Vincent Van Gogh: with Carol Jacobi

Vincent Van Gogh was an avid reader of Dickens. Throughout his life Dickens' works provided not only a mental 'scaffold' that helped him to believe in his own mission as an artist, but also pull himself out of deep depressions ...

Here to talk to Dominic today about the powerful connection between Dickens and Van Gogh is the inimitable Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art (1850-1915) at Tate Britain where her many exhibitions included the celebrated Van Gogh in Britain …

Here are links to paintings discussed in the episode:

Miners in the Snow

The Potato Eaters

Boots

Vincent's Chair + Gaugin's Armchair

Empty Chair

Prisoner's Round

Self-Portrait

Woman Rocking Cradle

L'Arlésienne 

Starry Night Over the Rohne

The piano music in this episode was composed by Franz Gordon. Used with permission under license from Epidemic Sound

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:20

On the 15th of August 1879, a 26-year-old Vincent van Gogh, looking thin and worn, suddenly appeared at his parents' home in the Dutch village of Eton. Vincent had crashed, burned, and lost his way in life again. His family bought him a new pair of boots, while his mother had new stockings ready, and his father gave the cherished new coat off his own back to his son. As an exhausted Vincent slipped away into his room to recover, his mother wrote an anxious letter to his brother Teo, describing how Vincent is reading books by Dickens all day long and does not speak apart from giving answers. Sometimes correct, sometimes strange ones. If only he adopted the good things from these books. The mother's wish was to be granted, as Dickens was for Van Gogh, more than mere escapism. These great novels and their philosophies were a kind of mental scaffold for him that not only helped him to believe in his own mission as an artist, but also pull himself out of deep depressions, citing remedies from Nicholas Nickleby, such as a glass of wine, a piece of bread and cheese, and a pipe of tobacco, or that important message which recurs so many times in Vincent's letters from the haunted man, Lord, keep my memory green. Here to talk to us today about the powerful connection between Dickens and Van Gogh is the inimitable Carol Jacoby, curator of British art, 1850 to 1915 at the Tate Britain, where her many exhibitions included the celebrated Van Gogh in Britain. But before we invite her in, something to consider is how easy it is for us to always see Vincent as a downtrodden, tragic figure who eventually took his own life. But to only see him as a victim is to completely misunderstand the man. As Vincent said himself, though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still a calmness, pure harmony, and music inside me. Carol, hello, and welcome to Charles Dickens, a Brain on Fire. I'm thrilled to have you here.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

I'm thrilled to be here, thanks.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Thank you. Well, I mean, to get to talk about one of the most loved and most brilliant artists of all time, but somebody that, interestingly, was not just a casual reader of Dickens. He absolutely loved Dickens in ways that I had no idea about.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Yes, Van Gogh was already reading Dickens as a child. Uh his whole family were Dickens enthusiasts, and he was even reading him in English as well as in translation. He'd have been about 16 when Dickens died, but was already a big enthusiast by that time.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

And what does he mean to you, you know, in your role as a curator at the Tate? What do his works mean to you personally? When did you first come across him?

