain at its boiling point. A terrible and demented genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always at the brink of the pathological." I mean, I think it's nonsense.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  It's quite gripping, isn't it? I mean, maybe the early part's quite acute until the boiling brain and the tormented genius.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  But it has a real effect in Paris.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Oh, it's very important. And I think it's worth just quickly outlining some of the things that are happening. So that Aurier article, really important. Although interestingly, Vincent, he's almost as though he's too modest. He doesn't like it, does he? And he actually starts suggesting, no, no, I mean, you've got it wrong. Gauguin's more important. Monticelli, that guy I mentioned in the previous episode or early in the series, is more important in terms of the development of modern art. However, he's finding success in other ways too. There's an avant-garde group of artists in Belgium known as les vins, the 20, XX. And they invite Vincent to show his work in Brussels, which takes place in early 1890. And this is the place where the one recorded painting that we know what it is, is sold.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  There's a picture he paints called The Red Vineos, which is bought from that exhibition. But meanwhile, Theo has already been submitting in Paris. Remember that they had that deal, so Vincent is sending his pictures periodically to Theo. Theo's sending them in, submitting them to the Salon des Deux Indépendants in Paris, which was a really important forum where progressive art would be shown. And several pictures by Vincent are appearing in the capital and getting a positive response. Theo's writing to him and saying, look, your paintings are well placed. They look very well. This is in 1890. Many people came up to ask me to give you their compliments. Gauguin said that your paintings are the key to the exhibition. So things are really building. This idea that he's this total outsider scotches that myth. Absolutely.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Not true at all. And after Vincent's death, Theo really becomes completely obsessed with pushing his reputation, pushing his name harder and harder. But the great tragedy is that Theo will not last very long himself.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Theo has syphilis. And very soon after Vincent dies, the syphilis goes to his brain. He ends up going into a psychiatric hospital. And he dies in January 1891, only six months after Vincent. He's only 33 years old. He's even younger than Vincent. And then, of course, it passes to his widow, Jo, whom we've mentioned.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  I think she is the master key in this whole thing.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  She's the real heroine.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  She is incredible. When you think this poor woman, you know, her life was going great. She was married to this lovely man who was earning some money. She had a lovely little boy called Vincent. They were living in Paris. And suddenly, she's a widow, she's a single mother, she's got no money, no source of income. She ends up moving back to the Netherlands, setting up a B and B. And she inherits hundreds of paintings, hundreds of drawings, the entire correspondence. And people say to Jo, they say, just burn this stuff. Burn all those paintings, burn all those letters, move on. Leave the Van Goghs behind. But she doesn't do that, does she?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Well, she writes, "For a year and a half, I was the happiest woman on earth. But I've had my happiness," this is post Theo's death, "now duty remains." And she really takes on the mantle of furthering Van Gogh's career. So she, very artfully, lends paintings to exhibitions, places key paintings with museums and collectors, crucially publishes a very early edition of Vincent's letters, because she's inherited a lot of the letters to Theo, all the letters to Theo as well as the paintings. And these things collectively start to generate this momentum. At the same time as the avant-garde is becoming very interested in Vincent,

• 55:54Speaker 01

  she is helping to manage and orchestrate that trajectory, which is very interesting. Her son, Theo's son, the nephew in whose honour the almond blossom painting was created by Vincent, was also called Vincent, as we know. He, to differentiate him, he actually ends up studying engineering. So he's often called the engineer. When Jo dies, Vincent Junior, the engineer, inherits all of these pictures. And he continues this whole process. And eventually, in 1962, he donates all of his Vincent Van Gogh's to a foundation. And the deal he strikes with the Dutch state is that they will create a dedicated museum in which to show them,

