Vincent van Gogh: Becoming Vincent (Part 2)

How did Vincent van Gogh find his signature style? And what inspired him to create his famous sequence of Sunflowers paintings in 1888? Join Alastair and James in the second of four episodes charting the life and work of Vincent van Gogh, as they explore a period of extraordinary creativity in the artist's career. 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, Self-Portrait as a Painter, 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Adolphe Monticelli, Sunset, c. 1882-84, The National Gallery, London Utagawa Hiroshige, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, 1857 Vincent van Gogh, Père Tanguy, 1887, Musée Rodin, Paris Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin, 1888, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Vincent van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes, 1888, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin, 1888, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Harvard Vincent van Gogh, The Yellow House, 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Vincent van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night, 1888, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo Vincent van Gogh, The Night Café, 1888, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhône, 1888, Musée d'Orsay, Paris Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888, The National Gallery, London Vincent van Gogh, Vase with Five Sunflowers, 1888, destroyed 1945 Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1889, Sompo Museum of Art, Tokyo Vincent van Gogh, Three Sunflowers in a Vase, 1888, Private Collection Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888, Neue Pinakothek, Munich Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1889, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1889, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Thanks to Thames & Hudson for Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters, 2022 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 Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to Stories of Art. I'm Alastair Sooke.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  And I'm James Fox.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  A pink grey face with green eyes, ash-coloured hair, wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth, stiffly wooden, a very red beard, quite unkempt and sad, but the lips are full. Now, for once, James, those aren't my words. They are the words of Vincent van Gogh, describing a really famous self-portrait from 1888, probably the last picture he painted in Paris, at the end of a two-year spell in the French capital that we're going to chat about today. And in it, he is wearing a blue linen smock, it's enlivened with these dabs of orange, and he's standing at work before this plain grey-white background in front of an easel, which we can only really see the back of, rather tantalisingly, and he's

• 0:52Speaker 00

  holding his palette and his brushes in one hand. And last time, we started with Van Gogh's traumatic self-portrait with bandaged ear, which he painted about a year after this one. And in this self-portrait, his ear, that sort of, I don't know, miniature red-tinged whirlpool of flesh, those are my words, is very much visible and still attached. His expression, I don't know, to me, it seems somehow haunted, somber, maybe possessed? And I can tell you that writing about this picture, this self-portrait, a few months later, Van Gogh even described his appearance in it as "the face of death". I'd love to know what you make of this astonishing, quite, well, I think unsettling likeness.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Well, the eyes are so dark, aren't they? I mean, they're bottomless, these dark eyes. So I don't know whether that's revealing. The other thing that's extremely revealing about this painting is if you compare it to what we had in the previous episode, the Potato Eaters, it is so different in style.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  So true.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Above all, in the colour. I mean, he's actually, he's almost brandishing this palette and showing it off to us. And look at the bright colours on there, these bright oranges and greens and reds and yellows. And it's an indication of where Vincent is heading as an artist.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Can I tell you just a wonderful detail about those colours on the palette? Some people have analysed the picture.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  And I think what they found through technical analysis is that all of the colours on the palette are, they correspond directly to the colours used to make the painting, if you see what I mean.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  It's also, the other element to this picture, we talked about the bright colours, it's also a very different kind of brushwork to the brushwork he was producing a couple of years earlier. That brushwork before that we saw in the Potato Eaters, it's sludgy and slappy and potatoey, whereas here, he's got the dots and the dashes that he would have probably seen in modern French painting in the 1880s.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Definitely, definitely. It's a transformation.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  So, Alistair, this portrait, we can see it signed on the canvas, was made in 1888, when Vincent was living in Paris. Can you give our listeners a sense of where we've got to so far in this series?

• 2:56Speaker 00

  Well, let's see if I can remember what we spoke about in the last episode. So, he's born, when is it, 1853, I think? Actually, as you pointed out, a year earlier, another Vincent was still born in this family. He's born to, his father's a reverend, a clergyman, a Protestant reverend, and he grows up in rural Netherlands. He's part of a big family, he has a very close-knit family and quite a sort of Christian moral upbringing. He loves the natural world. He goes to school, he doesn't thrive at school, but quite quickly, there's another Vincent in the story, an uncle Scent, who is an art dealer in The Hague,

• 3:36Speaker 00

  I think, isn't it? And he gets Vincent a job at a big, essentially, international art dealership. And eventually, Vincent, who spends many years being an art dealer, surprisingly, given that we think of him as this outsider, he ends up, and I love this so much, in London, living in Brixton, totally inconclusive. He then has a little bit of time where he's back and forth between branches of the dealership in London and Paris. He gets sacked, he has blazing rows with his dad. It's a story, really, of dead ends, false starts. He ends up trying to be a lay preacher in the coal-mining district of the Boreneage in Belgium, where he's living in a hut, gives away his clothes and encounters

• 4:20Speaker 00

  real poverty in this place. But it's a disaster, because he's not very good at public speaking and he can't get people on side. And I think we ended last time with, he makes the decision, encouraged by his art dealer brother Theo, who bankrolls his life and is fundamental to the story of Vincent van Gogh, to become an artist. And he returns, not to their great pleasure, to the family home in a different village in the part of the Netherlands, which is where he starts painting peasant scenes. And we ended with his first big and last big multi-figure composition, The Potato Eaters, which was, what, 1885?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Yes. So in this episode, we're going to continue that story and to see how, in some ways, Vincent finds his voice, how he becomes the artist we know and love.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  So this is episode two in our mini-series about Vincent van Gogh.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Alistair, now we're into episode two. Shall we have a brief discussion of Vincent, of who he was, what kind of person he was?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Well, I think we absolutely should. And that portrait that I just described, and indeed Vincent described at the start, I think here, he actually looks quite tense, as I say, quite haunted, quite possessed. And we'll come on to why that might be the case, but it's at the end of this spell in Paris, this important transformative spell in Paris. But quite soon after this, his brother, who was a big hero of the first episode and is indeed a hero of Vincent's life, his brother Theo, he ends up marrying someone, a woman called Jo, Jo van Gogh Bonger. And when she meets Vincent in 1890, she actually encounters someone who, it's quite a surprising picture, if you like. She recalled

• 6:11Speaker 00

  meeting this person who was robust, broad-shouldered, he had a healthy complexion, cheerful expression, something very determined in his appearance, is what she wrote. And she said that he appeared much more healthy than Theo. But she said, "This self-portrait, of all the 35-odd self-portraits that Vincent produced, was the one that most resembled him." And even though he doesn't have, as you say, those green eyes we see elsewhere, there's the red beard, he is ginger-coloured in terms of his hair. And what do we know about him? We know that he was, I mean, my sense is that he was always quite an unsettling person, probably for people to encounter, possibly quite an annoying and at times argumentative, difficult character.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  You wouldn't want to do a podcast with Vincent, would you?

