Vincent van Gogh: The Outcast (Part 1)

Why are the paintings of Vincent van Gogh so universally popular? And how close did Vincent come to being a preacher instead of an artist? Join Alastair and James in the first of four episodes charting the life and work of the man who has come to define our idea of the struggling, tortured artist - Vincent van Gogh. 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 with Bandaged Ear, 1889, The Courtauld Gallery, London Vincent van Gogh, Pollard Birches, 1884, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885, 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

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

• 0:04Speaker 01

  And I'm Alastair Sooke.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  A man stands before us in a heavy coat and a fur cap. His green eyes quivering with defiance, or perhaps just exhaustion. The paint itself is as agitated as he is. Thick strokes of peach, purple and lurid yellow crawl across his skin. But soon, we catch sight of something stranger. A wedge of white fabric running up his cheek. Is it a hat strap? A scarf gone rogue? No, it is in fact a bandage covering a wound that was once his ear. Now that, Alistair, is my description of an unforgettable self-portrait, painted by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh,

• 0:55Speaker 00

  or as the Americans call him, Vincent Van Gogh.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Van Gogh.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Or as the Dutch, I guess correctly, call him Vincent van Hoogh. He made it in 1889, just a few weeks after chopping off his ear, and not long before he ended his own life. And I honestly, Alistair, I can't think of a more notorious story in the history of art, can you?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  I don't think I can. I mean, this is, it's so infamous. And this picture you've described, I have to say, I love it. I really love it. It's painted at the start of 1889, in the immediate aftermath of this great crisis involving, as you've hinted at, this mutilation of his ear that everyone knows about. I partly love it for very trivial reasons. I just, I adore the fur hat. And I just think that coat, I want a coat that is that colour, that texture, is a great coat. But this is very superficial, because really this is a sort of personal manifesto picture in which he, and we'll talk in a moment about the pronunciation,

• 1:58Speaker 01

  because I think we need to establish that before we embark on this mini-series, but is really determined to signal his commitment to painting after this crisis, when his life is completely up in the air. He's in the south of France, isn't he? He's in Arles, and he has just spent the autumn of 1888 with the French painter Paul Gauguin. And that's an episode in Van Gogh's life story, which I know we're going to tell, probably not today, but it's so fascinating. And in the picture, you can see this determination to paint. There's a canvas in the background. And also tacked up on a wall behind him, there's a Japanese woodblock print. And without getting too stuck into details so quickly,

• 2:43Speaker 01

  but there is one I want to pick out, because if you look at that Japanese woodblock print, he loved Japanese prints.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  He did.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  I'm sure we'll talk about that. But there are two, there's Mount Fuji in the background, there are a couple of geishas, and there's a heron with a really sharp beak. And the way it's positioned seems to be almost pecking at the other ear.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  It's going to the other ear.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  So, you know, he's very sensitive about, about his, I was going to call them facial appendages, but let's not, about his ears.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Why do you think Vincent's story cuts through, and has cut through so much more than almost any other artists?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  He is an artist who is totally beloved. He's a superstar.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  And he's also an artist whose life story and work is just couched in so many myths.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  And you could say, are we being ever so slightly boring by choosing to do Vincent van Gogh in this series? But I would argue not, and I'm sure you were the same, because I think there are so many things that people think about him that aren't necessarily true. To do with the fact that he was an impoverished mad outsider, painting in this kind of frenzied, spontaneous fashion, you know, totally unsociable. There are lots of things that I hope in this series we're going to challenge about Vincent van Gogh.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  The main myth is that he was mad. The main myth is that he was a mad artist, and his very expressive painting is the expression of that madness. And that just simply isn't true. Vincent was sane and lucid through most of his life. He was extremely intelligent, very widely read. He was an, he was an unusual man. He was an oddball in some ways. But he was a very deliberate, intelligent, thoughtful painter. And it was only right towards the end of his life, when he went through these various psychiatric episodes, that he lost that lucidity.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  And even then, I think this myth persists that he, because he's sort of seen as like, he's like a prototype of a certain kind of, you know, popular perception of the modern artist.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  A bit tormented, total outsider, and as you say, mad. But even in the moments which this picture you've been describing, it's sort of, it's the beginning really of, soon after this he ends up and commits himself to an asylum, and a little more than a year after that painting was painted, he, I don't think it's real, spoiler, I think everyone knows the outcome, he's dead. Pretty young, probably by suicide. And yet people still think that in those final months, he was painting when he was suffering bouts of madness. I think one of the most interesting things in Van Gogh's scholarship that's happened in recent years and perhaps decades, is a move away from that, that kind of myth. People who study his work have been at pains

• 5:29Speaker 01

  to point out that, yes, he did suffer from this mental instability at the end of his life. But he wasn't, apart from with one or two exceptions, he wasn't painting in those episodes. And so, as you say, even when he's in the asylum, he's painting in spells of lucidity, despite more widely suffering from some sort of mental crisis and catastrophe.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  But so many of the, I suppose, the cliches of modern art, they originate with him, don't they? When people talk of the misunderstood artist, when they talk of the mad genius, when they say, and I've heard this many times, that artists only become famous after they die. They are sort of referring in some ways, even if they don't know they are, to the story of Vincent.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Yes. And part of that is because, as well as the paintings, and he was extraordinarily productive, prolific, given that his artistic career was really only 10 years long. And as a proper painter, we're talking about five years, really.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Five years, yeah.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  It's an extraordinary body of work. I think, what is it, like, more than 800 paintings that survive? In addition to that body of work, you have his letters. You have his correspondence. Again, later on in this series, I hope we can talk about them in some depth. But most of them are to his brother Theo. And the letters are amazing. Because they give us this kind of access, this window to his, his soul, his inner thoughts, the workings of his creativity, which, I don't know, can you think of another artist that we have that level of insight into their working process and their thoughts?

• 6:54Speaker 00

  He was a very prolific writer. He wrote thousands of letters, I think 800 or so, just like the paintings. About 800 survive, 600 of them to his brother. And they, they are so revealing of everything that's going on inside this, this often very tortured soul's mind. So I think that is also a very important reason for his, his fame. And you talk about the brevity of his career. I mean, a few months ago, we did an episode on Jean Michel Basquiat. And I remember observing and saying how remarkable it was that his entire career had been crammed into the space of seven years. Well, Vincent's career was really just five years long. And really, all the great works he made were done in the last two years of his life, between 1888 and 1890, before he died aged 37.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  And it's a real tragedy, even just artistically, because right at the end, his work was developing so rapidly, in such exciting directions, that you just think, as you do with Schubert or with Mozart, you just think, if it only had a few more days, a few more weeks, a few more months, what would he have produced?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  It is intensely sad, isn't it? That, the fact that he, he died, what was it, at the age of 37? I think here's another one of those myths, which is, he only sold one painting that we know about in his life. He did sell other works in his life. He only sold one painting that we can identify, and that was towards the end of his life, but also right very soon after his death. Yet, he had a reputation within the avant-garde, and he was being feted quite rapidly by important critics. So he was an artist who was on the up. This idea that he was not known about, not sort of tapped in, not connected, is, to use a sort of horrible political cliche, for the birds, I would say. Anyway, you know, I think for all of those reasons,

• 8:40Speaker 01

  there's a very compelling argument for re-examining him and his life now.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  And I have to confess, I was initially a little bit reluctant to do this series.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, how come?

