Van Gogh said: ‘It’s a great pleasure to me to observe London, and the English way of life.’ Tate Britain’s current exhibition looks at the influence of British culture on Van Gogh’s work as a young man, and also the later impact of his work on British artists in the early 20th century.
Despite the failures and disappointments of his early career, Van Gogh responded enthusiastically to art and literature in Victorian England. As a young man he was employed by the French art dealers Goupil & Cie, who in 1873 assigned him to their London branch. He was particularly impressed by the humanity and compassion which he saw in the work of English painters and illustrators.
The Pilgrim’s Progress
Van Gogh was also a voracious reader: the exhibition opens with a shelf full of books which he is known to have read during his time here – including authors such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle whose works helped to form his ideas about the role of the artist in society. Another important discovery was Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which he came to know well and often quoted. Related to this are paintings which he found especially meaningful, such as George H Boughton’s Pilgrims Going to Church and God Speed! Pligrims setting out for Canterbury which he would have seen at the Royal Academy.
Van Gogh’s Christian background has to be seen in relation to the Dutch Reformed church in the 19th century. It is well known that his father, Theodorus van Gogh, was a pastor in the Dutch church, ministering all his life to poor rural congregations. Theodorus was greatly influenced by the liberal theology of the ‘Groninger Richting’ – a group that had developed under the leadership of Petrus Hoofstede de Groot, at the University of Groningen.
Influence on Van Gogh
These theologians rejected the biblical Calvinism of the Dutch church and sought instead a ‘religion of the heart’, emphasising humility and service – looking back beyond the Reformation to texts such as The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. In the same way, Van Gogh longed to communicate with the hardships of the working man. In later life, even when he had largely rejected his father’s faith, he still envisaged his art as a form of ‘consolation’ – an art for the people.
Evangelist and preacher
When depression led to his dismissal from Goupil & Cie, a natural choice was to seek employment in the church. He became a teacher in a Methodist school, first in Ramsgate and later in Isleworth where he worked with a nearby Methodist congregation. Here in October 1876 he preached his only sermon, Psalm 119:9 – ‘I am a Stranger on the Earth.’ In it he draws on imagery from The Pilgrim’s Progress, but he sees no divine rescue for the solitary traveller. Van Gogh’s burden was never ‘rolled away’, and by the early 1880s, after a disastrous spell as an evangelist among poor miners in the Borinage district of Belgium, he had openly rejected his parents’ faith.
A letter to Theo shows his inner conflict: ‘That God of the clergymen, he is to me as dead as a doornail…but am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such…but I love, and how could I love if I did not live?’
Prolific output
Van Gogh’s output was so prolific that it is easy to forget that his artistic career only spanned ten years. Following his death at the age of 37 in 1890, hardly any of his major works had been seen in this country before the London Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910. This came as a shock to art lovers who had grown up with Victorian narrative painting, and the reaction of the press to Van Gogh’s work was particularly hostile. When it became known that he had spent time in an asylum, many critics dismissed his painting as that of a lunatic. Nevertheless, as the Tate Britain exhibition shows, his expressionistic technique and vibrant colour had a huge impact on several British artists.
Other clergy connections
The most interesting of these, Harold Gilman, a member of the Camden Town Group, must have identified strongly with Van Gogh’s background. His father too was a clergyman in a small rural parish, where the vicarage looked out on farmers’ fields. Gilman was one of three Camden Town painters with clergy connections. Their outlook was quite different from that of the Bloomsbury Group, who were openly atheistic.
Following the 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition, Gilman travelled to Paris to see as much as possible at first hand. Of all English painters he made the most thorough study of Van Gogh’s methods, and owned early publications of his letters.
Like Van Gogh he also chose to depict ordinary working people, with a sympathetic sense of urban loneliness – the best-known example is his old landlady or housekeeper, Mrs Mounter, with her headscarf and shiny brown teapot. Like Van Gogh, Gilman also died young – a victim of Spanish Influenza following World War I.
Van Gogh’s later struggles with mental illness and his eventual suicide have given him an almost romantic status as a tragic artist. To what extent his sufferings were connected with the rejection of his Christian upbringing is still a subject for investigation. Yet throughout his life he continued to see himself as a pilgrim, ‘sorrowful yet always rejoicing’, and the vibrancy of his painting is like a defiance of the darkness.
Anne Roberts lives in Norfolk and is a member of Hope Evangelical Church, Snettisham.
