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.
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.
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 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,
Bob Dylan
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.
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.
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 annum) was not just an ornamental flower but also a crop – and to that extent transcendent.
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.
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.
“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.