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Well, partly, you'd be distracted by, I suppose he had a sort of facial tic. And I think, I mean, I don't think I've got that going on, but it would be quite distracting. And he could be quite, there's always that thing, he could be quite unsociable, but yet he does become friends, quite, has these close friendships with certain artists, so maybe that offsets that idea. Could be quite intense. And I think in his description of this self-portrait, he talks about appearing wild and unkempt. And that was his manner. He often dressed not in kind of, you know, smart bourgeois attire, which I think could be quite embarrassing, particularly in this Paris moment, which we'll get to with Theo, but in these kind of workman's clothes.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  I think Vincent is so well-known and yet so misunderstood. I think he's probably the most misunderstood artist in the history of art, because when most people think of Vincent, what are the words they might use? They might say innocent, childlike, a loner, an outsider, a savant, a madman. None of those things really are true. Vincent was middle-class.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  He was very intelligent, he was very widely read, he spoke, I think, four or five languages very well, he knew a great deal about the history of art, great deal about modern art, he was very well-connected to the art world in Paris at this time. He wasn't really a loner. In fact, his life's quest was a search for connection and for friendship and for love. He was very meticulous and deliberate in his art, although his art seems to be very quickly impulsively made, he thought very carefully about what he was doing. But he was also a very difficult person, as you, as you mentioned. He was socially very awkward, he was stubborn, he was belligerent, he had a terrible temper, he drove people

• 8:36Speaker 01

  away, he fell out with almost everyone. So, you know, he's a complex character.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  He is complex. I think there is a saving grace as well, though, that he is highly, clearly, as you say, intelligent, but highly self-aware. And you often find that in many of the letters. And I can't remember if you did, if, there's a particular letter that he writes at 29, when he's 29 years old. You may have quoted it in the first part, I can't remember. But he, he says, "Don't imagine that I think myself perfect, or that I believe it isn't my fault that many people find me a disagreeable character." And he admits, you know, "He's terribly cantankerously melancholic, irritable, yearning for sympathy. I become indifferent, sharp, sometimes even pour oil on the flames if I don't get sympathy. I don't enjoy company and dealing with people. Talking to them is often painful and difficult

• 9:23Speaker 00

  for me. But do you know where a great deal, if not all of this, comes from? Simply from nervousness." Because he says, "I'm terribly sensitive." And I think that sensitivity surely is also the secret of his genius as an artist.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  An astonishing self-awareness, as you say in that letter.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. We are jumping ahead a little bit, James. He hasn't got to Paris yet in our story, so we should probably pause and return to the narrative itself.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yes, let's return to 1885, when he's still living in the Netherlands in the family home. Shortly after he finishes that painting, The Potato Eaters, which neither of us like, he very quickly has to leave for two reasons. First of all, his family kick him out of the family house because he's been so destructive in the family house.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  And his father's dead by this point, isn't he?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  His father has died, yeah. So, and many of the family think that Vincent... Really brought upon that death by being such a terrible presence in the household. So he has to leave the family home. There are also rumours, we mentioned this in the previous episode, swirling about his relationship with one of the peasant girls, if you like, who is shown in The Potato Eaters. So Vincent has to leave.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  And the first thing he does in October 1885 is he goes very briefly to Amsterdam, where he sees the newly opened or reopened Reichs Museum.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  He must have loved that.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Oh, he loved it. Spent three days there, looking at Rembrandt, looking at Vermeer, loved it.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  He, he, it's so interesting that because he really, you know, we always think of him as a modern artist and a great rupture with the past.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  But he really admired, he writes about so many Dutch masters in the letters. And it's quite fascinating sometimes, we might come on to this later, but to think about echoes maybe of Golden Age Dutch art in his work.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Really important, and we'll try and tease that out later on. So he spends a few days there and then in November 1885, he crosses the border to Antwerp. It's there that he discovers the work of Rubens, who is the great artist of Antwerp. Loves Rubens. But what he decides to do in Antwerp is to enroll at this very prestigious art academy in Antwerp. He thinks, I'm going to really sort of consolidate my gains.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  I, I can't imagine that he would be a model student in that kind of environment.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Goes so badly. Can I read a, can I read a little quote from one of the other students? This is what this other student says of Vincent. He came rushing in like a bull in a china shop and spread his roll of studies out all over the floor. Everyone crowded around the newly arrived Dutchman, who gave more of an impression of an itinerant oilcloth dealer and rolling and unfolding at a flea market is marked down samples of easily foldable tablecloths.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Out.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  The majority of the young chaps laughed their heads off. Soon, the news that a wild man had surfaced spread like wildfire throughout the building and people looked on Vincent, this is my favourite bit, as if he were a rare specimen from the human wonders collection in a travelling circus.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Whoa, I hadn't come across that. That's incredible. I mean, it's interesting because that's like, the myth making is happening in real time.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  As he's arriving in Antwerp, before he's even become the wild modern artist, the madman of, of myth today.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I know, I mean, we smile and we laugh, but you know, it's actually, it's so sad. Because really, you know, wherever Vincent goes, from his childhood, from his first days at primary school, all the way through to his death 30 years later, he's misunderstood. He's shunned, he's ridiculed, he's bullied, he's harassed. And of course, you know, we talked about his character, he doesn't help himself, he's a very difficult person. So when he's at the academy, when a teacher in life drawing class goes up to him and says, no, do it this way, not that way. He bursts into a rage and shouts.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Which I get because he, he's really frustrated by the idea of strictures of technique.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  You know, he's all about personal expression and a sense of spontaneity and working directly from the motif. And what he's doing there is the antithesis. It's everything that in a sense, modern art rejects. And I can see why, having not known that quote, it's put a different line, which I've come across, where quite soon afterwards, where he's reacting to his experiences at the academy. And maybe actually he's quite defensive. But you know, you can sort of see that sense of him rubbing people up the wrong way. He's writing to Theo and he's saying that, actually at this place, all of the drawings I see there are hopelessly bad and fundamentally wrong.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  And I know that mine are totally different, time will just have to tell who's right.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Well, he is determined to prove himself right, determined to prove everyone wrong. You know what he does in, in February 1886, this is a month after arriving at the academy, he decides to prove everyone wrong by submitting a drawing to the annual prize, the concours Okay. At the academy. And the judges look at his drawings and they conclude they were made by a 10 year old.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Is that right?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, utterly humiliating. So his life in Antwerp, very soon after arriving, it begins to collapse. He's humiliated as an artist, he's shunned as a person, his health is declining, his teeth start to rot.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  And so he makes this decision in, in February 1886, that he's going to have to leave Antwerp. And he decides, I know what I'm going to do, I should go to Paris. That's where my brother Theo is. And so he writes to Theo and he says, I've got a great idea.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  I'll come and live with you in Paris. And Theo says, whatever you do, do not come to Paris. Theo is desperate for him not to come. So what does Vincent do?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  I love this. So Vincent, I mean, Theo, I think has at this point, a relatively small apartment. And I believe it has a lease that lasts until the summer of, we're now in 1886. But at the start of the year, it's February, as you say, you've got Vincent saying, come on, it's a great idea, you know, I can join you, you know. Theo is working as an art dealer, he's selling modern art. And of course, at this point, I don't think, I think I'm right in saying Vincent has not seen an impressionist picture for real. And impressionism has been going on for quite a while. So there is this idea that in order to really improve and get away from the, the tradness of the, the academy in Antwerp, he needs to get to Paris. As you say, Theo is saying, I'm not sure there's space here. Is this a good idea?