SPEAKER_01 3:33

It's interesting because I think my views for both of them are originates in a similar place, and that's the sort of the way they found a poetry of the everyday, an ennoblement of sort of cheap, accessible art. That's sort of for me very much at the heart of what I do as a curator as well. They find this wonderful poetry in in everyday life.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Yes. Something that strikes me about both Van Gogh and Dickens is that they're great in their world, but actually they're also loved by people that aren't very interested in the art world or don't really read books, but they love Dickens' characters. And that's something I think deeply powerful and profound that they have that common touch as well. That's not meant in a patronizing way, but they can reach so many people beyond their own circle.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Yeah. I I think it's interesting to know a bit more about Van Gogh's background and and the change in his character and his beliefs that came about in London, partly through reading Dickens. So he came from a family of ministers and art dealers in the Netherlands, of course. And he was sent to London for his first job, which was working as an art dealer. He never had any idea of becoming an artist. And I think it was in London, which we have to remember, and of course, Dickens is a great poet of London, was by far the biggest and most modern and most fast-changing city on the planet. I mean, what an amazing place to get sent to at the age of 20. He actually really fell out of love, well, with capitalism, with this search for success, particularly financial success, and a sort of class success, which his family were sort of quite keen on it. He started to express his opinions at his um place of work. He worked at Goopolinco in Covert Garden and actually eventually got let go because he became a very modest person. He he embraced a very, very modest lifestyle, which he kept through the rest of his life. And he wanted to be uh sounds strange to us, but he wanted to be a missionary. Uh, there was this idea then that cities required missionaries, they required people to minister to the poor, to the people who weren't doing so well out of market capitalism, basically. And uh he tried to train as a missionary. He just worked voluntarily, he never managed to get a job. And that didn't work out, and he went back to Holland and then he had a kind of ministry in a mining mining community, and that didn't work either, and he actually became completely desperate. His family were thinking about putting him into an asylum. And it was at this point that he went back to Dickens again, and he found his set of values in Dickens that art was to be a kind of consolation. This is such a big idea for Van Gogh, and that art was a kind of ministry in itself. And he sort of started thinking maybe he could just do some drawings, maybe he could go back to London and work as an illustrator. And so he was 28 when he took up art. But that journey from seeking a respectable life to feeling art should be for the people, the Dickens' books were there, particularly hard times, uh, all the way through that really painful journey he had.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Yes, and it's interesting because actually in his letters he quotes Dickens a lot, doesn't he? But he mixes it in with passages of the Bible very often.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

I think one of the interesting things about the 19th century in terms of religion is the way that there were so many different variations of religion and a lot of new kind of framing of even just Christian belief. Van Gogh was living in just sort of north of Brixton in London. And um, when he became alienated from his landlady, mainly because he'd fallen in love with a daughter, and that passion was not reciprocated. He was actually living just off the Kennington Road, right next to one of the biggest churches, evangelical churches in London, which was sort of a lot of these churches were promoting Christian socialist values. This is the beginning of socialism, of course, and Christianity that was practical, that would do something to help people's lives, particularly the poor and the powerless. And of course, you know, Van Gogh was very influenced by those narratives in London. And so in the baronage, in the mining area of Belgium, that he went to work as a minister, he actually gave up his lodgings, he gave it to a homeless person and went and lived in his hut and slept on the floor and gave away all his food. Um in a very van Gogh way, he absolutely, you know, applied these new ideas, these sort of emergent socialist ideas, very literally and very passionately, and with this incredible love for his fellow human beings, which he always had. And of course, he lost that post because the church felt that he was bringing the church into disrepute. They didn't think he was being dignified enough in his post. So for him, particularly going back to hard times when it seemed that nobody really understood what he was trying to do, and he didn't seem to be having success in what he was trying to do, he could find those values in Dickens, uh, in reading Dickens' books. So he mentions Dickens in 54 of his letters. And it's interesting because those mentions are all collected around this absolutely desperate period when he is unemployed, when he's when he's asking, What am I good for? And he actually says that in a amazing letter to his brother, What am I good for? And that's when he's mentioning Dickens all around that period.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

What am I in the eyes of most people? A non-entity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person, somebody who has no position in society and will never have. In short, the lowest of the low. All right then. Even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