• 8:52Speaker 00

  I think it's over-familiarity. I thought, you know, everyone knows Vincent's story so well. Everyone knows his work so well, what can we add? But how wrong I was. Because over the last few weeks, I'm a very diligent boy, Alistair. I've read thousands of pages of literature on Vincent.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Well, you have read the big biography, which I have not.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  I have read the big biography, which itself is 900 pages. I have read a lot of the most recent scholarship on him, and I found it revelatory. And his story, as you imply earlier on, is so much more interesting, so much more complicated than we, than we think. And so I would urge our listeners and our viewers, many of whom know a great deal about art, to bear with us, because I think this, this series may just blow their socks off. So this then is the first in our four-part series on the life and work of Vincent van Hoogh.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  We never did the pronunciation.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  We didn't do it.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  What are we going to, there is one little detail, because I've always, can we just have a little sidebar on the pronunciation? Because I need to, at the outset, establish that I am going to stay very, very traditionally British.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Me too.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  And go Van Gogh.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  I'm going to go Van Gogh.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  That's so pretentious.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Well, it's not pretentious.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I've got two arguments for why I'm not going to go down that road. One is, when I, when I go to Paris, James, I never say, I'm off to Paris. You know, there is a sort of anglicisation, I think that's fine. But the other is, Vincent signs his pictures with his first name.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  So why don't we just call him Vincent?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  We should call him Vincent. He even, even in a letter in 1888 to his brother, he was, the work was going to be included in an exhibition catalogue in Belgium. And in this letter, he said, please, can we just use my name Vincent? Because as soon as you start putting Van Gogh, Van Gogh, Van Roegh, Van Gogh, Van Gogh, as the French say, no one will know how to pronounce it. So even he knew that there was this potential issue around his surname.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Okay. So this then is the first in our four-part series on the life and work of Vincent.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  I think we should begin this story, Alastair, in the middle of nowhere. In the heaths and moors and swamps of the south of Holland, there is a nondescript town called Zunder, which is mostly at this point inhabited by farmers and peasants. But right in the centre of Zunder, there is a little brick building, the parsonage. And inside that building, in the mid 19th century, lives the parson, a man called Theodorus van Gogh, and his wife, Anna. And on the 30th of March, 1852, Anna gives birth to a baby boy, which she calls Vincent van Gogh. But there is a problem, Alastair, he is dead, he is stillborn.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  And so they bury their baby, and a year later, to the day, on the 30th of March, 1853, the second Vincent van Gogh is born in Zunder. And that is the Vincent that is going to be the subject of this series.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable, that fact, isn't it?

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Born on the anniversary of your own namesake's death.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Do you think that his awareness of that in later life partly accounts for, he's a very, the second Vincent is a very complex character, as we've already outlined. Could this be a factor?

• 12:11Speaker 00

  I wonder if it is, I wonder if it is. He's got a lot of family issues, and a lot of issues with regard to his parents and his siblings.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  It's fascinating. But anyway, he is born on the 30th of March, 1853, and over the next few years, Dorus, as he's known, the father, and Anna have, I think, another five children. So they have six children in total, and the most important of them, apart from Vincent for our story, is his brother Theo, or Theo. And they're a very close family, they're very, very close knit. The mother is a real snob, and she, they're the only middle class people in the town, and so she doesn't want them mixing with the peasants, if you like. And so they spend an enormous amount of time, the eight of them, the six children and their parents, in the parsonage, knitting, drawing, reading, telling stories to each other. I think the closeness of this family life will prove very important for Vincent later on

• 13:05Speaker 00

  in his life and his work.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  I've always got the sense that they're sort of, by modern contemporary standards, sort of bizarrely almost obedient, these children. Because you can imagine the parents instilling certain Christian values, probably quite kind of Calvinist, I guess, hardworking, being virtuous, morally upstanding, trying to inculcate them so they're going to become upstanding members of society, right? Which Vincent...

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Yes, most of them are obedient, I don't think Vincent could be called obedient.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  This is true.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Because, because as the years roll on, it becomes increasingly clear to Dorus and to Anna that Vincent is strange. They use the word strange, we might use the word neurodiverse. He probably, if you were to diagnose him today, would be on, somewhere on the autistic spectrum. He's socially quite awkward, he's very disobedient, he's quite petulant. There's a story, for instance, when he makes this little clay elephant, and his mother says, "Oh, that's just lovely, Vincent", and he immediately throws it to the floor and cracks it, breaks it. He spends more and more of his time on his own as he grows older. So he starts going in these, he's very into walking, Vincent, throughout his life. He goes on these very long walks across the moors and the heaths,

• 14:15Speaker 00

  often at night, often in the rain, collecting birds' nests and eggs and beetles. He's very into beetles as well. And so he spends hours in the attic of the parsonage, creating these little specimen boxes and labelling his beetles.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  It's quite interesting, the beetles and the walking, because he always said later on, when he became an artist, that he really loved painting nature and being in the natural world. And you sense that actually comes from childhood, this kind of immersion, it's sort of innate, I guess. I also wondered, I mean, my understanding of the mum, of Anna, very kind-hearted woman, as well as being a snob, is what I've read.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Do we have a sense of how, is she in any way encouraging incipient artistic, you know, ambitions, that's too strong a word, in the young Vincent? Because I believe that she herself was quite a competent flower painter.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  They're a very creative family, and as I say, the whole, the whole family spends a lot of time indoors, in the house, hiding from the peasants.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And they are doing, they are taking art lessons, they are learning to draw, they are learning to knit, they are learning to do floristry. So it's actually, creativity is a very important part of their childhood. Vincent is a voracious reader as well, so they're all reading an enormous amount. Vincent reads absolutely everything, reads the complete work of Dickens and so on and so forth. So it's a very intellectually, creatively, culturally engaged household. But Vincent is difficult, and so difficult, in fact, that as he grows a little bit older, they can't send him to the local school, like the rest of his siblings.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  So he had, he has been at the village school for a bit, right?

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it doesn't, it doesn't work out well. So age 11, his parents, quite reluctantly, because they don't really have the money to do this, they're not impoverished, but they're not wealthy at all. They have to send Vincent, and they decide to send Vincent to a boarding school, which is about 11 miles away from Zunder. And this is a moment of terrible trauma for Vincent.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  He's unhappy, isn't he?