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Didn't really go well when you're living the family home in the, you know, just recently with mum and dad.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Also Theo's having a lovely life.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  And he's having a good time.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  He's earning a bit of money. He's very successful. He's earning a bit of money, he's a man about town, he's going to dinners and parties, he's seeing women. He does not want Vincent, the human wrecking ball, arriving in his life.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  So, so the human wrecking ball is also, as we've established, quite an eloquent letter writer. And he writes to Theo on the 28th of February 1886, and he says, my dear Theo, don't be cross with me that I've come, all of a sudden, I've thought about it so much and I think we'll save time this way. In other words, he just turns up, he just arrives. And in my head, I don't know whether, it, it just, it always seems to be, to be like a sort of, a moment like The Shining, where Jack Nicholson's character is coming through the bathroom door. It's like, surprise, here's Vincent. And.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Well, actually, the way it unfolds, I mean, it, it, we know exactly how it unfolded in that one morning, Theo goes to work, he has his coffee, he sits down at the desk and he sees a little note, handwritten note on his desk. And he unfolds this note and that is the note when Vincent says, I'm here already, I'll see you in a few hours.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  And you can almost feel, when you read that note, you can feel this, the chill running down his spine, the, the cold sweat forming on his palms. Because he knows his, his life is going to be turned upside down by Vincent.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Can I tell you a nice detail though, about that initial meeting? I believe that Vincent says, come and meet me, not at the apartment, but meet me at the Louvre.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yes, he says, shall be at the Louvre from midday onwards, or earlier, if you like. Come as soon as you can, we'll sort everything out, you'll see.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  You know, but his intentions are totally right. You know, he's there to just embrace art and culture. And Paris at this moment, it's what, it's the capital of the art world.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  So much sophistication, excitement, progressive art, culture is available. Cafes, cabarets, you know, Montmartre, where they end up living is this semi sort of rural, semi bucolic on the outskirts of the city, on the edges, but very exciting place to be. And for the first time, after Theo gets over that shock, they do live together, they eventually in the summer, they move to a larger apartment, don't they, in, in Montmartre?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, they find, I mean, Vincent first of all, gets himself a new suit, he gets his beard trimmed, he replaces his rotting teeth with state of the art wooden dentures.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  And they, they do, they find this really lovely three bedroom apartment in Montmartre. I mean, it's the classic French apartment, parquet floors, high ceilings, lovely mouldings, great fireplace, it even comes with a cook. So actually, quite good. But very quickly, as we predicted, Theo's life is turned upside down.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Well, you sort of get the sense that Vincent, one of the reasons he wants to be there is he, he's got wind of, there's an artist called Fernand Courman, who's a French painter, sort of history painter, academic painter. But he has a studio and in the studio, he teaches people. And Vincent joins this studio. And I think this particular artist has a reputation for being not quite as sort of rigorous and strict as maybe that academy in Antwerp. And also is quite welcoming to foreign artists. And it's through Courman's studio that Vincent meets people, really important figures in 19th century art. One, a much younger artist called Emile Bernard, who I think at the time, he's only 18.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  He also meets Toulouse Lautrec, who's at the beginning of his stellar career. And Bernard becomes one of the big correspondents for Vincent in his life. I think we spoke in the last episode about, there is one photograph from this period where it's Bernard, Emile Bernard and Vincent with his back to the camera on the banks of the Seine at Asnières. So he's immediately tapping into an avant garde scene.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  So Alistair, they move into this apartment together. It does not go well. My favourite genre of 90s cinema is the psycho housemate genre. The most famous example is an incredibly terrifying film called Single White Female with Bridget Fonda.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  I have not seen it.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  She takes on a roommate and this roommate systematically destroys her life.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  And this is really what happens to Theo. I mean, you know, first of all, Vincent is so filthy that the cook flees. She says, I can't work with this. The other thing is, as I said before, Theo is a man about town. He's got a great social life and this social life is completely destroyed by Vincent because Vincent insists on going to all these events. He's social kryptonite.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Is it embarrassing for Theo?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  It's so embarrassing that Theo actually decides, I'm not going to go out anymore because I can't have Vincent come with me. He can't invite people back because when he invites men and women back, Vincent is so badly behaved that they run away. And actually, Theo begins to get very unwell while he's in Paris with Vincent. But it is an extraordinary moment in Vincent's artistic development, isn't it, in Paris?