And then the other time when you get a lot of mentions of Dickens are after he has his major breakdown uh in the south of France towards the end of his career. Uh, when he goes out, and as soon as he gets out of hospital after self-harming, after cutting his ear, the first thing he does is go out and buy a translation of um Dickens' Christmas stories.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Yes, it's amazing, isn't it? So Dickens was a kind of inspiration and a solace to him.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Yeah, solace is a good word, and I think Van Gogh saw his art, he wanted his art to perform a similar function. I mean, obviously he did want to get some sort of financial independence through his art because he always felt very, very guilty that his brother, who stayed an art dealer and was quite successful as an art dealer, his brother basically maintained him with a very modest income. And he did want to pay his brother back and have some success. But the real value for him of his art. And so he says, My whole life is aimed at making the things from everyday life that Dickens describes and these artists draw. So he's not just interested in Dickens, he's interested in illustrations of Dickens and other sort of um social realist prints, which he had a huge collection of. For him, Dickens was like a fantastic example of how you could turn realism into poetry. And he wanted to get some quality in his painting that was the same as Dickens' language. And what he saw in it was this quality, not only of realism, but of real ability to stir emotions in the viewer or the reader. And he felt that the realist art of his own country, well, there was a real tradition of realism in his own country, but he didn't feel it had the extra quality, that that quality to just stir you and move you and possibly console you.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

It's interesting because you saying that to begin with, it reminds me, talking about the potato eaters, that very early painting. I think that's an extraordinary one. It's not what you associate with Van Gogh, is it, initially? The all the browns in there.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

Could I introduce you to an almost completely unknown drawing by Van Gogh?

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Of course, yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

It's called Miners Walking in the Snow. And I think anyone who looks at it um will be very surprised because it looks like he's been drawn by a child. And this is one of the first ever times he thought, right, I am going to try and do a drawing. And as you can see, he still has a lot to learn. Um the the figures are very kind of you know anatomically strange. And so he does this after he gets sacked from uh being a minister in the mining area, but he's gone back there to live with a miner and to work out what he's gonna do with his life. And so this is his first attempt. So I think it's absolutely fascinating. So he is 27, and this image is inspired by hard times. In particular, Dickens' sort of imagery. Dickens describes it as a wild country undermined by deserted coal shafts and spotted at night by fires and black shapes with stationary engines at Pittsmouth. And of course, Van Gogh's been living this, you know. Um so Dickens is really speaking to him, and he's particularly interested in the character of Stephen Blackpool, this sort of struggling hero, and also being a working class hero, because of course Dickens and George Eliot, Van Gogh also loved Elliot, really kind of invented the working class hero. And in particular, what interests me is that there's all these little thorn trees. Can you see in the drawing?

SPEAKER_00 14:07

Let me get back.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

All these little thorn trees, and what they refer to is Dickens describes the thorn trees growing around the mining district, and for Dickens, the fact that they still manage to grow and even to flower is a kind of sense of the possibility of nature in this industrial landscape. And you get lots of references of Angulh's letters around this time to the thorns in his own life. And he actually writes to his brother in during this very, very depressed time. I have hopes that these thorns will bear white flowers in their time.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

Yes. The the branches they seem incredibly faded, don't they? Almost kind of ghostly.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Yes, he's trying to do distance, I think. Um they get fade more faded as they go backwards. And you know, it's a very ambitious drawing in that you've got the mine in the background and everything. And he's sort of also really interested in that dark light that Dickens describes as well. That the mine is almost like silhouettes. All the way through Van Gogh you get these images of people walking. Um, he was a very, I don't know if Dickens was interested in Pilgrim's Progress, but Van Gogh was. And he saw that idea of the of the of the walking figure as a metaphor for the sort of struggle of life. Uh, he comes back to that all the time and often even depicts himself as that walking figure. And it's interesting that, see, that there are women there wearing trousers, which was quite normal at the time, of course, children as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

And like you said, their bodies seem a little bit out of proportion with each other or a little bit not quite in the same space, which is so interesting, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Yeah, I mean it's it's very much a first go.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

And the other thing is not bad for a first go.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Yeah. Um, he's he's 27, and within three years, he's taught himself, he's turned himself into the most fantastic draftsman. And the way he did this, because he did try and go to art school, he did try and get artists to teach him, and he fell out with all of them, and he hardly got any training. But he basically collected a huge number of black and white prints, illustrations of Dickens, illustrations of all kinds of things, particularly loop files, and he used them to learn to draw.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

It's inspiring stuff as well, isn't it, to be self-taught in that way. And then so brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

And yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

The potato eaters, that very early painting. I remember seeing this one for the very first time.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Um you think, wow, is that a Van Gogh?