• 16:15Speaker 00

  In some ways, he never really comes back from it, Alastair. Because, as I say, they're a very close family, he feels like he's part of this nest, and he is the first child and the only child to get exiled from it. And he remembers years later, he's haunted by the memories of standing at the door of the boarding school and seeing his parents drive away in a carriage. And he writes letters to them, imploring letters, saying, "Please, can I come home? I hate this school, he's bullied, no one talks to him."

• 16:40Speaker 01

  This will be very familiar to generations of British boarding school goers.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  I think so. But he hates it. And after a couple of years of repeated letters demanding that he leave that school, they do take him out of the school. But rather than bringing him home, they send him to another boarding school, which is even farther away from the hometown, which is about 20 plus miles away from the hometown. So he goes there, what, age 13, 14, that kind of age. Again, he's absolutely miserable there as well. Bullied, no one's talking to him, the same thing.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  He does quite well in languages, doesn't he? He gets some, some good marks. I mean, he's not a totally hopeless student, which is, again, another one of these sort of myths, that he's this total uneducated, almost sort of noble savage kind of idea.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Definitely not that, he's a great linguist, actually, throughout his life. There's a photograph, have you seen a photograph of him at this second boarding school?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I haven't, actually, no.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  It's a, I mean, it's, there are very few photographs of Vincent throughout his life. There's one confirmed photograph, we thought we had another, but it's since been attributed to being a photograph of Theo instead.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Can I just, just very briefly, before we talk about the photograph you're about to bring up, my favourite photograph of Vincent, which I don't know if you've alluded to, is, there's a picture of two men sitting on the banks of a river in Paris, from much later in life, well, a little bit later in life, he goes to Paris. And one of them is dressed in black, and you only see him from behind. The other is a young, his friend, Emile Bernard, an artist. But we think that this other sort of figure is Vincent himself, but, which is to your point, that very little photographic evidence, documentation of him exists.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Very little, there's this one photograph that we think is of him, of the school, and you can see him, it's a class photograph, and although it's small, although it's grainy, you can see he's miserable, he's, he's, he's crossing his arms, he looks quite morose. And so one day, age 15, it's in March, 1868, he just decides, I've had enough of this. So he walks out the school, and he walks about 20 plus miles home. Just walks all the way home. So you can imagine Anna and Dorus, they're in their house, in their little parsonage, they get a knock at the door, they open the door, and it's Vincent in his school uniform. This is a source of great family shame. And that, you know, they, they care deeply about keeping up appearances, and here is their eldest son returning home from school without completing his education.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  They try desperately to get him back to school, they try to find jobs for him, but he just refuses to do anything, you know, he's been exiled, he's been thrown out of this family home once, he's not going to be thrown out again.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  It's quite interesting, because although I haven't read the very big biography, that, when was it published, 2010, 2011, something like that, by a couple of Americans? I believe there's a line in it where they characterise Vincent's, as they put it, sort of campaign to mortify and embarrass his parents. Because what you're describing is the start of repeat behaviour, isn't it? Throughout his life. And actually, one of the great stories of his life is this tussle with his dad, his quite, as you've sort of sketched, basically conservative, traditional, probably quite narrow-minded father, who really wants to keep up appearances and lead a, a life of probity and good, middle-class upstandingness, if that's a word.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  And Vincent, who in all sorts of ways, probably starting from round about now, is just railing against that again and again and again.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  He absolutely is. And so he just spends this time, and he's there, actually, I think, for 16 months, hovering around like a morose teenager, like a kind of bad smell in the parsonage, refusing to do anything, a proper, do we use the word, the phrase, neat now? He's a real neat, he's not in, he's not in education, he's not in training, he's not working, he's just sitting in the parsonage. So it's a, it's a really difficult period. But eventually, Alastair, in July, 1869, after 16 months of sitting at home.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Vincent's father Doris hatches a plan because he has a brother also called Vincent van Gogh.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Uncle Szent.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Uncle Szent, who is quite an influential figure in the art world.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yes, Uncle Szent, I know that Szent has no monetary value whatsoever, but in my head, I always kind of make that slightly weird association because in a sense Uncle Szent was a very successful, he was an art dealer.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  And he was working for a particular art dealer where I think he'd been taking over his business in The Hague, but there was an international French art dealership called Goupil and Company, and that had been set up earlier in the 19th century, 1827, by Adolph Goupil, and they really specialised in high-quality reproductions of famous works of art and then got into actually selling primary works of art as well in the primary market, selling paintings and drawings. And Uncle Szent, through his connections, persuaded the directors of this firm, I guess, that maybe they could take on his slightly listless, wayward nephew, who became the youngest art dealer in this international art dealership.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  I think there were branches in Paris, in Brussels. I mean, Theo, Vincent's younger brother, he ends up working initially for a branch of the same firm in Brussels, and there was a branch in London, there may even have been one at some point in New York. So the interest for me is again this idea of Vincent, the uneducated outsider artist toiling away in obscurity. Hang on, at the very start of his life, it's a bit like, I mean, I don't know what the comparison would be, but you have those sort of international mega commercial galleries today, a Gagosian or a Howser and Wirth, it's a bit like someone has an uncle and they get you a job, he's basically a nepo baby. You know, he suddenly gets this gig and he's off to, initially, where is it, it's in The Hague.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  It's in The Hague. Age 16, he takes on a role as an apprentice clerk at the Hague branch of the Goupil Gallery. This is a really big opportunity for him and his family, his parents think, you know what, if he can pull himself together, if he can stop being so difficult.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Then, you know, it's quite possible that he might inherit this business ultimately because Szent doesn't have any children.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  And that, you know, money will start flowing into the family. I've said before, they're not a very wealthy family, they have just enough, but they don't have much. And so it's very exciting and to be fair to him, Vincent is really excited about this. He gets some new clothes, he travels to The Hague, he gets a room and it's, I mean, you've mentioned about reproductive art, I think actually it's probably a very important moment in his artistic development because it's the first time really, isn't he, age 16 or so, when he sees an enormous amount of art of lithographs, engravings and woodcuts.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he often later in life, well, you know, surrounds himself with reproductions and indeed at various points after he's become an artist, copies reproductions quite explicitly.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  And, you know, perhaps this is the start of that, you know, there was a genuine question to be asked, would he have ended up becoming an artist if he didn't have this family connection and wasn't working in the business? And you could even extend that because later, when Theo, he becomes part of the same dealership in different branches and he ends up running one of the branches in Paris, doesn't he?