• 56:36Speaker 01

  which then opens in 73, I think, which is the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam today. And the reason I'd love this story, because I've mentioned this to you when we've been WhatsApping in the run-up to this, James. But on a couple of occasions, I've interviewed one of Vincent the Engineer's grandsons.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  My gosh.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  A man called Vincent Villen Van Gogh, who goes by his second name, because, I mean, in fact, he sort of shuddered when I suggested he might have called himself Vincent at any point. And he became an advisor to the museum. And he has these memories as a child of going to this, I don't know, like, small commuter town, just a few miles outside of Amsterdam, where his grandparents, so the nephew, the engineer, lived. Going into the sitting room, and there above the sofa was the sunflowers. A sunflowers picture, as well as the almond blossom. His dad, so the engineer's son, it's confusing with all the family stuff. They remember, you know, in front of the almond blossom, there were three brothers, big pillow fights going on. It just seems crazy as well.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  He would sort of suggest, this is the detail that stuck with me, that they didn't even bother locking the kitchen door. They've got all of these Van Goghs in the house. And he was like, well, that's Holland for you, which is true. They're very, I mean, part Dutch.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Very law-abiding people. And I think that it's the most homely, wonderful story. But it's also, it's a hard thing to pull off, to create that momentum and almost curate a career. But that's what all of his descendants have done posthumously. And clearly, the museum still does today.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  They've been so canny, haven't they? Obviously, they were a family of art dealers in the past. But they all did it, they dealt with it so well. First of all, Jo could have just sold everything off in one go. But she was deliberately placing pictures in the major museums around the world in order to make his name known. She recognised that the story, the life story, was part of the story, the overall story. And obviously, she was doing the letters, she was translating the letters. I think without Jo, without her complete determination to carry that through, to honour her brother-in-law's work, to honour her late husband's wishes, no one would really know about Vincent Van Gogh.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  A really good example is one of the paintings we spoke about earlier in the series. The sunflowers in the National Gallery here in London. That's thanks to Jo that it is here. She was persuaded to part with it from the family and sold it in, I think, 1924. And she wrote at the time, "It's a sacrifice for the sake of Vincent's glory." It's interesting, again, it's that language, a sort of duty all the time. But she really felt it.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  We're very quickly approaching the end of this series. Why do you think Vincent's story has cut through so much?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Well, the life is totally compelling, and I think the letters are a really important aspect of it. The paintings clearly people just respond to. There's something about the way he paints where he conveys emotion in a way that touches people. But because you have the correspondence, you have this immense insight into his creative process as well, and to the vicissitudes of his life, which makes for an astonishingly fascinating biographical tale. So that's part of it.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Our producer Ben had a wonderful idea about why this legacy is so important. And partly it's that Vincent's art is at this sweet spot, isn't it, between being very accessible, very pleasurable, very enjoyable, but also challenging, also pushing the boundaries of art in the 19th century, like someone like Gustav Klimt, for instance, who's also in that, inhabits that same sweet spot. So I think the work itself is extremely compelling, however good the story had been. I think if the work wasn't something that challenges and delights people in equal measure, I think it wouldn't have cut through in the same way.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  It's very interesting to think about the influence of those Japanese prints, because what you've seen happen during the 20th century is his reputation starts in that avant-garde in North West Europe. You know, it's really taken up in Germany. Through the 20th century, people in America become very excited by the work of Vincent van Gogh. And then suddenly, he really resonates with an audience in East Asia. And part of that might be to do with this fixation with the natural world, which has been a really big theme. Because, you know, we can talk about the idea that he rests painting away from depicting the real world to paint some sense of the inner world, you know, emotion, bold colours, he's hugely

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  influential on innumerable art movements of the 20th century. But I was really, really struck when I went to review, in fact, that Poets and Lovers exhibition, the one that I went, had been on the press trip for, the National Gallery 2024, looking at all of these pictures. So many of them are of the natural world. None of them appears static. There's this kind of exultant, rhapsodic, just quality to the brushstrokes. Everything seems to be moving. And I think that is a real positive. It's something hugely celebratory about experiencing what it is to be a human being in, the bounty that is this, this natural world.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. One thing we haven't really said is that one of the journeys that Vincent's, if you like, legacy goes on during the 20th century, is he goes from being at the very beginning of the 20th century, after a breakthrough exhibition in 1905, and then the publication of the letters, he goes from being a very important figure to the avant-garde, to being a breakout figure, and one that becomes a pop culture figure. And that happens mostly after the Second World War. I mean, we have Irving Stone's book, we've talked about Irving Stone before, his great, his great book, The Agony and the Ecstasy, about Michelangelo. But he also writes a book about Vincent van Gogh called Lust for Life, which in the 1950s gets made into a film with Kirk Douglas. And then in the 1970s, Don McLean is writing

