Saint Paul’s Hospital at Saint-Remy, 1890.
Iris, 1890.
The Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Remy, 1889.
Tree and Bushes in the Garden of the Asylum, 1989.
Hospital at Arles, 1889.
Undergrowth, 1889.
The Park of the Hospital at Saint-Remy, 1889.
I was entranced by the Vincent
van Gogh exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery. Mrs Ingram,
who is a member, has been escorting various people along to it – her aunt, her
mother, and now me. She’s taking a friend along next week, which will be her
fourth visit. It’s that good that she doesn’t mind.
Last year we went to see the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam
together. Truthfully, we were disappointed. We didn’t think much of the
selection. I came to the conclusion that, yes, he could paint some wonderful
portraits, especially of himself, but people weren’t really his forte. In 2019,
we’d seen the Van
Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain. That too was an interesting,
but faintly disappointing selection dominated by interiors, portraits, and
urban scenery.
Garden with weeping Tree, 1888.
This exhibition, however, really seemed to nail it with a
focus on pictures of trees and plants. People who follow this blog will be
familiar with my interest in this axis of ecology and therapy. More than any of
his other preoccupations, it’s in van Gogh’s drawings and paintings of the
rural landscape and its vegetation that his work really comes together in
spectacular fashion.
Van Gogh, at the time these paintings were made in 1888, had
been diagnosed with “acute mania with generalized delirium” and “mental
epilepsy”. He made many drawings in the grounds of hospitals and asylums. It
seems like the therapeutic power of nature in helping the physically injured,
as well as the mentally dislocated, was better appreciated in his era than
ours, when it is only just creeping back into serious acceptance.
Drawings of Montmajour, 1888.
Van Gogh’s drawings of the countryside have a tremendous
intensity. He was a big fan of the Illustrated
London News, and in fact tried and failed to get work with my ancestors,
who ran the paper. Visually, these drawings of his were inspired by the
technical necessity of mark-making in newspaper illustration.
In print production, pictures would have been built up from
the mark in the same way that halftone
would later become the underpinning of printed pictures. It was not possible to
render gradients of shade in any other way. But Van Gogh was fascinated by the
technique of this mark making itself. He pulls it to the fore in a way that
newspaper illustrators would have tried to make less obtrusive, as though it
were an encumbrance forced upon them by the medium to overcome.
Van Gogh tailors his every mark in such a way to respond to
what he is drawing: pebbles, grass, leaves, branches, the texture on rocks,
everything has its own corresponding style of mark. Van Gogh’s responsiveness
makes me think of Bob Dylan’s religious anthem, “Every Grain of Sand.”
In the fury of the moment, I can see the master’s hand,
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.
Bob
Dylan
View of Arles, 1889.
Field with poppies, 1889.
The Large Plane Trees, 1889.
Landscape with ploughman, 1889.
Enclosed field with Peasant, 1889.
Wheatfield behind St-Paul Hospital, 1889.
A Wheatfield with Cypresses, 1889.
The Sower, 1888.
The landscapes, which are of special interest to me, often
show fields of wheat, vegetable crops, allotment gardens and orchards at the
edge of towns, (after Millet) sowing seed, or ploughing. Van Gogh romanticises
this agricultural work. It represents to Vincent some part of his personality
that has been broken from him. His paintings of it are an, arguably successful,
attempt at spiritual reunification.
Sunflowers, 1889.
Sunflowers, 1888.
There are two of the exquisite sunflower paintings in the
exhibition. As one literate in these matters, he must have reflected that the
sunflower (Helianthus annus) was not just an ornamental flower but also a crop – and to that extent
transcendent.
Oleanders, 1888.
But there are other highly distinct plants in these
pictures: Plane Trees (Platanus x acerifolia), Cypress Trees (Cupressus
sempervirens), Roses (Rosa spp), Ivy (Hedera helix) in the
undergrowth, the Iris germanica flower at the top, a favourite of the
Arts and Crafts movement and gardeners like Gertrude Jekyll, and
the Nerium oleanders directly above. This faithful depiction of botany
was at once more normal in those times when the urban/rural divide was markedly
less pronounced, but also unusual in van Gogh given his largely urban
upbringing.
Olive trees, 1889.
One sequence of paintings of an olive grove is presented as
though a study in light, like Monet’s series
of water-lilies. Van Gogh, god’s lonely man, works there in the heat of the
summer sun – and only in the last picture do we see other people, and the
olives being harvested in the cool of the evening.
Tree Trunks in the Grass, 1890.
Long Grass with Butterflies, 1890.
“Long Grass with Butterflies” is the last picture hanging by
the exit. It might have been my favourite painting in the whole exhibition.
Every blade of grass here is sacred. The butterflies, Marbled
whites perhaps, pollinators, flitter in the still Provencal air.