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? How would you describe it? I'm going to have links, obviously, to all of these so the listener can see it, but um where would you start?

SPEAKER_01 16:55

So Van Gogh basically had this uh two years in The Hague, uh, where he ended up, plastered his room with prints, and taught himself to draw. And then he went and lived in other areas, and so he was living in the Borinage, and again in this very working class area, and he starts painting in oil. He thinks maybe I I could be more than an illustrator, I could be a painter. So this is his first really ambitious picture, and of course, you know, this could be a scene from Dickens. It's a family around a table coming together, having a meal, but incredibly modest meal, just made up of potatoes and tea, I think, as the title suggests. And so, again, both Dickens and Van Gogh moved on from images of the working class that were kind of aimed at middle class audiences and therefore made them picturesque and even perhaps exotic, to images that were really empathetic and which gives them the leading role. And so you've got these unidealised but incredibly human and tender portrait of five figures sitting around the table. Yes. The woman is pouring tea, and and you've got the steam, and you've got the light. What Vangos learnt from the English printmakers is the way light can again turn ordinary things into poetry.

unknown 18:26

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Van Gosh's light is always wonderful. You can see the light just gives them this sort of beauty and gives this almost a kind of Last Supper or sort of religious sort of sense to the scene.

unknown 18:37

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

With the with the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling above them all.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

And they look their features to me look almost likely potato-like, oddly. They look they're such funny shapes, aren't they, to their features? But they're also very, very quite attractive looking, aren't they? That the the couple in the on the on the left side and their eyes and everything.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

I think there's a humanity. Do you know that painting by Van Gogh of of his boots? Yes. Around a similar time. Well, actually, he bought a pair of boots and scuffed them around Paris so they would have a story to them, so they'd look like you know, experiences had and had in these old boots. And he found a sort of beauty in what had previously been considered ugliness. He found this amazing beauty in those things, in people who were worn out, and he even talked about wanting the the paint itself, the painting to have the kind of texture of a potato.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

Yes, yes. It's amazing. It's amazing. But there's something that Carol, I you will have seen this because you would have studied this properly, but I had never seen until I was preparing for this conversation the picture on the wall on the left side. I think you can see two figures. One's in very bright red and very bright blue, and there's this kind of star almost above their heads that kind of lines up with the flame of the of the lamp, which is so interesting because you at first sight you think this is quite a muddy coloured painting, but there you have something of the future van Gogh tucked into that little corner there, the of the colour that's about to explode later on.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

I wonder if that is a a cross, and there's the figures at the base of a cross, which is a you know very standard religious subject of sacrifice, of course, but also of hope and renewal. And I think that might be a religious print of that subject. And of course, this ties into the idea of the importance of art for everybody's lives. Even these people who are very, very poor have got this work of art, this humble work of art on their walls. I think you might be right that there is definitely a chiming going on between the the real light uh in the lamp and the shape of the cross, which is interesting, that's picked out in white in the print. I think that's a really interesting idea.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

So often, you know, you look at it and you don't really see so many of the details. And then I look at the man, the man in the far left, our left, his shoulder, his right shoulder, has some of the traces of that blue, very bright blue on his shoulder. Yes that connects really to the blue in the portrait above his head.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Yeah, so that your eye doesn't miss it. If your eyes in the foreground, it gets led into the background to to notice that print. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

Yes, there you go. There's a very, very powerful connection between um Van Gogh and his friend Gogan, but also Dickens, isn't there, in in the chairs, the empty chairs. Could you tell us a bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 21:44