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  He's earning quite a lot of money. Theo is almost like the saint, in a sense Theo is the kind of hero of this story because he bankrolls his brother's existence and life, we'll get into that, but in a sense, without the family connection, without this international company of dealers, you wouldn't have Vincent and that exposure to art and you wouldn't crucially have his brother and his interest and connections with avant-garde in Paris encouraging Vincent to do what he did.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  I totally agree, I think there would have been no, it wouldn't have happened. He wouldn't have become an artist without that connection. But anyway, he goes to The Hague, he starts the job, things start out quite well, but the pattern of Vincent's life is that things that start out well always end up going wrong. It's partly because of his neurodiversity, it's partly because of this issue he has in terms of social interactions. So he very quickly, well, over the first year or two, he starts to rub his line manager up the wrong way and then when he talks to clients, he's very odd with clients and clients start to complain.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  And the other thing he does in The Hague is he starts buying sex, he starts visiting brothels.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  I mean, this was not unique to Vincent, in a 19th century young man, that's maybe quite a common thing.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  I imagine most men in The Hague were probably doing it at some point, but the sources are a little bit murky here, but what I understand is that it becomes, his use of prostitutes and sex workers becomes sufficiently embarrassing to the firm that they decide, you know what, we've got to transfer him.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  And so after three and a half years in The Hague, in January 1873, he is transferred to London.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  I know, this is so good. I just love this whole chapter in the story of Vincent van Gogh.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  It's incredible.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  So, look, I would really urge listeners, viewers, to go, there's an exhibition catalogue, there was a show in 2019, which was at the Tate, which was Van Gogh and Britain, I think, and in it, there's a wonderful Van Gogh scholar, correspondent of the art newspaper, a man called Martin Bailey, and he wrote a brilliant, brilliant catalogue essay, which was all about this moment of Van Gogh in England. It's so detailed, we don't have time today to get into all of that detail, but essentially he comes to London, he is earning quite well, he's probably earning the most he's ever going to earn in his life from his salary as a junior member of this dealer.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  He's dressed up for the sake of his family as a promotion and he does get a pay rise, but it is really a demotion because the London branch is much smaller and less prestigious than the Hague branch, but he's got some money.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  He's got some money, I think he's getting 90 pounds a year. He wears a top hat, which is completely uncharacteristic, given that much later, he, one of the sources of shame for his family is he really loved dressing in kind of workwear, much like East London hipsters, you know, 150 years later Vincent was at the beginning of that trend. And London must have felt totally, in a sense, overwhelming because The Hague was quite big, but as you've said, he came from this tiny village in South Netherlands, in this region known as the Brabant, and then suddenly he's in the biggest city, I think, in the world at the time, it's got 3.3 million inhabitants, but as a young man there, in his top hat, who loves walking along the Thames Embankment, loves walking to work from

• 27:08Speaker 01

  South London over Westminster Bridge, he just immerses himself seemingly in the culture and everything that the city had to offer. So he's going to museums, he's going to the, well, the dealer itself is in Covent Garden.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, not far from where we are now.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Really near, and just down the road, there is the National Gallery. He's going there, loving looking at Dutch art, I think he struggles initially at least with looking at English artists, he has a bit of a problem, writes to Theo about, you know, whether or not he likes them, but he eventually comes around to people like Gainsborough and Millais. He visits the Dulwich Picture Gallery, I believe his signature may even be in the visitor book there.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  So I was told by the director many years ago, and he is, as I say, I think, kind of having a good stimulating time. There is a kind of mini-episode within this wider chapter where initially, we don't quite know exactly where he was living, probably in the suburbs, probably on the south side of the Thames, but it was costing him quite a lot and he moves and he ends up living in Brixton.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  This is so incongruous, isn't it?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  It's so incongruous, I think somewhere, let me just find, what is the address? It's 87 Hackford Road, I believe there's a blue plaque.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  There is a blue plaque.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  There is a blue plaque there. So this was a kind of like, what is it, three-story, 1850s sort of, you know, London brick house, and it was run by a widow who was in her 50s and she had a teenage daughter who was called Eugenie, the widow's called Sarah Ursula, and probably Vincent has the bedroom right at the top, at the front on the street. I believe, you know, judging by the letters, you can sort of extrapolate that he was putting lots of those prints, the reproductions up there. And whilst he's living in Brixton, he probably falls in love and the weird thing is, well, maybe it's not so weird, but he possibly falls in love not with the teenage daughter, but with the 57-year-old widow. The only reason I'm laughing is because I happened to mention this at breakfast this

• 29:03Speaker 01

  morning to a couple of my children who were sitting there and my daughter just reacted in horror when I said he fell in love with this 57-year-old, which I just thought was so cruel, you know, but anyway, there we are. So the thing is, the potential affair comes to an end and there is a crisis, isn't there? So he has to leave and he ends up going down the road to stay in Kennington after this abrupt departure. His sister is in the mix because she's also in England at this moment, but it's the beginning of that sense of, as soon as he's found, like, what is it, almost a surrogate family in this Brixton environment, quite rapidly it unravels and there's that self-destructive tendency within him, I think.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  He is so self-destructive, there is a pattern that runs through almost every interaction in his life, which is that he tries to bring people too close and then he pushes too hard and he ends up pushing them away. But it's all underpinned by this motive to try to find connection, to find this family that he feels exiled from. The other thing he finds while he's in London is religion.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Of course, yes.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Because while he is in London, he encounters this very charismatic sort of Bible Belt style Baptist preacher called Charles Hadden Spurgeon. And Vincent becomes obsessed with these sermons. And he goes again and again, and he becomes obsessed with religion. I mean, his father was a pastor, of course, but Vincent hadn't shown a great deal of interest in religion up to this point. But now he becomes obsessed. And it's another facet of his lifestyle. It's everything that Vincent does, he throws himself into with obsessive zeal.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  I mean, this religious fanaticism lasts for most of the rest of the 1870s. And there's a little sort of vignette that I particularly love. Where he is at this point, it's ever so slightly complicated. You know, he's in London for a bit, and then he's transferred back to Paris temporarily, and then he returns, and then he's back in Paris for a bit, and then eventually it all goes to pot and different things happen, which we'll come on to. At one of these temporary moments where he's in Paris, he's staying in Montmartre, and his roommate is this English, this young Englishman called Harry Gladwell.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  And there's this letter, this detail just kind of made me, it slightly tickled me, but in this letter, Van Gogh is talking about, he really likes Harry, and they seem to be friends, 19-year-old Harry, calls him my worthy Englishman. And apparently, night after night, what they're doing in the Montmartre place is they're reading the Bible. Vincent is reading it out loud to this Englishman, and he says in a letter, "We intend to read it all the way through." And I can almost imagine Harry kind of like in horror at the back, sort of, "I don't, I don't want that to happen." But Vincent is convinced that, you know, this is great, and they're getting on enormously well.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  That's classic Vincent. So he becomes very religiously motivated. And this may play a role in the fact that things, just as they hadn't gone well in The Hague, things don't go that well in London. He gets moved to Paris briefly. That goes very poorly as well. So what happens in Paris, again, he's sort of rubbing people up the wrong way. And it all comes to a head at the end of 1875. Now, one thing that is very important, if you want to understand Vincent, is Vincent cares deeply about Christmas.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, he loves Dickens, and he read the Dickens Christmas stories, hadn't he?