• 20:37Speaker 00

  It's so key. He's encountering art at every turn. He's meeting these artists at Cormon Studio. He's going to the Louvre. He is studying the latest developments in modern art. And Theo is essentially introducing his brother to modern art in Paris at a crucial moment. And amongst those modern artists are the so-called pointillistes, the neo-impressionists, people like Siniak and

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Sura.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Sura, Georges Sura. And we started this episode with that self-portrait that Vincent paints at the end of the two years he spends in Paris. A lot of those, the dots, if you like, they're his response to the innovations of people like Sura, who's famous for painting with dots. It's kind of like he makes his own version of neo-impressionism. And what you generally find is that the art that we ended the last episode with, which is the Dutch art of the mid 1880s, which is really, really dark and depicting rural themes.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Unpeeled potato, was that what you said?

• 21:38Speaker 00

  That was his line, wasn't it? That he wanted it to have the quality of dusty potato peel. Suddenly, his palette massively lightens and brightens up and he's painting different things. He paints loads and loads of floral flower still lifes. And I think part of that is because it's an opportunity to really experiment with colour, essentially. And of course, floral still lifes, they're some of the things for which mature, if you like, Vincent's post-Paris is best known for. He's starting it there. He becomes obsessed as well with a particular artist who was associated with the south of France called Adolphe Monticelli, romantic painter. And the thing he loves about Monticelli is that Monticelli paints

• 22:23Speaker 00

  very, very thickly. So one of the things we associate with Vincent van Gogh, the modern artist, is he's painting with so-called impasto, thick pigment laid on. And he's getting that from Monticelli, who's himself painting these quite expressively painted, thickly painted pictures. And he and Theo are sort of deciding, this guy, who I think has recently died, he's undervalued, we should go big, we should invest in Monticelli. And they start to buy up pictures by Monticelli. And then there's another source of artistic excitement that they go big on in terms of investing in, which is Japanese art.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Japanese woodcuts.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Some listeners may remember that a few months ago, we did a series about the great Japanese artist Hokusai. And at the end of that series, we talked about how in the 1850s and 1860s, how trade links with Japan opened up and Japanese goods, porcelain, lacquerware, things like that, started to flood into Europe. And many of those goods were wrapped up in these cheap Japanese prints, some of them made by Hokusai. And when these prints arrived in Europe, modern artists, who were all looking for new ways to represent the world, they found them so, so exciting. And no artist was more entranced by these Japanese prints than Vincent van Gogh.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  He starts buying them, doesn't he?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Buys them in enormous numbers. They buy hundreds and hundreds. He spends days and days in the shops of Paris, in Siegfried Bing's shop, buying up these prints, pinning them up on his wall, making copies, tracing them, colouring them in. He's completely obsessed with them. And those two influences, in that time in Paris, the great influence of the modern art that is coming out of these young French artists in the 1880s, and the Japanese influence, they combine to produce this incredible art that, for the first time probably, feels very Vincent.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  I think some of the things he's seeing in the Japanese pictures are, essentially, it's non-Western. So it's a very different visual tradition to the kind of tradition that he finds so stifling when he's learning about it in, say, the Academy in Antwerp. And it's very flat plains of colour, quite bold graphic designs, bold outlines, surprising crops and senses and uses of perspective within the images. And sometimes he is literally copying these woodcuts in his own paintings. As you say, we've done a series or a couple of parts about Hokusai, but there's another very famous Japanese artist, Hiroshige, and he is literally copying. He was known for his representations of rain and people are

• 24:53Speaker 00

  scurrying across a bridge and this rain is coming down. Vincent copies that image. But he then gradually, you see him sort of assimilate a lot of the aesthetic devices and compositional tricks and motifs of Japanese art in his own pictures. And he's obsessed with Japan as a place. It becomes this kind of blessed utopia, this painter's paradise in his imagination. And you see it as well come up in some of the portraits he's creating at this time.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a picture he makes in 1887 of Père Tongue. Now, Julien Tongue was a colour man. He created artist paints and artist materials. He had a little shabby little shop not far from where Vincent lived. And he was very supportive of many artists. He provided the paints to people like Monet and Renoir and Cezanne and Pizarro.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  And often in exchange for artworks, didn't he?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Yes. He was a very benevolent figure. He recognised that most of these artists had no money at all. So often he'd say, well, look, I'll give you these paints if you just give me a picture.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Which is why he gets this nickname Père, French for father.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Father Tongue. And Vincent gets to know him. And Vincent, I think, paints three pictures, three portraits of Père Tongue in 1886, 1887. And the one we'd like to focus on very briefly is the last one he makes, which I think is in the Musée Rodin. I don't know if Rodin actually owned this picture. I guess he did. It's an incredible picture. It really is. You've got Tongue. He's seated frontally in the canvas. It's a quite strange format, actually. It's three-quarter length, so he's cut off at the knees. He's probably sitting on some kind of stool. He's smiling out at us with this straw hat, clasping his hands together. He looks like, I don't know, Father Christmas on holiday or something. And behind him, we have all these Japanese prints. You've got Mount Fuji erupting out