Yeah, so um obviously when when Dickens died, it was a a worldwide event. And famously Luke Files, who became one of Van Gogh's hero artists, um, made this very famous image of Dickens' study and the chair empty. And Van Gogh came back to this image when he set out what he thought of as his studio of the South. Van Gogh, he's imagined this surrogate brotherhood of his. Heroes, in particular, people like Dickens, printmakers like Luke Filds, and even the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was thinking when he when he went down to Arle and he bought the yellow house, the famous yellow house, or he rented, sorry, the famous yellow house, and he he invited other artists to come down. He was imagining a sort of new kind of brotherhood. And so hardly anyone came, only Gogan turned up, unfortunately. And in anticipation of Gogan coming, he made these two paintings of his own chair, Van Gogh's chair and Gogan's chair. And I just think they're just so wonderful. It's something that Van Gogh and Dickens had in common, the way that very ordinary objects could become incredibly resonant and full of sort of human presence and even human stories. So he's taken that idea of the empty chair from the files print, which was very, very famous. And he's done his own chair and Gogan's chair. And his chair is, of course, a very plain, modest, kind of peasant-style chair with brush seating. And on it he puts his tobacco. So the idea of a chair somewhere you rest, somewhere you have a smoke. Again, this lovely sort of idea of consolation. And in the background, there are these a little box of onions, of all things, and they're sprouting. So they're a little bit like the flowering thorns. There's this sort of sense of hope. Whereas Gauguin's chair is very different because Van Gogh understood Gauguin's very different character. It's nighttime rather than daytime. It's a rather curvy, sort of um slightly sort of show-offy kind of chair, and it's got these sort of slightly weird purple shadows, reflections coming off it, and a candle and books. So it's very much more about the life of the mind and the imagination. And you've got the sort of gaslighting in the background. And of course, Gurgan thought Van Gogh was really misguided to always base his art on something real, to sort of sit down in front of something real and paint, whereas he felt that the best art came from your mind, from your imagination. And he even got Van Gogh to try this a couple of times while they were staying together in Arle. And again, I think that's why Dickens was important, because he sort of re-grounded Van Gogh in an art of the real. And of course, in a way, these chairs which were painted with such hope of brotherhood hold the seeds of what went wrong. And Gogin and Van Gogh never really got on. They got on less and less, and it was Gogan's imminent departure that precipitated or slightly caused Van Gogh's breakdown, his self-harm, his first really serious period of illness.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

You placing both those chairs next to each other, it's so interesting to see also that Gogan's chair is very kind of dynamic, isn't it? An extrovert, whereas Van Gogh's character in perceived in that chair is much more quiet and calm and sort of withdrawn. And it seems like Gogan's chair is angled in the same way as Dickens' empty chair in that Luke Filde's chair.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

It's really similar, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 25:36

Yeah. The arms as well, these very sturdy arms.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Yes. And actually, um, don't you think that the sort of the speckled ground that the chair is sitting on uh is really like the carpet in the files print.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

Oh yes, yes it is.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

Whereas you've got this sort of nice, sort of modest terracotta stone floor in Van Gogh's chair.

SPEAKER_00 25:59

And something else you just mentioned, you you described the the weird purple shadows on the legs of the Gauguin chair. And of course, you're completely right. And I didn't see that. He puts it together so well as a painter Van Gogh that you don't immediately think, oh, that's an odd colour of shade for the legs of that chair. It just seems to fit together so well.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

And I think to a lot of people in this period, these pictures would have seemed like either incredibly crudely painted or as perhaps sketches for a painting, you know, that's going to be more finished, more detailed. And what Van Gogh saw was the incredible power that there was in making something really simple and um making the brush strokes really obvious uh and engaging and the sort of simplicity and realize that you get something much more powerful from this style.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

I seem to remember that in a in a big argument between Gogan and Van Gogh, Gogan had said to Van Gogh, you overload your brush. You know, I mean, what an insight. It's kind of like saying Dickens uses too many words.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

And you think you could say that.