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Many, many times reads A Christmas Carol and the other ones. And for Christmas, I guess, we've talked about this, it's a major theme of this episode and the series, is this longing for family connection. And he thinks of Christmas as this time when the family come together, and they sit around the table, and they all love each other. And so Christmas becomes very freighted in his mind with emotional significance. And it often means that the crises of his life happen in or around Christmas. So for instance, it was no coincidence that he chops his ear off on the 23rd of December, the day before Christmas Eve. Because it's at Christmas when suddenly things become, the stakes feel

• 32:54Speaker 00

  very high for him. And when he's in Paris in 1875, he is told that he has to work through the Christmas period at the gallery. And this is just totally unacceptable for him. He doesn't want to miss out at Christmas in Zundert, or wherever they are at this point, because the father does move a few times. And so he ignores the instructions, and he travels back to the Netherlands for Christmas.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  And this does not go down well, because on the first day back at work, on the 4th of January, 1876, he's called in, there's a terrible meeting, very, very difficult, acrimonious meeting, when he is sacked. And this is a major, major setback. I mean, he even writes in a letter, he says, "The ground gave way under my feet." Because he'd been at the Goopel now, Alastair, for six years or so.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it's quite interesting that, because his time as an art dealer is almost as long as his time as a proper painter, artist. It's kind of worth reflecting on that length of time.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  I think the fact he was absent around the Christmas period was the nominal reason that Goopel are giving for getting rid of him. You sense that his wayward, headstrong, difficult character for some time had been rubbing people up the wrong way. So they maybe use it a little bit as an excuse.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And the transfer to Paris is interesting as well, because actually, there comes a moment where there's going to be a big expansion essentially of the gallery within London. And so it's a big moment where the backwater of the business suddenly is coming to the fore. And that's the moment where they switch him out and transfer him temporarily to Paris. So they're obviously already aware that he's not really that great in terms of the job. But yeah, this is, this is a major, major setback for him.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  A major blow, not just for him, but for his entire family, because they were pinning their hopes on him. And we should say that this sense of failure is exacerbated by the fact that his brother has also joined the firm. And his brother is far more socially adept. He's a charming, brilliant guy, actually, in some ways. And he is rising up the ladder.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  He thrives, doesn't he, though?

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Very, very rapidly, just as his older brother Vincent is falling to pieces. So he loses the job, he returns back home, but actually, he very quickly takes another job. So he decides now, I don't want to be an art dealer, I want to be a teacher.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  So two months later, this is March, 1876, he returns to England as a teacher in Ramsgate.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  I mean, this is full on Dickens again, this.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  It's so Dickens. It's an unpaid job, and he's working at this little boarding school. Very menial job, really. He's doing, he's like a janitor, he's doing maintenance work. He's also doing some language teaching. He's putting the children to bed, he's giving them baths, he's looking after the dormitory. But that doesn't last very long.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Still going on his long walks, doesn't he walk from Ramsgate to London?

• 35:35Speaker 00

  He does. He's still always doing his long walks. Then the school sort of closes down and it moves to Isleworth. So he moves to Isleworth. So again, I mean, so incongruous, Vincent van Gogh in Brixton, Ramsgate, Isleworth. I mean, it's incredible. I think his sister was actually well in for a period. It's so weird. But anyway, he's, it doesn't really work out for him as a teacher. And so at this point, he decides, you know what, I don't want to be a teacher, I want to be a preacher.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Now, don't you find this decision fascinating as well, given the relationship with the dad?

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Because, you know, seemingly, he spent his life railing against his father's values. But for a big chunk of, how old is he now? We're in the 1870s, so he's in his twenties.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Mid twenties.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Mid twenties. He really wants to basically follow in his father's footsteps.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  What, what, what do you make of, there's a kind of complexity there to the psychology, don't you think?

• 36:29Speaker 00

  I think he's searching for purpose, isn't he? I think that, I think he's tried various things and they haven't worked out. I think obviously it wasn't his first choice. But I think that there also is probably deep down a desire to please his parents. But there is also this sense that, we'll come to it in a minute, he has this sense deep within him that he has some calling in life, some, some, some purpose that he has to find. And this is what he goes for.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Do you think there's also an aspect of, and actually, maybe this is something that I should have said before about his time in London, where he is very conscious of inequality within society. And partly because of those family values that he's had instilled in him by his parents. When he's in London, he, you know, he can see places like Whitechapel, these slums, this kind of real squalor in which people are living. And he genuinely, I think, has a sympathy for what would you, you know, the downtrodden, the dispossessed. That comes up in his art later. But that perhaps also is a big motivating factor for why he suddenly wants to be a preacher at this moment.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  I think that's true. I think what, the way we've been describing Vincent so far gives you the, might give the listeners the impression that he's just this wayward, lost soul. But he does have a fierce moral conscience and social conscience. He has an unbelievable capacity for self-sacrifice and for kindness. And this is feeding into it. And so he decides, I want to, I want to go into religion. So he, he returns to the Netherlands, and he decides, I'm going to train up to be, to be a clergyman. He, it goes very badly for him. So he, he, he tries to get into university to study theology. He doesn't pass the exams. Then he decides that it's to go to Belgium, where it's slightly easier to train to become a missionary.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  He doesn't actually do well there either. But he does end up, almost as a sort of, it's almost an act of pity from the, from the evangelical authorities that they say to him, well, okay, why don't you become a lay preacher? And so in 1878, 1879, right towards the end of the 1870s, he gets sent as a lay preacher to an area called the Borenage.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yes, the Borenage, which, well, he describes it, Vincent wrote Theo in 1879, and this is how he describes it. This is the coal mining, a coal mining region of Belgium. He says, "It's a somber place, and at first sight, everything around it has something dismal and desolate. The workers there are usually people, emaciated and pale, owing to fever, who look exhausted and haggard, weather-beaten and prematurely old, the women generally sallow and withered." So it doesn't sound like a very picturesque, nice place to be. But for whatever reason, whether it's some sort of self-mortification, Vincent really

• 39:16Speaker 01

  does seem to want to make a go of being in the Borenage. And he lives in a hut, he gives away his possessions, he sleeps on the floor, and he really tries to make a go of this preacher thing. The only trouble is that he isn't very good at it, because he's not great at fostering these personal connections with the poor local people that he's meant to be illuminating with Christianity, even though, you know, he was nicknamed the Christ of the coal mine. But instead, he really wasn't a great speaker.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  No.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  And consequently, the authorities are like, hmm, this isn't really working out for you. But the Borenage moment is highly Significant because this is the time when finally, after he's had all of these dead end sort of false starts in life and dead end jobs, he decides to become an artist and he is drawing. We know he had done a few sketches in London and he continues to sketch. Often the sketches are things which are, he's describing where he is and he puts a sketch into a letter to a family member. But here he is in the Bora Nage and Theo has come to have a kind of real heart to heart.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Because he comes to visit him, doesn't he? And I think there's even a bit of a rift afterwards. They don't correspond for a full year. But essentially Vincent hits rock bottom.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  He absolutely does, Alastair, hit rock bottom in the Bora Nage. I mean, he is bullied relentlessly by the miners. In fact, everywhere Vincent goes, it's so sad throughout his life, wherever he goes, he is ridiculed and bullied and harassed. No one understands him. No one particularly likes him. He has a terrible time there. And this time in the Bora Nage, this lifetime of bullying, really, this sequence of failures and disappointments just brings him to a full on crisis. And, you know, at this point, he is wandering the lanes barefoot. He's dressed in rags. His face is black with coal. He's got no money. He's actually on the verge of suicide. He's so close to a nervous breakdown that in 1880, when he's, what, 27 years old,