• 26:41Speaker 01

  of his straw hat. You've got cherry blossoms. You've got kabuki stars. You've got courtesans. I think this is such an important painting in Vincent's development because I think this is one of the very first paintings where if you look at that picture, you would say, that's a Vincent van Gogh.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. It almost has a sort of green screen quality where, because it's so flat, you have the figure and then you've got this, it's a cacophony, a visual cacophony, if you like, in the background of all of this dense, different imagery where these prints are sort of interleaved and just provide this flat screen. So it's quite, in a sense, confusing to look at. But I also wonder whether part of the reason that it is, as you say, it feels like this is a Vincent van Gogh painting, is because you feel that the artist himself is projecting his own interests and sensibilities, don't you, onto this image? He loves Japanese pictures and there they are in the painting. He obviously loves Père Tongue, but with that beard, with that straw hat, you know, you wonder whether

• 27:42Speaker 00

  when eventually Vincent goes down to the south of France and he sometimes wears a straw hat himself, there's a sense almost of identification, is that too much, do you think, with the character?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  It's also got joy, though, hasn't it? I mean, many of Vincent's greatest paintings are full of joy and full of enthusiasm and full of joie de vie. And this picture has that in abundance. It's, I mean, taken together, Alistair, his period in Paris between 1886 and 1888 is an astonishing period in his life and his development. So in those two years, he paints 230 paintings. That's more than any other comparable period.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  Can I give you a lovely detail on that, which recently, this is something that I mentioned, the van Gogh expert, Martin Bailey, in the previous episode, but he has reported on a new study of Vincent's signatures.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Now, the time in his life when he signs most works is Paris. So of that number you just mentioned, how many in Paris?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  230.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  So 57 he signs. And the reason that's quite telling is because he's in the art capital, he's in Paris, and his work is changing rapidly. He's a fast learner. And those signatures are suggesting, because they start to drop off later in his life, that he's thinking, I'm going to sell.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  This is me doing commercial work. I'm going to try and make it as a professional artist.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Fascinating. Well, look, by February 1888, everything seemed to be going quite well for Vincent. He's living in Paris with his beloved brother Theo. His art is developing, as we've said, at a ferocious pace. And yet, at that very point, he decides to leave Paris. Why does he go? And where will he go? Find out after the break.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. It is February 1888 and Vincent has just decided to leave Paris. Do you have a sense why, Alastair?

• 30:13Speaker 00

  It's quite mystifying, isn't it? Because in a way, the way that we had set it up in the previous part is that he's having this incredible time in Paris, that it's transformative, that this is the moment where he becomes, in a sense, the modern artist that we know as Vincent van Gogh. But there are other factors which are at play, and he's there for the best part of two years. And during that time, he is embracing everything that Paris has to offer, but he's also starting to feel quite frazzled, I think, quite exhausted. He is tapped into the avant-garde, as we've established. He's meeting loads of important avant-garde artists, and he has important friendships and relationships with them. But he's starting to get a bit ground down by the backbiting, the jostling.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  You know, there's that dynamic which we've touched on all the time about whether Vincent is a loner or is he a joiner? He's a bit of both. But I think he's also drinking a lot. And by the end of his period in Paris, he's just feeling jaded. And it's quite interesting. There's a couple of little quotes from the letters that I wanted to mention because I think it gets us into the mindset of how he's feeling at the time. One is, he writes in February to his brother, February 1888, to Theo, "It seems to me almost impossible to be able to work in Paris unless you have a refuge in which to recover and regain your peace of mind and self-composure. Without that, you'd be bound to get utterly numbed." I think the language is telling, right? Refuge, peace of mind?

• 31:42Speaker 00

  And the other is, a little bit later, he writes to his sister, his favourite sister, Wilhelmine. He's looking back, thinking about Paris, and he says, "No matter what people say, we painters work better in the country. Everything there speaks more clearly. Everything holds on, everything explains itself." So he wants to leave the city all behind, and the country is where he's going to restore himself, rejuvenate himself.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I also wonder whether he feels, he's very self-aware, Vincent, whether he feels that he's cramping his brother's style.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  But one of the interesting things is, after he leaves, and we'll tell listeners in a second where he goes, you know what his brother writes?

• 32:18Speaker 00

  What does he say?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a lovely letter that he writes to his sister. This is Theo writing. He says, "When he arrived here two years ago, I would never have thought that we would become so close. Now that I'm on my own again, I feel the emptiness in my home all the more. It is not easy to fill the place of a man like Vincent. I am convinced that if he has a few more years, he will make a name for himself. And he has such a good heart, too, and is forever trying to do things for others. All the worse for those who do not want to know or understand him."

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Do you think easy to write once Vincent's actually gone?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  He's a good few hundred miles south. So that is sweet, isn't it?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  It is sweet. So where does he go?

