Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers – a ‘scintillating’ and ‘unmissable’ show

Vincent van Gogh moved from Paris to Arles in Provence in February 1888, when he was 34. By the end of the year, he was in hospital after mutilating his ear. In May 1889, he was admitted to a nearby asylum. In 1890, he returned to northern France, where he died by his own hand in July. “Despite this bleak narrative, the artist’s southern sojourn produced some of the most astonishing paintings of the modern era,” said Rachel Spence in the Financial Times. “This comet trail of splendour is now mapped by ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’, a scintillating exhibition at London’s National Gallery.”

To celebrate the gallery’s bicentenary, and the centenary of its acquisition of van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, the curators have assembled a “stunning array” of 61 pictures created during these two years, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. As the title suggests, it is “strewn with paintings of individuals”: the “lover” is a handsome army lieutenant; the “poet” a Belgian painter. But, as it progresses, the exhibition’s abiding theme is “van Gogh’s rhapsodic feeling for the natural world. Roses, poppies and oleanders; cypresses, pine trees and planes: at every turn, we encounter vegetation depicted with expressive brushstrokes like plentiful dollops of double cream.” He almost seems like an “animist”, communicating the “spiritual essence” of sunflowers, trees and roots. “The sense of rapture is breathtaking.”