Life & Times Exhibition

The EY Exhibition and his monumental Van Gogh and Britain London: a Pilgrimage. Tate Britain, London, Whistler’s Nocturnes 27 March 2019 to 11 August 2019 and Constable’s country landscapes also made a VINCENT IN LONDON considerable impression London seems to have been the springboard on him. Yet he did not for Vincent van Gogh’s creative genius. He start painting until he trained as an art dealer at Goupil & Cie in had unsuccessfully tried The Hague, coming to the company’s Covent his hand at teaching and Garden office in 1873, aged 20. He lodged in preaching. South London, initially in Brixton, and for a He returned to the short time stayed at 395 Kennington Road, Netherlands at the age of just a few minutes from my old practice 23, where, in 1880, after in Lambeth Walk. He soaked up London further unsatisfactory life and loved to read Zola, Balzac, Harriet forays into theology and Beecher Stowe, and, above all, Charles missionary work, his Dickens. This intriguing exhibition opens art dealer brother Theo movingly with a version of L’Arlésienne encouraged him to start (image right), in which Dickens’s Christmas drawing and painting. Stories and Uncle Tom’s Cabin lie on the Van Gogh’s earliest table. paintings were almost He became familiar with the work of pastiches of Dutch British illustrators and printmakers, and landscape masters, but, as he absorbed Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), L’Arlésienne, 1890. Oil paint on canvas, 650 × also that of Gustav Doré (below is van 540 mm. Collection MASP (São Paulo Museum of Art). Photo credit: João Musa. Gogh’s only painting of London, inspired by other influences such Doré’s engraving of Newgate Prison and as Japanese painting, said to reflect his own spiritual isolation) ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Harold Gilman. Provence started to become and post-impressionist a place of pilgrimage and Augustus John Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), The Prison Courtyard, 1890. Oil paint on techniques such as was such an admirer that he took a rented canvas, 800 × 640 mm. © The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. pointillism, his style house near the asylum. became freer and more There is a slightly fanciful room in the vigorous, culminating in exhibition in which the sunflower paintings the astonishing series are linked to British flower painting more of masterpieces that generally and, finally, some garish and are familiar around the unprepossessing canvases by Francis globe. Bacon who was also, apparently, a fan. In his 2 years at Arles It’s a pleasure to walk around this he produced around 200 exhibition, although I thought it asked paintings and during more questions than it answered about his last months, in the the dreams, sensibilities, and demons asylum at Sainte-Paul de that drove Vincent van Gogh along his Mausole, in Saint-Rémy- extraordinary journey from Stockwell to de-Provence, he was Saint-Rémy. extraordinarily prolific. Reflecting its title, Roger Jones, the second half of the Editor, BJGP. show examines van Email: [email protected] Gogh’s place in the post- impressionist period and DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp19X702521 the influences he had on early 20th century British painters, such as Matthew Smith and the Camden group including Walter Sickert and

British Journal of General Practice, May 2019 249