SPEAKER_00 27:02

Well, you can see that if you're not going to be a fan, if you're not on board, then yes, yes to both of those. But of course, it's a ridiculous. And and you know, you don't get the sunflowers, do you, in quite the same potency if the brush isn't really stick with paint.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

I think it's quite a paradox that Van Gogh is painfully aware all the time of how much he's costing his brother. And his brother is the person, of course, is sending him paint down from Paris. And yet he's using it, he's using this paint at this huge rate, there's so much going on to these canvases.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

There's that fantastic painting, The Prisoners Round. That's really something, again, isn't it? I think.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

The one thing almost everyone knows about Van Gogh was that he was mentally ill. And and I think there is a tendency to look at the paintings and the incredible passion of the brush strokes and the directness of them as connected to the mental distress. And the thing that breaks my heart is that after he had that first breakdown for which he was hospitalized, and he only survived because there happened to be a doctor who was a specialist in the kind of wounds he had, is that he felt that he was going to have a new start. He went out and bought Dickens and he also bought um Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was another favourite of his, along with the Christmas Carol. And of course, not that long after, he had another period of mental illness. And these were very serious. And um there was a petition in the town, Arl to get him put into prison or um incarcerated because people were frightened mental illness at that time. And so he actually um booked himself into a hospital for the mentally ill. And that's when this painting was painted. And of course, what happened there was that he didn't get better, there wasn't really any treatment to those days. He just carried on having these periods of of being reasonably well, and then and then these periods, as he called them, crises of breakdowns, and eventually he came to understand that they were going to carry on forever. And it's really heartbreaking reading his letters when you see him realizing that this is going to keep happening. You see him realising that this is going to mean that he's always going to be reliant on his brother, who's just got married and is due to have a baby, so he's particularly worried about this. And there are often times when he can't get outside to paint. And so he asks his brother to send him prints, and he starts to paint from prints. So this is a print that he loved when he was in London of Newgate Prison, and it's from um Doray's book of images of London, amazing book of really modern, up-to-date images of London, which draws on Dickens' um sketch of Newgate, which is a heartbreaking piece of uh of writing, incredible piece of writing. And so he goes back to that imagery of Newgate, of course, he would have walked past Newgate many times when he was living in London, back to that imagery of Newgate and does this image of imprisonment. And during this period, it describes his time at the asylum, especially when he can't go outside, as a period of imprisonment often. And you can see that uh if you're looking at the picture, you can see that you've got again, you've got these people walking like those very first minors, but they're walking in a circle now. It's a completely pointless, repetitive existence of walking. And you can see that the person in the foreground has actually got their head raised and the light is just catching the top of their head. And it's really hard to resist the idea that this figure is a little bit like Van Gogh.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

I I assume it was, Carol. Is it is it possibly not? I totally thought that was him painting himself into it.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

Yeah, I mean, he he he often does paint himself, obviously, and um it's not exactly a portrait, but as we know, he had this deep identification with what he was painting, whether it was a a mother rocking her child in a cradle or a pair of boots, or uh and so I'm sure you know, I think we can say he was deeply identifying with these prisoners, and and that figure does really draw our eye. Also, a couple of changes that he made to the doorway print. One is that the image gets more sunny as you go up. There is a sense that there is light beyond this claustrophobic space. And just in case you think I'm making it up, he added two little butterflies right at the top. Oh yeah, I think.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

I'm zooming in, yes, I can see them.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

God and it's interesting that immediately after painting this picture, he left. Uh he decided that there was, you know, no future staying in in this hospital in Saint-Remy. And he made his last move. Uh he was always moving about, always looking for a life where he could paint. Um, and he he moved back up near Paris, so he wouldn't be so far from his brother Theo, who was an art dealer in Paris. And during that period, he painted at least a picture a day. He was so prolific, and then he he he shot himself. And no one knows exactly why. I feel he he knew by this time that another breakdown would be coming. Maybe he could feel when it was gonna happen. I don't know. Certainly he'd met his little nephew, who's also called Vincent, and he was sort of concerned, I think, for his brother. Uh no one really knows why, but um, certainly his sense of imprisonment, which he felt so strongly, not just imprisoned but in the asylum, and not just imprisoned by his illness, but imprisoned by social prejudices, expectations of respectability, traditional understandings of art, I think is is distilled in this in this painting.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

It's so interesting because the colour, just if you just absorb the colour and don't even think of what it represents or see the detail of the figures, it's actually quite a bright positive colour in lots of ways, isn't it? I mean, essentially they look like they're down the bottom of a well that they're walking the bottom. Yeah. But it's not kind of dark, earthy, damp, unwholesome looking until you really take in the expressions on the faces and their bodies. I think that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

It gets more and more buttery as it goes up, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 33:42

Yes. And oddly, the colour, the entire colour palette of this image reminds me so much of the colour in one of his self-portraits of his own skin, his own hair, you know, his blue.

