Excerpt: Van Gogh and Britain

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The Night Café, 1888

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Introduction

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L’ArlÊsienne, February 1890 Medium 000 × 000 mm

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Pollarded Willows, Arles 1888

Hospital at Saint-Rémy, 1889

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 Starry Night over the Rhone, 1888

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Still Life, Basket of Apples, 1887

La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin, 1851–1930 ) 1889

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Van Gogh’ s prints from Dore and Jerrold, `London a Pilgrimage'

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↙ Artist name Work Title Work Title, 0000 Medium 000 × 000 mm

↓ Artist name Work Title Work Title, 0000 Medium 000 × 000 mm

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↑ Artist name Work Title Work Title, 0000 Medium 000 × 000 mm

↗ Artist name Work Title Work Title, 0000 Medium 000 × 000 mm

The name of Richard Parkes Bonington appeared in a list of ‘painters whom I like very much’ that Van Gogh included in a letter to Theo in 1874, and he sent his brother prints of two of the artist’s paintings in 1875.1 Bonington was widely known and copied in Britain and Europe and Van Gogh had the opportunity to see numerous works in London. Distant View of St-Omer 1824 (fig.2) appeared with three others in an exhibition Old Masters and Deceased Masters of the British School at the Royal Academy in 1873 and shortly afterwards Van Gogh purchased Jules Joseph Augustin Laurens lithograph of the picture in reverse, A Road (1851). He owned this print by at least 1875, when, during a brief stay in Paris, he hung it in his room in Montmartre, and kept it until the end of his life (fig.3).2 The ‘stormy skies’ that Van Gogh admired in the Bonington had a deeper resonance. A Road reminded him of a landscape in a novel by George Eliot, ‘that landscape described in that passage in Adam Bede, which we both found so moving’ mentioned in two

letters around this time.3 Forsaken by her lover and heavily pregnant, Hetty Sorrell sets out to search for him, ‘on the road towards Ashby, under a leadencoloured sky, with a narrowing streak of yellow, like a departing hope on the edge of the horizon’.4 Bonington was on Van Gogh’s mind again on a stormy night om 6 July 1882, when he wrote a long reply to Theo.5 Theo’s letter had mentioned a grey day in Paris which reminded him of the Bonington and prompted thoughts about the difference between describing landscapes and creating them in writing or painting: ‘drawing in words is also an art’. Again, there was perhaps a more personal resonance. Like Hetty Sorrel, Sein was away having her illegitimate baby, but unlike Hetty, Sein was not forsaken. Van Gogh wrote at length about his hopes for life with her in his new studio, repeatedly returning to his familiar metaphor of his life as a road: ‘This is an intensely deep feeling, serious and not without the dark shadow of her and my fairly sombre pasts … against which our life must be a

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Farms near Auvers, 1890

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Beaches

The name of Richard Parkes Bonington appeared in a list of ‘painters whom I like very much’ that Van Gogh included in a letter to Theo in 1874, and he sent his brother prints of two of the artist’s paintings in 1875.1 Bonington was widely known and copied in Britain and Europe and Van Gogh had the opportunity to see numerous works in London. Distant View of St-Omer 1824 (fig.2) appeared with three others in an exhibition Old Masters and Deceased Masters of the British School at the Royal Academy in 1873 and shortly afterwards Van Gogh purchased Jules Joseph Augustin Laurens lithograph of the picture in reverse, A Road (1851). He owned this print by at least 1875, when, during a brief stay in Paris, he hung it in his room in Montmartre, and kept it until the end of his life (fig.3).2 The ‘stormy skies’ that Van Gogh admired in the Bonington had a deeper resonance. A Road reminded him of a landscape in a novel by George Eliot, ‘that landscape described in that passage in Adam Bede, which we both found so moving’ mentioned in two letters around this time.3 Forsaken by her lover and heavily pregnant, Hetty Sorrell sets out to search for him, ‘on the road towards Ashby, under a leaden-coloured sky, with a

Van Gogh’s copy of Jules Joseph Augustin Laurens, A Road, 1851

narrowing streak of yellow, like a departing hope on the edge of the horizon’.4 Bonington was on Van Gogh’s mind again on a stormy night om 6 July 1882, when he wrote a long reply to Theo.5 Theo’s letter had mentioned a grey day in Paris which reminded him of the Bonington and prompted thoughts about the difference between describing landscapes and creating them in writing or painting: ‘drawing in words is also an art’. Again, there was perhaps a more personal resonance. Like Hetty Sorrel, Sein was away having her illegitimate baby, but unlike Hetty, Sein was not forsaken. Van Gogh wrote at length about his hopes for life with her in his new studio, repeatedly returning to his familiar metaphor of his life as a road: ‘This is an intensely deep feeling, serious and not without the dark shadow of her and my fairly sombre pasts … against which our life must be a constant struggle. At the same time, though, I feel a great calm and clarity and cheerfulness at the thought of her and of the straight path lying before me.’

The following morning was, in two senses, a calm after the storm. Van Gogh had expected to be admitted into hospital, but he was pronounced well, and the weather cleared. He immediately went to the dunes at Scheveningen and painted a scene reminiscent of A Road.