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  pop songs about Vincent van Gogh. And he becomes a kind of great, commercial, commodified cash cow, doesn't he?

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  He's unbelievably popular. And I think, I have to say, I don't think you're going to like it, but you can't extricate the art and the life in his case. I really think because of that story of all of that sense of great struggle, that for a lot of people, that is partly what they're identifying with when they're thinking about Vincent van Gogh. He also paints clearly in a, at times fiercely direct, seemingly raw, honest, kind of, you know, emotional fashion, which responds to our age in a way that clearly wouldn't have worked in, say, I don't know, a more decorous age like the 18th century. But there's something about that which resonates.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  But the work itself, even if you stripped away the story, the work stands alone. The work is so, so strong. It is vivid, it is violent, it is imaginative, it is inventive, and it is also beautiful and full of joy and love.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  I don't disagree with that at all, but I do think you still can't see it without viewing it through the prism of the life. And I think that's what, that's my, it's just my sense. That's my sense that, you know, that breakout nature of his fame is bound up with that whole sort of idea of this outsider artist, all of the difficulties he faced. I think people respond to that. They really, really do. And a lot of the art seems to articulate that and express that in a very memorable way. But, but yeah, for sure. I mean, it, it, it's not bad.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  It's not bad. Can I say one final thing before we finish? Because I don't want to forget this, because I think this series has been about Vincent. But in many ways, the real hero of the story is his brother, Theo. You know, in Vincent's short and very tragic life, he was rejected, he was spurned by almost everyone, by his friends, by colleagues, by other artists, even by his parents. But there was one person who stood by him the whole way, and that was his younger brother, Theo. He was with him as a child when they were playing on the moors, and he was with him, holding him as he drew his last breath. And Theo's loyalty was just extraordinary, because Vincent could be a difficult person.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  He could be ungrateful. He could be almost impossible to get on with. And Theo stuck with him. He supported him financially. He encouraged him artistically. He put his needs before his own. And he did this not because he thought Vincent was a genius. He did it because he was his brother and he loved him.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  I, I think it's such an important point, because one of the cardinal myths about Vincent van Gogh is that he's this lone, wild, tormented, crazy outsider, madman genius. But without Theo, and indeed without his wife, Jo, as we've just established, you wouldn't really have Vincent van Gogh as we know him and have him today.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  There would be no Vincent van Gogh without Theo. There would be no Sunflowers. There would be no Starry Night. None of those paintings that have touched so many millions of people around the world would have happened had it not been for one brother's love for another.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  You know, something as well to bear in mind is he has had an astonishing impact on the history of art, but the length of the career, just as a reminder, I know we've touched on this, it's so brief. It's 10 years as an artist, it's five years really as a modern artist, it's what, two years as a really tip-top, exciting, you know, proper artist, as it were. And to have created what he did in that period, I mean, it, it, I is totally mind-blowing. I know that for you, Michelangelo is the absolute top of the tree, and I get it. But I just feel that that achievement itself is, it's up there with the greatest achievements of any person in human history. It surely is.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  I totally agree. Well, shall we leave it there?

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  It's been such a joy, Alastair, and such a revelation, actually, talking about this very familiar figure and discovering so many extraordinary new things about him with you over the last four episodes. So to all our listeners and viewers, goodbye.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Goodbye.

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  Join us next week as we travel back a thousand years to explore an artwork that documents, I'm just going to say it, the most important moment in British history, the Biotapestry.