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Well, initially, he wants to go, he goes to the south of France, and he takes a train. But his initial plan is to go to Marseille. Do you remember I mentioned this artist, Monticelli, just now? Who he gets his sort of thick impasto application of paint from. Monticelli is associated with, he's from, I think, Marseille. And Vincent, he's obviously got a bee in his bonnet about this artist. He wants to get out, so he wants to go there. However, en route, he ends up in the city of Aul, ancient city in the south of France with ancient Roman ruins. There's an amphitheatre there. And this is where he ends up for, what is it? A little over a year, I think about 15 months.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  And he arrives there in February 1888. And the thing I always find so strange about it, I alluded to this in the first part, is he goes around all the time, initially going, "This is just like Japan, isn't it like Japan?" You know, there's snow weirdly when he gets there across the fields. And he's saying it reminds him of Japan. He has this idea that this sort of, Japan has become this kind of utopia for him, this blessed painter's paradise. And somehow, he feels he's going to find it in Provence.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's because, I mean, though Vincent is very well-travelled, he's really only travelled in the north of Europe. And so I suppose the south of France does feel, I mean, he couldn't get on a flight to Tokyo, could he? It does feel like a different country for him. But as you say, Alastair, he goes there probably hoping for a bit of sun after a long winter in Paris. And those winters can really last a long time in Paris. And it's even colder in the south of France. It's been a record-breaking winter. There is snow absolutely everywhere. He's not very happy there. He doesn't like Aul. He says it's a filthy town. He's staying in this room above a restaurant. He hates his landlord.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  A bit more expensive than he's hoping for as well.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  It's more expensive, well, because Theo's not paying for everything. And the people are horrible to him. They're very abusive. I mean, we've talked about this everywhere he goes. This is what happens to Vincent. So he's not that happy at first. But then slowly, as the snow thaws, as the sun comes out, as spring starts to emerge, he becomes incredibly inspired by all the blossoms.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  I mean, Aul is right at the centre of fruit-growing territory in France. There are orchards all around the town. And in March and in April, all the fruit trees, the almond trees and the peach trees and the cherry trees and the apple and the pear, they start to blossom. And of course, Japanese artists love their blossom. And he goes out through March and April, painting these extraordinary paintings of blossoming trees.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  I think this is part of the great rejuvenation that he's hoping will happen when he's in the south of France. And it's connected with something we touched on right at the beginning of this series, which is his feeling for, his aptitude for, his love of the natural world. And, you know, that was the case in that small Dutch village when he was growing up, family going for lots of long walks. We know that he loves walking, and that's what he's doing in Aul as well. He's getting out of the town, and he's enjoying being in nature and depicting nature. And funnily enough, as you say, he's returning, after a spell in Paris where he was painting more, you know, sort of quote-unquote "impressionist", neo-impressionist-type pictures in terms of subject matter, he's urban scenes.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  He's returning to rural themes. So he's starting to paint agrarian workers and people, you know, harvests eventually, that kind of thing. And there's a sort of bucolic sense where he is happy being in nature and going for these long walks out. There's a place called Mont Major, which is a sort of large rocky outcrop. I can't remember which direction outside of Aul, but quite far out, has this very old abbey on the top of it. And he does a series of stunning drawings because there are points when, I think, he's constantly asking Theo to send, you know, some money and to pay for artistic materials and that kind of thing. But there are moments where he can't afford all the paints he's sort of burning through. So he takes, he does these substantial drawings. He's doing them with reed pens.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  He's cutting the reeds himself that he's finding in the walks. And for me, anyway, the sort of big picture of Aul is that this is, it's a great moment. It's the moment where he's perhaps happiest, would you say?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yes, I think so. And he's also almost at his most productive. I mean, by the time you get to the summer, particularly as you get to the late summer, to August and September 1888, he is on absolute fire.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  The productivity is like nothing we've seen before. I've actually written this down. So this is what he does in just August and September. In August, among other pictures, he makes the two versions of The Postman, Joseph Roulin, incredible pictures.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  So this is a friend, a local figure in Aul, who he actually does befriend. So despite that initial sort of abusive thing that you alluded to, he becomes mates with the Roulin family and paints them all.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he paints pictures of The Postman. He paints the great pair of shoes in the Met. He paints four paintings of sunflowers. We'll come to those in a moment, in the space of just a week in August. And then in September, he paints the self-portrait with a shaven head. Incredible picture. He paints the yellow house, again, we'll come to that. He paints the café terrace. He paints the night café, one of, I mean, his all-time most famous paintings. He paints his first starry night, the starry night over the road. That is all in August and September. I mean, it's one banger after another, one masterpiece after another. I think it's unprecedented in the history of art that any artist could be so productive. And I was thinking before we sat down here, what is the equivalent of that level of creativity?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  The only thing I can think of is The Beatles in 1966.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Where, you know, where they've got the Midas touch and it's just one great song after another for Revolver and Sergeant Pepper.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Do you think-

• 38:43Speaker 01

  It is extraordinary what he's producing at that point.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  I mean, I'd love for listeners to keep in mind that that self-portrait with the shaven head, that will become quite important later in the story, but for now, it's maybe just worth observing that, again, part of this theme of being in Japan, he actually writes in a letter that he's, he's sort of play-acting almost in that picture.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  He's shaving his head as though he's, God knows how you pronounce this word, Bonze? B-O-N-Z-E, which I think is a sort of Buddhist monk. So there's this idea that he's, he's playing, being a Japanese religious figure in that self-portrait.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  It's slightly politically incorrect, that picture, because he says, "I've made my eyes slightly slanty, so I look more Japanese."

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Yes, it's true. We should perhaps gloss over that fact. But yes, this kind of like astonishing, kind of prolific spell, do you think that he is aware of it? I mean, my sense is that he's starting to gain real confidence.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  He's not found a market for the work, but he writes about being on firmer ground and, and you sense in the way he's painting, someone who is feeling tremendously self-confident all of a sudden.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  I feel there's a sense that there is a force surging within him. All this pent-up tension, all this creative energy that has been hiding within him, striving to get out for all those years, is suddenly in our, just expressing itself with the, I mean, he can barely contain himself. It's picture after picture, every single day he's painting something remarkable. And of course, we could do a whole episode on any one of those paintings. I mean, The Night Cafe would be a great episode in its own right.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  But the ones we perhaps, or the one perhaps we will choose to focus on for the remainder of this episode is of course the sunflowers.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're going quite classic. So the sunflowers, as we record this, I mean, I would normally say that they're just down the road in the National Gallery. There are several versions, but there's a very famous one here in London that both of us and many of our listeners will have seen countless times and be familiar with. As we record this, it's on the other side of the Atlantic. It's been lent to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for an exhibition about the sunflowers. I was very kindly sent a copy of the catalogue. It's a very, very interesting read. This is a reciprocal thing where they have a sunflower painting themselves, which had been lent to London. And before maybe we kind of go any further, it's worth describing the outlines of what we're discussing here, right? Because you've touched on this.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  This is a moment in August 1888 of just supreme, incandescent, white-hot creativity. He paints, in total, I think there are, what, seven sunflower pictures that he paints. There are two sort of campaigns in terms of painting the group. One is in August that we're discussing now, those are the initial, is that the initial four?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  He paints four in August in a single week.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  In a single week. And he documents this, we know a lot about it, because I think there are maybe seven odd letters which he's talking about painting them, so we can, we can really get into the detail of how that progresses. And the London picture, the National Gallery one, dates from that week.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Subsequently, for a whole bunch of reasons that may become plain, he does variants. So there's another group of three, which he creates later. The paintings themselves, one of them was destroyed in the Second World War.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  That was actually in Japan.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  That was in Japan. There's another picture that, of the surviving extant ones, that is also in Japan. There's one, one of the very first that he painted, which is still, as I understand it, in a private collection.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the weakest of the four.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, but imagine if that comes onto the market, what that's going to go for.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  I'm trying to think what the, the auction record currently for Vincent van Gogh is. I think it's the 117 million, was it pounds, dollars? That one of his orchard paintings, I guess, from Arles in 1888, went for. This would go for so much more.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, yes.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  But you, you're left with a bunch of pictures which are in museums and galleries around the world. So there's Tokyo, there's Munich, there's Philadelphia, there's London. There is, of course, one other principal version that he paints, which is in Amsterdam.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  And all of them depict sunflowers in a pot against different coloured backgrounds.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  So some of the initial ones, I mean, you're saying the, the weaker ones, that's, that's your line, not mine. There's one where it's against a turquoise background in a green pot, and it's only three blooms, right? There's the one that was destroyed against this royal blue background where you've got the three blooms in the same green pot, and then there are two flowers which are on the table next to it. And then you come to the, as it were, money shop pictures of the London and Munich ones. But the London one, which is so famous, is, I was trying to count, is it 15 different sunflowers?