This was Bleaching Ground at Scheveningen (fig.1). The diagonals of the sandy path and the diminishing scatter of figures and rectangles of cloth create depth in the same way as Bonington’s road, figures and cattle. The palette provides an insight into Van Gogh’s visual memory; the green grass, and glimpses of blue sky, recall the colours of Bonington’s painting viewed nearly a decade before. In the letter of the previous evening, Van Gogh had reflected on the power of inanimate things around him to evoke profound emotional responses, and the symbolic dimension of the Scheveningen scene cannot have been lost on him. The cloth being made fresh by the sun and the wind and the promise of the patches of blue, reverse the prospect of Hetty’s path to one of arriving rather than ‘departing’ hope. CJ

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↑ Bleaching Ground at Scheveningen (Woman from Scheveningen), July 1882 Watercolour and gouache on paper 31.8 × 54 mm

→ Richard Parkes Bonington Distant View of St-Omer, 0000 Oil paint on canvas 31.4 × 43.8 mm

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Walking in Paris

The Bois de Boulogne with People Walking Paris, 1886 Oil paint on canvas 46.5 Ă— 37 mm

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Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Mauris ultricies sit amet nisi a euismod. Nulla a diam ex. Morbi eu nulla sit amet mi facilisis sagittis at id quam. Aenean efficitur ornare consectetur. Morbi nisl magna, maximus sit amet auctor at, aliquet auctor sapien.

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Cras ornare odio non neque mollis, eu iaculis sapien posuere. Aliquam euismod purus eget sapien auctor convallis. Mauris volutpat consequat tortor eu tempor. Mattis commodo urna, non sollicitudin mauris fringilla quis. Maecenas in velit nec metus laoreet vestibulum. Integer nisi erat, interdum sit amet pulvinar ac, euismod vitae purus. In massa lorem, sagittis a ligula eget, dictum bibendum neque. Vivamus et orci accumsan, pharetra lorem euismod ut tempor enim. M L 30

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 Still Life with Plaster Statuette, a Rose and Two Novels, 1887

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Olive Trees, 1889

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Van Gogh's Sunflowers

Now arguably the world’s most instantly recognised work of art, Sunflowers went unsold during the artist’s lifetime.

Following Van Gogh’s suicide in 1890 his paintings passed to his brother Theo, who died a few months later.

They then went to Theo’s wife Jo Bonger. The yellow Sunflowers was one of her particular favourites. In 1922 the National Gallery at Millbank, the predecessor of the Tate Gallery, tried to buy it when it came on short-term loan to London’s Leicester Galleries. Jim Ede, a young curator, wrote to Bonger, saying that ‘it would be exhibited at the fountainhead of England’s art – and would be in a place where all the world would see it’.

Bonger refused, saying, ‘the Sunflowers are not for sale, ever; they belong in our family’. She had looked upon the still life nearly every day for more than thirty years.

Ede persisted, and in the end Bonger relented: ‘No picture would represent Vincent in your famous Gallery in a more worthy manner than the “Sunflowers”... It is a sacrifice for the sake of Vincent’s glory.’1 The price was £1,304, funded by the textile magnate and collector Samuel Courtauld. The Sunflowers proved a great inspiration to British artists in the 1920s and 1930s, some of whom set out to adopt the motif, but tackling it in their own distinctive styles. It later became the star of Britain’s first major Van Gogh show, held at the Tate Gallery in 1947. In 1961 the Tate transferred Sunflowers along with some late nineteenth-century pictures to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Since the 1960s it has only been lent twice, both times to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and its temporary return to its old home, Tate Britain, represents a very exceptional loan. Van Gogh painted a set of four Sunflower pictures in

Sunflowers, 1888 Oil paint on canvas 92.1 × 73 mm

August 1888 in Arles to decorate Yellow House, his home and studio.2 That very week he wrote to his brother Theo, admitting that ‘there’s no market for what we do’, but he and his avant-garde colleagues were preparing ‘for the painters who will walk in our footsteps.’3 This picture is one of Van Gogh’s first set of four sunflower still lifes completed in less than a week.

He began with a painting of three sunflowers (private collection), then six sunflowers (destroyed in Japan during the Second World War) and after this fourteen sunflowers (Neue Pinakothek, Munich), with the blooms set against blue backgrounds. In this, his fourth picture, he boldly presented the flowers against a yellow background. The fifteen sunflowers are at different stages of their life, a reflection of the passage of time. There is one bud, seven flowers in full bloom and seven going to seed.

Compositionally it is simplicity itself – a bouquet of flowers, a modest pot, a table and a background wall.

Van Gogh was pleased with this final version, prominently signing it on the pot. As he wrote to Paul Gauguin, two French artists had their specialities – Georges Jeannin painted the peony and Ernest Quost the hollyhock, but ‘the sunflower is mine’.4 The Sunflower paintings were hung in the spare bedroom of the Yellow House, awaiting the arrival of Paul Gauguin. The two artists worked together for two months, but tensions developed and their collaboration ended when Van Gogh mutilated his ear just before Christmas. Despite their difficulties, Gauguin was a great admirer of the Sunflowers and a few weeks after their split Van Gogh painted copies for him. M B

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Entrance of Voyer d’Argenson Park at Asnières 1887, 1887

Prisoners Exercising, 1890

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Road to Etten 1881

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↙ Giuseppe De Nittis Victoria Embankment in London, Westminster Bridge, 1875 Oil paint on canvas 18.4 × 31.7 mm

s

→ To Theo van Gogh, London, beginning of January, 1874

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Van Gogh and Britain Edited by Carol Jacobi

Rizzoli Electa A Division of Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 300 Park Avenue South New York, NY Â 10010 www.rizzoliusa.com In association with Tate, London Exhibition Schedule: Tate Britain, London: March 27-August 11, 2019 ISBN: 978-0-8478-6685-4 $50.00 Hardcover, 8 7/8 x 10 5/8 inches 224 pages 220 illustrations Rights: North America, Latin America For serial rights, images to accompany your coverage, or any other publicity information about this title please contact: Pam Sommers, Executive Director of Publicity T. (212) 387-3465 psommers@rizzoliusa.com

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