SPEAKER_01 33:54

Yeah, and that is the last self-portrait, so it's the closest self-portrait in date to this to this painting. And that that blue is really interesting. It's that last self-portrait where he's just surrounded by these swirling blue lines.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

Yes. And I always think that's quite a confident portrait of him on the. Yeah, it's great, but it it's so charged with colour, isn't it? It's amazing. It's only three years after the potato eaters, I think, this one.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

Yes. I mean, this is the thing with Van Gogh. I mean, he just developed so fast. So although, you know, when he started off, he was much older than a lot of artists are when they start off being artists and he had so much capture catching up to do, but he just his art evolved at a tremendous speed. Just mentioning the um Velesienne, because uh this is the picture he painted um after he had his first breakdown. Uh and I mentioned, I think, that first thing he did when he came out of hospital, uh, he was still, I think, feeling pretty ropey, and he went out and bought um French translation of Dickens' um Christmas stories, including Christmas Carol, and uh Harriet Beecher's story's Uncle Tom's Cabin. So and you can see that in L'Esienne, he's included in the foreground the two books that he bought. Can you see?

SPEAKER_00 37:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:03

So he he again he made many versions of this. He's got such a kindly look. And the books are there, there's objects of consolation, objects of sort of human connection he bought when he when he got out of the hospital.

unknown 37:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

And I've actually tracked down the actual edition that you can see in the painting. It was obviously not a first edition, it was a later, a later edition of the Christmas books.

SPEAKER_00 37:29

Actual Dickens Christmas books in the picture is amazing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 37:33

So we started the exhibition with this painting. And it's it was the room was completely empty. There was this painting, and then opposite it, there was a bookshelf. And on the bookshelf we assembled all the books by writers in English that we know Van Gogh read as a young man and a boy. And we had sort of the additions from that Van Gogh himself would have looked at. And it was really interesting to sort of see how incredibly well read he was and how incredibly immersed he was. I don't think people realize that he spoke English, French, German as well as Dutch. And you know, sometimes he'd spend his time translating, you know, just to occupy his time.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

So And in your exhibition, did you have the starry night over the run?

SPEAKER_01 38:19

Yeah, yes, there's two starry nights. There's one in New York and one in Paris. And we had the one in Paris. Um, he started off drawing that sort of image in in London, um, drawing the new embankment with the new electric lighting. Um Stone just gone in and that polluted city with the lights glimmering uh in the River Thames, and he comes back to that idea uh with the Rhone when he's when he goes down to the south of France in Arle. And again, it was it was um Dore who'd first turned this this very modern industrial image or into a work of art. And Van Gogh sort of um obviously, like many artists, he had an amazing visual memory, and and he sort of blends that in with uh his experience of Arle.

SPEAKER_00 39:08

This starry night feels much calmer and less turbulent than the other one, which is obviously very much closer to the stars swirling.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

Absolutely, and that is because it was painted when he'd first arrived in Ale, when he was you know planning the studio south, he was very optimistic. Uh, you can see he's just doing these amazing new things in painting. Uh, whereas the other Starry Night, the one in New York, was done in the hospital. And uh it was later. Uh, it's far more visionary. It was possibly the view from his window. And it's also he's he's moved on with his style. He's he's really exploring what you can do with curved brush strokes that sort of almost whisk your emotions up uh in the second story night.

SPEAKER_00 39:59

Carol, it's been wonderful to talk to you about all of this. Thank you so much for your time. I've really, really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

Thank you. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it too.