• 41:26Speaker 00

  his father even travels to the Bora Nage to take him home. And his father even wants to commit him to a psychiatric hospital. So by this stage, Alastair, aged 27, Vincent had failed at everything. He had failed as an art dealer, failed as a teacher, failed as a preacher, he had even failed as a son. And in June 1880, he wrote the following to his brother. To the family I have willy nilly become a more or less objectionable and shady sort of character, at any rate a bad lot. How then could I be of any use to anyone? And so I am inclined to think the best and most sensible solution all round would be for me to go away and to keep my distance, to cease to be, as it were. But

• 42:11Speaker 00

  I am good for something. My existence is not without reason. How can I be of use? How can I be of service? There is something inside me. But what can it be? And to find out what that something is, though I suspect you already know, join us after the break.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  A reminder that if you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time. And if you're enjoying this episode, please consider following Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. It's now the late summer of 1880 and Vincent, after failing at everything else, Alastair, has decided that he's going to become an artist.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yes, big moment.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  And just as Vincent does with everything, he throws himself into his new vocation with this ferocious zeal. So he takes some home study courses. He works relentlessly day and night. He makes drawing after drawing after drawing after drawing. In fact, in the first two weeks of deciding to become an artist, he makes 120 drawings.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Oh my god, I didn't know that.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Almost 10 drawings a day. It's extraordinary. And he very quickly becomes convinced that this is his calling, just as he thought that being a missionary was his calling, just as he thought that being an art dealer was his calling.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  But this time he's right.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  This time he is absolutely right. He buys some new clothes. He buys some nice artist clothes. He buys some art materials. He pays for some models. Now, this is a really important moment because at this point, at the moment he decides to become an artist, he is no longer being supported by his parents. He is being supported by his brother. His brother Theo or Theo, I'll call him Theo, you can call him Theo. His brother says to him, because he's trying to relieve the burden, the financial burden on his relatively impoverished parents, he says, look, if you decide to become an artist, I will cover your costs. And from that point on, and really for the rest of his life, actually.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Theo pays for Vincent to live.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  It's a really fascinating dynamic because there is, I almost think of Theo as like, he's a sort of saint.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  There's this really profound fraternal love. He supports, he looks out for Vincent, he encourages him to become an artist. And as you say, he essentially bankrolls his endeavour. It's not without its complications because there are moments where they do have fights, they kind of are closer and then they sort of drift apart temporarily and then come back. But Vincent himself clearly feels quite conflicted about the arrangement. Now, my understanding of, again, the big American biography, is that one of the things they sort of argue is that he's quite profligate, Vincent, and that he spends a lot of cash all a bit too easily. And there's a sense almost of entitlement. I mean, I think he does spend on books, he does spend on artistic materials, but he is clearly racked with

• 45:15Speaker 01

  a certain, at least self-awareness and possibly even guilt about the arrangement with Theo. And quite often in the letters, what, he tries to sort of, he tries to define the terms, doesn't he? He sort of argues, well, look, let's see it as, it's kind of an investment from you, younger brother, isn't it? Because, you know, I'm making all this work and you're going to sell it. And then, so that kind of works. And then subsequently, when it becomes quite clear that Theo can't sell the work, because initially it starts out extremely dark and there isn't a market for it in France where Theo is, he starts saying, well, look, he basically wants to be absolved of the idea that he's going to owe Theo.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  So he's like, you can have the work. You may not be able to sell it now, but you can do what, you can do with it what you like.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  And that, for him, for Vincent, means that he doesn't really owe him.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  There is a sense of entitlement, though, nevertheless. I mean, there are moments when if Theo is slightly late in paying him, Vincent writes and says, what the hell are you doing? Where's the money? So there is a bit of that. And, you know, Theo is, he's at this stage, he's still a young man. He doesn't have an enormous amount of money.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Well, and on the money, I read that he's giving at points 15% of his income to Vincent. That's a significant hit, given that, you know, he's living in Paris and I can't imagine that's a particularly cheap place to be in the 1880s at all. So again, it's sort of true charity. And actually, despite all of the sense of difficulty Vincent has with his dad and with some members of his wider family, it's a real sort of testament to how close knit the family was.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And the parents got something right.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  They did. And Theo is one of my all time heroes in the history of art. Actually, when I think about him and talk about him, and we will do it much more in the next episodes, it often brings me to tears because of how much love and loyalty he showed to his brother. But so Vincent is now drawing. He's drawing away. He's decided he's going to become an artist. He does, I mean, his life is still a shipwreck, really, in so many ways, particularly with regard to women. You talked about this particular incident that took place back in London, but it's no better here. So, I mean, a couple of little instances I'd like to describe. One is with his cousin Kay Vos.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a bit awkward, this one.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  This is bad. So he has a first cousin. Her name's, they call her Kay. And in 1881, she actually, she's had a terrible life, actually, because she loses a child at the age of one. Her husband then dies. So she's a single mother with an eight year old son. And she comes to visit the family. And in some time in 1881, she and her son go on a little visit to, they go out into the countryside to watch Vincent doing some drawing. And he immediately falls in love with her and he decides, well, I want to save this woman. I'm going to propose to her. So he proposes pretty much there and then. She says, never, never, never.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  But he then proceeds to stalk her. And all of his family's saying, just don't, just leave her alone. And he won't listen to it.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  I think it's really embarrassing, again, for the parents.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  It's so, so embarrassing. And there's a particular instance when he travels, she lives in Amsterdam, he travels up to Amsterdam, knocks on the door, she hides.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 48:19Speaker 00