• 43:33Speaker 01

  It's 15, I counted.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, against a, a just sort of, well, a table that is a golden-yellow, and then this blazing lighter, paler yellow, which is behind those flowers. I, it's, it's so famous. Sometimes we do this in this series, we're talking about very familiar works of art. This one is hugely familiar, but God, it's good, this.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so good. It's so good. I love it so much. It's always, it's interesting, isn't it? Because it's very conventional in many ways. It's just some flowers in a pot on a table.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  I mean, artists, particularly Dutch artists actually, have been painting this kind of thing for hundreds of years. And yet, the way Vincent does it, he makes it feel like it's the first time flowers have ever been painted in the history of humanity.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  It's remarkable. And you know, when we look at these paintings, they're so sketchy, the paint is so kind of quickly applied, that we think they're very impulsive paintings. They're not. As you alluded to earlier, Alastair, he planned this series so, so carefully. He spent days and days, he spent sleepless nights thinking about how to do it, what the cycle would consist of, what the different colour palettes would be. He spent hours arranging the flowers very deliberately in the pot. So it's a very, very carefully thought-through painting. And one of the things that people often refer to, it's been said many times before, is that those 15 flowers we see in the pot, they are all at slightly different stages in the life cycle of the sunflower.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  So we have the, the flowers that are just budding, we've got some that are in full bloom, we've got others that are over the hill and the petals are falling, and we've got others that are completely dead, they're just the seed heads. And so that means this painting becomes a kind of metaphor for life and death.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  And actually, rebirth, because the seed heads contain the seeds that will grow into the sunflowers the following year.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Don't you think they have a really anthropomorphic quality? I mean, some of them just look like eyes. Others look like these kind of old men with these bristly hairs. There's so much that I think, you know, we, we want to say potentially about this painting. I mean, you're talking about the, the planning, and that's so true. At the same time, he is knowing that he is really, he's on to something good.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  There's this wonderful quote, very famous, where he writes to Theo and he says, "I am painting with the gusto of a Marcelais eating boule à base," which is this hearty Provencal, I think it's a fish soup?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  But you know, that sense of kind of like real appetite, gusto. And I think you, you see that in there. He talks about a symphony in blue and yellow.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  But that sort of, that eating of the food, I mean, that really channels something that you said earlier, which is when you know creativity is with you, when you know the wind is in your sails, you've got to cash in. And that is what he is doing. And we go back to the idea of the planning of these pictures. It's very easy to think of this painting as just something, he just, you know, put some sunflowers on the table, painted them. The fact that there are these different flowers at different stages of existence is not an accident. If he wanted to paint 15 flowers in full flower, he could have done that. He chose deliberately to have the flower at different stages. I think it's a fascinating, fascinating picture.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  What, what do, I mean, just a couple of sort of like art history geeky details. One is that he did say he wanted to paint a tribute to this painter I've mentioned a few times, Monticelli, because he depicted the south of France, this is Vincent writing, "all in yellow, all in orange, all in sulphur." I just wonder, Monticelli's painting flower pictures, in a way, this is a tribute perhaps to him.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  But I also wonder how much you think this really is consciously enthralled to more traditional devices. You've referred to those sort of 17th century Dutch flower pictures that he would have been well, well aware of. And in them, you have a sense of like, there's a sense of vanitas, the transience of life often, which you find, which, you know, you, you've described here, you see the life cycle of the flowers. There are other kind of layers of symbolism that people sometimes try and put on, aren't there? Because the sunflower, classically, what it does is it follows the sun.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  So artists in history have used the sunflower as a metaphor, a device in their pictures to be, for example, a follower of Christ, or a lover who's turning to follow the, the beloved, or-

• 47:45Speaker 00

  And I don't want to jump ahead too far in the story, but it's important we just kind of, I don't know, put down a marker because he is conscious when he's painting these of trying to attract the attention of a real leader of the avant-garde, who, look, how many spoilers, he's trying to entice to the south of France. So I wonder whether there's an element of that going on as well, where perhaps this sort of shaggy red-haired Vincent van Gogh with his beard and so on, is almost in those sunflowers, kind of swiveling his eyes around. I don't know, mate, that's a bit fanciful.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Is there also a sense that he's looking for a motif that can be truly Vincent?

