Every few years, a new Van Gogh exhibition opens in London. It makes sense; Vincent van Gogh was arguably a phenomenal painter, and his work is so well regarded by museum audiences today that any show featuring his works is sure to be extremely popular. The city hosted two excellent ones in recent years: a selection of his self-portraits at The Courtauld in 2022 and “Van Gogh and Britain” at Tate Britain in 2019.
The National Gallery is the latest institution to get in on the action with what it’s calling a “once-in-a-century exhibition” of works by the Dutch Post-Impressionist master. The opening of “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” coincided with the hundredth anniversary of the National Gallery’s acquisitions of Sunflowers and Van Gogh’s Chair (not to mention the gallery’s 200th birthday). As is often the case, the works on show were primarily created during the period of intense creativity between 1888 and early 1890 during which Van Gogh was based in the South of France. Or, to put it more bluntly, the years leading up to his death by suicide.
“Poets and Lovers” seems designed to entice the casual Van Gogh fan, with a lot of familiar works: Starry Night over the Rhône—which pulls you into the darkened river at its center as the twinkling stars above try to compete with the lights on the riverbank reflected in the
More interesting are Van Gogh’s lesser-known works in the show, like the painting of stevedores working by the shore, silhouetted against a blazing sunset of yellows, oranges and turquoise that are so vivid one almost wants to shield one’s eyes against the glare. The same gallery also contains his heartily painted portraits of Augustine Roulin and an unnamed peasant. Their faces are so vibrantly yellow they could pass for sunflowers themselves; the peasant’s stubble is blue-green, echoing the color of his jacket. Something about it feels contemporary, and one wonders how Van Gogh’s paintings would have evolved had he lived for several decades more.
Some of the works in the exhibition hint at his insecurities. The empty chair with pipe and tobacco pouch feels like a self-portrait, painted when his contemporary, and sometimes frenemy, Paul Gauguin visited the Yellow House. Van Gogh was always jealous of Gauguin, particularly when it came to his success with women, and one could read that empty chair as a reflection of his inadequacy when holding himself up against the man.
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Van Gogh’s yearning for love and to be loved can be found not only in his letters (“I can’t live without love, without a woman. I couldn’t care a fig for life if there wasn’t something infinite, something deep, something real,” he wrote to his brother Theo in 1881) but also in his paintings, which in some cases depict lovers walking through the open air. Knowing he sought love but never found it is bittersweet—too often, we revere the brilliant but tortured artist not thinking about the man underneath whose quiet yearnings shaped the work on the canvas.
Among the pieces on display in “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” are some of the artist’s works on paper, including a room of Van Gogh’s drawings of Montmajour Abbey, five kilometers north of Arles, where he lived after leaving Paris. While these don’t have the grab-you-by-the-lapels impact of his paintings, the various sketches on show and the lesser-known masterpieces will be particularly fascinating to viewers whose interest in the artist runs deeper than the myth around the man.
The familiar works, much replicated on merchandise and on social media, are here, but there’s more than that to see. Much like his sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh bloomed brightly but briefly, leaving the world with a body of work that reflects an artistic genius that remains unparalleled today.
“Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” is on at London’s National Gallery through January 19, 2025.
