Vincent van Gogh, a literary life

By A.C.

FOR A new exhibition, Tate Britain has assembled more than 50 works by Vincent van Gogh. “Van Gogh and Britain”, which opens on March 27th, is the largest collection of his art in the country for nearly a decade, demonstrating how the post-impressionist painter “was inspired by Britain and how he inspired British artists” in turn. He studied the work of John Everett Millais and John Constable with interest. Literature was also influential. In a number of the paintings in “L’Arlésienne”, a series made between 1888 and 1890 (pictured), van Gogh carefully inscribed “A Christmas Carol” on the spine of a book. The choice of title and author was deliberate: he had read the novel every year since childhood. When van Gogh moved back in with his parents in 1879 they complained that he did nothing but devour Charles Dickens from morning to night.

Indeed, for van Gogh reading was as compulsive as painting: “I have a more or less irresistible passion for books and the constant need to improve my mind, to study if you like, just as I have a need to eat bread.” He copied down poems by Longfellow, Goethe and Keats; he enjoyed the works of George Eliot as well as Hans Christian Andersen, Thomas a Kempis, Tolstoy, Zola, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Balzac and Voltaire.

Literature provided subject matter for paintings, and influenced their execution. He was particularly inspired by novelists who shared his revulsion for wealth and championed social outcasts. Reading Dostoevsky’s “The House of the Dead” encouraged him to finish “Ward in the Hospital in Arles”. When rendering the sparse interior of the “Bedroom in Arles”, van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, that he “wanted to arrive at an effect of simplicity as described in ‘Felix Holt’,” Eliot’s novel about a man who chooses working-class poverty over luxury. He sought to capture the essence of places, much as some writers did, as well as individuals’ inner lives. Sketching farm labourers in The Hague, he turned to Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” as a model, believing that the personality of each figure had a corresponding “type” in the novel’s panoply of characters. “I cannot understand how one can be a painter of figures and not have a feeling for [literature]” he said.

Van Gogh admired authors for their ability to create arresting images with words. “There’s no other writer who is as much a painter as draughtsman as Dickens,” he wrote; he thought that Shakespeare’s “language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy”. Rembrandt was equated with Shakespeare, Delacroix with Victor Hugo. The message was paramount, not the medium: “My strongest sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are with those artists in whom I see the soul at work most strongly.”

His own literary skill was considerable. The letters van Gogh sent to Theo are artful, describing his life in punchy and charismatic prose. As in his paintings, van Gogh interrogates the relationship between the transient and the eternal. “I wouldn’t give two cents for life if there were not something infinite, something deep, something real,” reads one. “Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all,” advises another. Avoiding practical details such as food or clothes, van Gogh filled the page with lofty descriptions of landscapes or his insights on politics, literature, the human condition and the slow struggles of innovation. “Great things do not just happen by impulse,” he observed, “but are a selection of small things linked together.”

Van Gogh’s prose appealed to modernist writers. W.H. Auden edited a volume of his correspondence, saying that the “fascinating” content of each letter made it difficult to decide which ones to discard as all were testament to the man’s “extraordinary character”. In 1996 Ronald de Leeuw, a former director of the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, edited a collection of the letters for Penguin Classics. He noted they make use of leitmotifs and symbolism: stars were a particular favourite, representing the beauty of eternity and its superiority over the material world. Van Gogh used the tricolon—“I think and I believe and I love”—to great effect. His choices of simile and metaphor are striking, too. He compared his own painting technique of interspersing coloured dashes to weaving on a loom; cancer is a choking “ivy” snaking up the trunk of a man, “an old oak tree”.

Other painters expressed themselves as writers, and vice versa. Picasso produced surrealist plays and poetry; Victor Hugo offered shadowy, haunting daubs of paint. While these forays into other artforms are forgettable, van Gogh’s words linger. “What am I in the eyes of most people—a nonentity, an eccentric, an unpleasant person,” he wrote. “I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.” Considering what he read and what he wrote helps to complete the picture.

“Van Gogh and Britain” is showing at Tate Britain until August 11th