  So she doesn't have to see him. He's turned away and the following day, he goes again, he knocks on the door, she hides again. He storms into the house, he holds his hand above a candle and says, I will not take my hand away from this flame until Kay comes down to see me. So that is a disaster. Ultimately, it is resolved, but it's very embarrassing with the family. And then the following year, things get even worse because then he falls in with this woman called Sienna.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Well, is it worth just saying that the thing, you know, the initial debacle, romantic debacle you've just described, precipitates, because you've been talking about the importance of Christmas for the Van Gogh family.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  A major Christmas row that year. And it's during the course of, I mean, it's slightly reminiscent, I don't know what Christmas is like, the Shae Fox, possibly one or two Christmases pass where you can, it often happens, families are together, heightened tensions. But all of that's been going on. Vincent's a total failure. And there's this massive blow up, stand, you know, proper Barney between Vincent and his dad, after which Vincent walks out.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  He leaves. And he says, that's it, I'm done. You know, he writes to Theo and says, you know, Par and Ma's routine is too constricting for me. It's going to suffocate me. And he ends up going to The Hague. And this is where, very important for his artistic development, but also this is where I think he has this next little romantic episode interlude.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Yes, after a classic Van Gogh Christmas, he travels to The Hague and he meets this woman called, he calls Sienna. She is this destitute, alcoholic, pregnant, sex worker and seamstress. Well, he, she, he actually pays her to model for him. They do have a sexual relationship. And in fact, she gives him gonorrhea.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Right, so you shouldn't laugh, but you sort of, you know, yes, that's not good.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  So she gives him gonorrhea, and when she actually ends up having a baby, it's another man's baby, we presume. He decides, again, this is this capacity for kindness that he has, he has this desire to be a saviour, particularly to women, actually. And he decides, you know what, I'm going to house her. And so he gets the house ready, he gets a little cot ready for the baby. He makes a lovely little home ready for them.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Is it basically Theo's money that's paying for this?

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, and Theo is, he's not happy at all about the money being spent on this. In fact, all the family is saying, you cannot be cohabiting with a sex worker. This is not something we do. But Vincent was determined to do it. And eventually, I think Theo tells him, look, if you stay with her, I'm not going to send you money anymore. And so Vincent ultimately ends that relationship as well. But he is making progress as an artist in the meantime, Alastair.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, he is.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  In eighteen eighty-three, he's now thirty years old, he heads out to the countryside of northern Holland, settles right in the marshes, and he begins to make, I think, his first really great drawings. And there's one drawing I want us to briefly look at here.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  It's called the Pollard Birches. No one really mentions this in the literature. It's hardly ever, but I think it is absolutely exceptional.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  So just, Phil, because you did tip me off that you were going to mention this, and I have to confess, I promptly forgot all about that. And so I'm looking at it now. I mean, it is, where are we? What are we looking at here?

• 51:29Speaker 00

  Well, we are looking at a, it's a landscape format drawing in pen and ink. And it shows, it's based in the marshes, the marsh landscape of the north of Holland, Drenthe, where he's living at this time.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  And it shows these, this row of birch trees that have been pollarded. That means when you cut back the branches, so they get these gnarled qualities to them.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  A row of them, kind of almost like an army of them, in the long grass. And as you, and obviously it's winter time, so there's no leaves on the trees. So it's a very kind of spiky, linear design. And it leads the eye through, so it's very kind of, there's a very single point perspective quality to it.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Couple of figures.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, and as you look closely at the landscape, you can see there are these two figures. There's one on the left, a woman probably, walking through the reeds. And on the right, there's a man, again, facing away, who's probably a shepherd, he's surrounded by sheep.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I mean, this is, this is, in a way, classic Vincent at this moment, isn't it? Because these are rural labourers. These are people who are not rich, they're not middle class, they don't come from the city. And that's what he's obsessed with in terms of his subject matter and depiction. I think this is an absolutely marvellous drawing.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  It is.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  And it is partly because of just the intensity of the mark making.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  So you have all of these very small strokes that feel highly individual and also highly expressive. And you have a sense almost of, I don't know what time of year this drawing was done, but it feels like the light feels quite sort of pale and wan. There's a, there's a possibly even slightly sort of wintry quality to it, you know, there clearly aren't leaves on the trees. And he's really inspired at this early moment of becoming an artist with a couple of things. One, he's obsessed with drawings, you've said, because he thinks he wants to be an illustrator. So he's not that interested yet in painting at all. But two, he's interested in schools of art that have emerged in the nineteenth century. In France, the so-called Barbizon School, and in the Netherlands, the so-called Hague School.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  And actually, when he's in the Hague, and you didn't mention this, but I think it's worth bringing up. He has a cousin-in-law who's an artist, who's a very established, well-respected Hague School artist called Anton Maav. And he gives Vincent a lot of lessons, invites him into the studio. And the Hague School is interested, a bit like the Barbizon painters, in depicting the natural world in a realistic way. They love a kind of grey tones, a sort of, you know, understated poetry, if you like. And I think you're seeing that influence in the mix here when you're looking at this drawing.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I totally agree with you. It's the qualities, the range of the mark making that makes this image so remarkable. The range of marks, the horizontals, the verticals, the diagonals, the loops, the curls, the swirls. It's remarkable, and I think the way he uses his marks to animate the inanimate.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't you think the trees are quite anthropomorphic?

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Oh, definitely.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  And so even here at this early stage, you have a sense of, you know, Vincent isn't about technique so much as expression.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  And you see that in this drawing.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  You know, it's almost as though somehow, some part of his self is projected onto the landscape in a way that you're often told, if you're, you know, to use a sort of silly analogy of like, you're writing poetry at school, don't go in for pathetic fallacy. But Vincent, there is a sort of pathetic fallacy aspect to his work, and it's brilliant. That's almost his genius in a way.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  I think you look at this drawing, and for me, anyway, I think this is evidence, the first real evidence, that we have real talent on our hands. And of course, it will take a few years for that talent to properly emerge. But I think when you look at this drawing, you think, wow, this guy has it.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Do you know where he, does he show them at all?

• 55:17Speaker 00

  No, I don't think, I don't think anyone's seeing them. I think he's just making reams and reams of drawings wherever he goes in his preparation. So it's pretty remarkable, but he's very, very unhappy up in the north of Holland.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  It's a bit lonely, though, isn't it? Long nights.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  He's so lonely, it's the winter.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Sorry, James, I just, one little thing about the long nights, because you can sometimes tell when he doesn't have much to do and is feeling lonely, because the letters he writes, they get longer and longer and longer. I think there are fewer biblical quotations, at least, in them at this point, but.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  He's moving slightly away from religion at this point, but he hates it there, really. And after three months, he just calls it quits. He walks sixteen miles to the train station, then another six miles across the moors. He's dressed in rags, he's being ridiculed by the locals, he says himself that he's crying the whole way. And aged thirty, you suggested this earlier on, what would happen? He moves back in with his parents for Christmas eighteen eighty-three.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  This is my favourite quote is possibly in the entire letters, is that he describes his homecoming. And he says, there's a similar reluctance about taking me into the house as there would be having a large, shaggy dog in the house.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  I didn't know that.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  And there is this kind of weird sense where, at this moment, because he now spends some time, I think, what's the name of the village they're in now? Is it Nuenen?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  They've gone to Nuenen.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  This is another rural Dutch village, and he now spends some time there for a couple of years.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  And there is this weird thing where you can imagine the poor mum and dad just thinking, I can't believe it, he's back again.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  He's back.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  You know, and there's this sort of strange, don't they mock up a studio, they kind of give him a small space? There were these moments where it's like he's partly living in the house or partly he's in his annex. It's like having a monster around.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  It's so awful, it's so awful.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Unruly pets.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he comes back in time for Christmas, obviously with his, you know, his characteristic high hopes for how wonderful Christmas is going to be. Within one hour, he has a blazing row with his father.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Of course he does.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  He stays there, as you say, for almost two years. He's, there are constant arguments. There's so much petulant behaviour. I mean, there are moments, there are long periods of time when he refuses to talk to them, so he'll pass them notes.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Yes. And at dinnertime, he would often take his chair and move it to the corner of the room and sit and eat on his lap, often covering his face as he's doing it, so they can't even see him. So it is truly awful, and he's pushing his parents to the limit. And in fact, in March eighteen eighty-five, after fourteen months of this miserable cohabitation, his long-suffering father dies of a stroke.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Could the two things be linked?

