Inside the mind of Vincent Van Gogh

00:00 05:20

Laura Gascoigne has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert Aurier described his six paintings in the 1890 Brussels exhibition of Les XX as the product of a ‘terrible and distraught genius’, the artist responded that, far from being a genius, he was ‘very secondary’ and that his sunflowers – now in the National Gallery – were no different ‘from so many pictures of flowers more skilfully painted’. If he were alive today he would probably have protested at the National Gallery making an exhibition of his work the high point of its bicentenary programme, but he would have liked its focus on his inspirations rather than his distress.

The show, which covers the artist’s period in Provence from February 1888 to May 1890, takes its subtitle, Poets and Lovers, from a pair of portraits painted in Arles in 1888. ‘The Poet’ was the dreamy Eugène Boch, a young Belgian painter with a ‘Dante-like’ head; ‘The Lover’ was the handsome Zouave lieutenant Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose success with women Van Gogh envied while consoling himself that ‘he has all the Arlésiennes he wants’ but ‘can’t paint them’. In the opening room the two portraits flank ‘The Poet’s Garden’ (1888) showing a couple walking hand in hand in the public park opposite the Yellow House he planned as a base for his projected ‘studio of the south’. Van Gogh admitted that the park was ‘nothing special’, but after reading about Boccaccio and Petrarch – who met his muse Laura in nearby Avignon – he imagined it haunted by the spirits of Italian early Renaissance poets and embarked on a series of paintings of lovers strolling in its gardens, intending them as decorations for the guest room he had earmarked for Gauguin.