The artists he was referring to were not the old masters, but rather the makers of a new kind of imagery in which his employers, the art dealers Goupil & Co, traded.
A few years later, and on his way to becoming the artist who would invest old shoes, ragged sunflowers and potato-eating peasants with powerful feeling, Van Gogh wrote to his brother: “My whole life is aimed at making the things from everyday life that Dickens describes and these artists draw.” Van Gogh had been particularly caught by Whitechapel, which he described to his brother Theo as 'that extremely poor area which you’ll have read about in Dickens'
Here was social realism, in all its unloveliness, transformed into a kind of moral grandeur. Van Gogh loved Dickens and Eliot for the way they took the everyday details of modest lives and elevated them into something luminous. Sharp-eyed art historians have pointed out that the night sky in the Rhône painting is a direct quotation from a scene in Dickens’s Hard Times, in which the secondary hero, Stephen Blackpool, gazes at a star as he lies contemplating his difficult life and imminent death. His favourite author remained Charles Dickens, closely followed by George Eliot. Van Gogh’s letters home to his family are crammed with references to classics that he had devoured during his time in Britain, including John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Carol Jacobi, the lead curator of the Tate exhibition, explains that the Dutchman was “an intensely literary artist, and the books that he read during his time in London were as important to his later development as the images he encountered in the city”. Van Gogh’s connections to British culture go even deeper. Illustration: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation) Fifteen years later he would transpose this jolt of modernity to Starry Night Over the Rhône, a view of Arles in which new-fangled streetlamps compete with exploding stars to light up the sky. It wasn’t the pomp of the neo-gothic Houses of Parliament that drew Van Gogh to Doré’s image so much as the regular pattern made by the gaslights as they flared across the river. Gustave Doré’s Evening on the Thames shows London from Westminster Bridge, a view Van Gogh knew intimately from his commute between his suburban lodgings and the Covent Garden office where he worked as a clerk. Yet its spring exhibition, Van Gogh and Britain, is organised on the principle that the foundations of the Dutchman’s art, both his eye and his intellect, were laid not in the south of France, nor in the misty light of the Low Countries, but in London, where he spent three life-defining years (1873-76) as a young man.Ī case in point: if you look beyond the hallucinogenic brilliance of Starry Night Over the Rhône, which Van Gogh painted in 1888, two years before his death, you will notice a family resemblance to a small black and white engraving that he first encountered more than a decade earlier, during his London stay. For the past half century the painting has hung in Paris, and its singing Mediterranean colours, which the artist himself described as “aquamarine”, “royal blue” and “russet gold”, bear little resemblance to the murky half-tints of the Thames, which runs past Tate Britain’s Millbank site. A s Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône goes on show at Tate Britain, it is, in one sense, coming home.
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