• 57:48Speaker 00

  I think the family certainly think it is linked.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Well, he gets asked to leave, doesn't he?

• 57:52Speaker 00

  The family blame Vincent for driving their father to his own death. And would you believe it, the funeral takes place on the thirtieth of March eighteen eighty-five, on Vincent's birthday.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  So there is a real sense that, you know, there is a connection between the son and the father's death. And indeed, as you say, after the funeral, the family kick him out of the house. They say, you can't do this anymore. You know, his mother at this stage is pretty frail, she's suffered an injury, and they just want to get him out. But Vincent, of course, is shell-shocked by all of this. But he is hard at work, Alastair, at this point in early eighteen eighty-five.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  On his first great painting. We've talked about drawings, but this is his first great painting. And he throws himself into it with abandon, you know, relentless work, sketch after sketch. And eventually he produces it, and it's a pretty famous painting called The Potato Eaters. Do you want to describe it?

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Yes, this is his first, what would you say, sort of fully fledged picture. It's a multi-figure composition and I think it's the first and last large group figure composition that Van Gogh paints. And the thing about it is that if you have an image in your mind of what a Van Gogh picture is, it looks nothing like this.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  No.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Because it's figures, not a landscape, and instead of that riotous, joyous colour, it's very, very dark. So we are inside a cottage, it's a cottage interior, and it's dinnertime. And there are five figures arranged around a table and their only illumination is this oil lamp that hangs above the table. On the left of the picture, you've got two seated figures and it's worth saying that he probably conceives of a composition with seated figures because it's slightly easier to depict seated figures than standing figures. Because he's trying to set himself a challenge, Vincent, with a picture like this, to say, I can take on a big, multi-figure composition. On the left, you've got these two figures who are tucking into a plate of, platter

• 59:57Speaker 01

  of steaming potatoes, hence the title of the picture. And on the right, you have a woman who's pouring out coffee and a man is holding up a cup and moving in her direction. In the foreground, with her back to us, almost silhouetted, is a young girl who's standing. Apparently that was actually quite common in a household like this, that children might stand at the table. And she sort of acts as like a conduit, a substitute for the viewer, doesn't she? She sort of brings the eye into the picture. I think in the background, there's a clock which is saying, is it seven o'clock, saying it's sort of supper time. But the tones of this are very, very done, earthy, dark.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  And there's a wonderful quote, very famous quote, where Vincent is talking about the effect, if you like. He said he was going for something like the colour of a really dusty potato, unpeeled, of course. And that, I mean, it's a beautiful description.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  I really intensely dislike this painting.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Do you, oh, I thought, we can't have agreement when we hate something. I find it's kind of like this weird, there's such an element for me of caricature

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  to the way he paints these, you know, quote unquote peasants. So for all of that sympathy, they don't feel like real humans. Instead, they have this subterranean mole man, kind of slightly shriveled quality, which is highly unpleasant. And then there's the whole question of the awkwardness of the execution of the picture. Because the way it's painted isn't very good. The anatomy is way, way off. The sense of perspective is really quite suspect.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  Well, can I, can I follow that up? Because Vincent sends a copy of this painting to a friend of his, one of his only friends.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yes.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  Anton van Rappar, who is also an artist. And Rappar writes back, he says, "You can do better than this. Why may that man on the right not have a knee or belly or lungs? Or are they in his back? And why must his arm be a metre too short? And why must he lack half of his nose? And why must the woman on the left have a sort of little pipe stem with a cube on it for a nose? Come on, art is too important, it seems to me, to be treated so cavalierly." And Vincent was so furious with this letter, do you know what he did? He took the letter, folded it back up, put it back in an envelope and just wrote, "My dear friend Rappar, I have just received your letter to my surprise. You hereby get it back." But he's right, isn't he, Rappar?

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Pretty brutal, but yeah, he's bang on.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  It's a bit of a disaster in all sorts of ways. And yet, it's now seen as, I mean, routinely in the literature and indeed the museum where it's shown in Amsterdam, it's seen as the great masterpiece of his Dutch years.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  Utter nonsense. And do you know something? One of the other complicated things about this picture that makes it even more controversial in some ways, you've talked about how he does have patronised and caricature the peasants, as he would have called them at the time. But the girl who is second from the left, so she models for Vincent quite a lot during this period, often one on one.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  And during the process of making this picture, she gets pregnant. And lots of people, including the family, think that Vincent is the father and he is actually hounded out of the village as a result of making this picture. But you know something? I want to come back to this picture in one way because I totally agree with you. This is, this is, it's not a great work of art at all. But it is really, really interesting. Because I think in some ways, though this is a painting about this family that Vincent has come to know in the countryside, it is also really about his family, it's about him.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Right, yes, of course.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  I said earlier that, you know, how, how close knit Vincent's family were and how painful that first exile was to the boarding school all those years earlier. And I think from that point onwards, Vincent's whole life was a search for closeness, a search for intimacy, a desperate attempt to recover the innocence of that childhood family home that he had been ejected from. And of course, every attempt he makes to do that, we'll discuss it over the next few episodes, whether it's with his family, with his parents, with other people, with Paul Gauguin, for instance, that always backfires. Every time he drives people away, every time he ends up being more isolated. If we remember, this painting is made off the back of him returning to the family home

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  and destroying the family home and ending up, you know, essentially indirectly killing his father. So for me, this painting, which is ultimately about a family, sitting quite happily together around a table, I think it's his deepest wish. So with The Potato Eaters, Vincent, aged 32, has completed his first major painting. It's not a masterpiece, we think, but it is his first major painting. It has been quite the journey, Alastair, an ordeal really, to get there. But I'll tell you something awful, poor old Vincent has only five years left to live at this point. And those five years are going to be astonishingly eventful, full of hope, full of inspiration, full of unspeakable tragedy. So please join us next time when we will describe how Vincent became the artist we

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  know and love. Goodbye.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Goodbye.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

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