He painted prisoners, devoured Dickens and worshipped the London News ... ahead of a major show, our writer reveals how Britain changed Van Gogh - and how he transformed its artVincent van Gogh was the most European of artists. His brief, intense life, before he killed himself aged 37, saw him moving between his native Netherlands, Belgium, England and France. He spent two years in London from 1873 to 1875, employed by an art dealer; in 1876, for shorter periods, he worked as a teacher in Ramsgate and Isleworth. Later, when he was living in Paris, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about seeing a painting that depicted London from Victoria Embankment, by Giuseppe De Nittis. `When I saw this painting,` he wrote, `I felt how much I love London.` The city provided a deep immersion into the bewildering, heady life of a fully industrialised metropolis. This was Dickens´s London, with its squalor, its teeming masses, its glamour, its wealth, its cruelty - and, importantly for his formation, its art galleries.After his death, the love, at first fitfully, flowed in the opposite direction. When his work was shown at Roger Fry´s famous post-impressionist exhibition in 1910, it changed the course of British art. In 1947, bombed-out, austerity London was given a blast of the golds and scarlets and greens and azure blues of Provence, and Van Gogh´s paintings, by then sanctified into mass popularity, astounded the public once more. The Manchester Guardian´s critic, Eric Newton, wrote of that exhibition, held at what is now Tate Britain: `When he painted with reckless courage from a full heart ... the results are astonishing. What is more, they will always be astonishing. That kind of genius cannot go out of fashion.` This month, Van Gogh will be returning to the building, as a major new exhibition examines his relationship with Britain - what he drew from it and what he bequeathed to it. Continue reading...
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