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Ah, I'm so glad you've said this, because I wanted yet again to talk about the signatures.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, go ahead.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  And I think you've just got to humor me here, because I think this is very interesting. He does, clearly, he is known as the painter of sunflowers. He knows that the sunflower, as he puts it, is mine. You know, it is a motif that he claims. He lays claim to the sunflower as a motif, as an artist. And when you look at that London picture, there is a very prominent signature in it, and the signature is around the belly at a slight angle of this earthenware pot that the flowers are in. And it's worth saying as well, and this is actually an observation of our, well, I say our dear friend, but only because I've mentioned him a few times, the Van Gogh expert, Martin Bailey, he has noticed that actually

• 49:12Speaker 00

  it would be impossible for flowers of that size to stand up in that pot. So there's already a fiction that's going on there to begin with. But then you find this Vincent signature with a very distinctive horseshoe-shaped V, which almost looks like a U, which he does specifically in Arles, and it's, in this case, although often his signature is in red, here it is in blue, it is clearly reflecting his pride in this picture. He's stamping it with his name so prominently.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's one other thing I'd like to talk about with this picture, and that is colour. We've already referred to it. As you know, Alastair, I'm a huge colour fan. I wrote a book five years ago called The World According to Colour, available in all good bookshops. And the colour is really very interesting here. We have to remember that in the 19th century, there was an extraordinary revolution in colour production. Because in the 19th century, what you see is the invention of some new synthetic pigments that are, in many cases, brighter and more brilliant than the natural pigments that came before them. And that is one of the reasons why modern art, by the art of the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists, look so modern. It's because they're using

• 50:25Speaker 01

  these brilliant lurid colours that weren't available to their predecessors. And Vincent was initially quite reluctant to use these pigments, as many other artists were. I think he was more interested in the, is it the dusty potato peel colours or something like that you said in a previous episode? But while he's in Paris, he starts to embrace these new synthetic colours, maybe from Per Tonghi. And one of those colours was chrome yellow. Chrome yellow is really interesting. It was first discovered at the end of the 18th century in a Siberian gold mine, I think. And it started going into production as a colour in the early 19th century. In fact, Turner was one of the first artists to use chrome yellow.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  I mean, famously so.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Famously so. And here is Vincent, and you talk about the sunflowers being a motif that he can call his own. Yellow also becomes a colour he can call his own. It's why I'm wearing my yellow jumper for this episode. And in this National Gallery version, Alastair, he decides to make use of chrome yellow in abundance.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Can we just establish, because, you know, like he was talking about it being this series, a symphony in blue and yellow, and clearly here you do see some of those outlines, the signature in blue, but the principal tone, as you say, is yellow. But there are a lot of different yellows in it. So there were some which are a bit thicker, more mustardy, some ochres, some sort of orangey. Which is the chrome yellow?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Well, he uses three different kinds of chrome yellow.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  He uses, he uses a pale lemon yellow, the one in the background. He uses a medium yellow, and he uses this deep orange yellow. So he's combining these three different kinds of chrome yellow, all of them synthetic pigments that were not available 100 years earlier. And that is one of the reasons why this picture is so brilliant. But as a little conclusion to this thought, there is a problem with chrome yellow. It fades. On exposure to sunlight, in fact, it starts to go greeny-brown. And that has happened in this painting. So this painting has faded quite significantly since it was painted. And that's why, actually, although it's a wonderful painting, the tabletop is a slightly muddy yellow. The seed heads aren't that good to look at, actually. And...

• 52:34Speaker 00

  But that background, that sort of lemony back...

• 52:37Speaker 01

  It's a lovely colour, isn't it? Buttery, lemony.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  It's really attractive, but it also, for me, it kind of, I think this is what makes this, this version of the sunflowers stand out the most. It seems to convey a sense of actual heat, that the sun, you know, are we looking at the sun somehow? It's a metaphor for that in this, in this one picture.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  But you know what? A few years ago, technicians at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, they painted a replica of this picture with the colours as they would have been in 1888, and it is even better than this. It brings to mind how kind of, how even more radiant this picture would have been when he painted it than it is now.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  I'm glad you mentioned Per Tonghi, because just to finish, close the little Per Tonghi thought, just to skip ahead slightly, eventually, I think it's no secret, Vincent does leave Arles, and the sunflowers paintings, sunflower paintings end up with his brother Theo in Paris. And Theo actually gives some of the sunflowers, I'm not sure how many, would need to check that, but to Per Tonghi, who, as you will recall, has that art supply shop in, I think, Montmartre. And he writes to his brother to say that the sunflowers were on show at Tonghi's this week and made a very good effect. Your paintings cheer up Tonghi's shop, and Per Tonghi likes them a lot.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Oh, that's lovely. And you know what? They do cheer people up. I have watched people in the National Gallery, when they go up to look at this painting, every single one of them smiles. It is one of those pictures, isn't it? It's just joy.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Do you think as well it's worth just sort of quickly saying that the way he conceives of them is almost not as individual pieces? Because I think initially, he's talking about, I'm going to do a dozen of these canvases. And as time goes on, and I think actually, interestingly, the Philadelphia catalogue that I mentioned does go into this a bit for anyone who wants to read about it in greater depth. But he is becoming obsessed with how to present them. So he's thinking about the framing, and he's thinking about ensembles, and eventually, he wants to use the sunflowers to flank a portrait that he creates, which he does five versions, of that postman's wife, Madame Roulin, where

• 54:41Speaker 00

  she's rocking a cradle. And he sees them almost as like candelabra, sort of flanking, I guess, as sort of quasi-secular altarpiece. But I find that a very interesting insight into the modernity of his approach to picture making. He's thinking serially. I think that's quite significant.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Well, I think, Alastair, one thing we haven't told listeners yet, although you've implied it, is that the sunflowers was made for a reason. It was made to decorate a house

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  that Vince had recently taken on in Arles, the so-called Yellow House, and specifically to decorate the bedroom of another artist, Paul Gauguin, whom he hoped to persuade to join him. And that brief period living together in the Yellow House would turn out to be one of the most sensational, most explosive episodes in the history of art. And we will be telling it in forensic, blow-by-blow detail in the next episode. You will not want to miss it. To see you next time. Goodbye.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Goodbye.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe even leave a review.