There’s a Vincent van Gogh exhibition heading our way: a big one. It’s being hailed by its venue, the National Gallery, as a “once-in-a-century event” and will include more than 60 pictures by art’s most anxiously exciting painter. Everything in the show was made in the south of France during Van Gogh’s short but astonishingly fertile sojourn in the sun. He was in Provence for only two years, from 1888 to 1890, but the masterpieces poured out of him at an absurd lick.
The show will be filled with examples. Among them will be his first Starry Night, the one with the stars twinkling over the river Rhone. Also coming is The Yellow House, that canary-coloured view of the home in Arles outside of which he cut off his ear.
But the sight I am most keen to witness — a genuine once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — is the bringing together of three pictures in a single display. It’s something Van Gogh wanted to see but never did. Writing to his brother, Theo, soon after the ear cutting, he described how he wanted to create a triptych of his works, with two of his Sunflowers on the sides and his portrait of a maternal figure, the picture he called La Berceuse, in the centre. He made a small drawing of the arrangement. The National Gallery will be recreating it.
One of the two flanking Sunflowers will be the National’s own masterpiece. It’s the version that Van Gogh described as “yellow on yellow”, a giddy burst of brightness — big sunflowers in the centre, big yellow wall behind — that fills the room with sunlight. The second has been borrowed from the Philadelphia Museum of Art where it too sucks in the crowds. In this version the wall behind the sunflowers is a pale turquoise.
Both pictures are part of a complex story. Sunflowers looks simple — a bunch of blooms in a vase — but the simplicity is deceptive. Van Gogh had been painting sunflowers since he arrived in France in 1886. He had been fascinated and touched by the way that they follow the sun as the day unfolds. In one of his crazier flights of fancy he described them as being Christ-like with their glowing yellow halos. His earliest paintings of sunflowers, produced in Paris long before he set off for Arles, show them dead and drying out, not quite crucified but certainly at the end of their story. He gave two of them to the painter Paul Gauguin, who admired them.
Fast forward to 1888 and to Van Gogh’s arrival in the south of France. His plan — his hope — was to start what he called a “studio in the south”, a commune of like-minded artists who would live and work together in Arles. He approached Toulouse-Lautrec. He approached Émile Bernard. He approached and re-approached, and then re-approached again Gauguin, who eventually agreed to join him.
To prepare for Gauguin’s arrival in Arles, Van Gogh painted a suite of four pictures of sunflowers in a vase, and hung them in Gauguin’s bedroom in the Yellow House. Imagine arriving in your new bedroom in Arles and being greeted by a ring of Van Gogh’s gleaming sunflowers. What a thrill it must have been.
One of the bedroom paintings is the National Gallery version. But the other, the painting from Philadelphia, has another story. That picture was made several months later — after his breakdown, his big argument with Gauguin and the ear-cutting — when Van Gogh copied two of his originals. He literally traced the existing Sunflowers and redid them. The Philadelphia painting is one of those copies. The original is in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich and has not been lent. So the National’s triptych will be made up of all the right images, but not all the right versions. Something for pedants to fret over.
What about the image in the middle, Le Berceuse? That, too, is complicated. It’s an image with special significance for Van Gogh. He painted no less than five versions of it. The one coming to London to form the centre of the triptych is from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
In French, La Berceuse has two meanings. Its first is “a lullaby”. The other is “a woman who rocks a cradle”. Both definitions point specifically to childhood and the comforting presence of a mother.
Van Gogh started the first version just before the ear incident. The woman in the picture is Augustine Roulin, the wife of the postman in Arles, who had recently had a baby. The rope she is holding leads to a cradle that we cannot see: a cradle at the front of the picture, in our space. Thus Van Gogh is casting everyone who looks at the painting as a toddler being rocked: a child in need of Madame Roulin’s comfort. And as sure as eggs is eggs, he is numbering himself among those in need of lullabies.
The later versions of La Berceuse were painted just after the ear-cutting. The image of the comforting mother had clearly taken on huge significance. Vincent was desperate for love. And his copies had specific destinations in mind: he wanted to give them to his painter pals, Gauguin and Bernard, and to flank them with two of his Sunflowers. That is why he made the Philadelphia version.
The triptych arrangement had a deeper purpose too. In another letter to his brother, he describes how he would like La Berceuse to be hung in the cabin of a ship as protection from stormy seas. He compares the rocking of a boat to the rocking of a baby’s cradle. Thus Roulin becomes a secular version of what sailors called the Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea, an incarnation of the Virgin Mary that protected mariners and seafarers.
Van Gogh had seen stained glass windows devoted to Stella Maris in the sailor’s church in Antwerp. He remembered the flat colours and simple shapes. In his own moment of emotional shipwreck, he wanted to paint his own stained glass window to protect him and give him succour. To illuminate his domestic Star of the Sea he would flank her with sunflowers “glowing like torches”, filling the heart with light. His life had capsized. His art would protect him.
Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers is at the National Gallery, London WC2, Sep 14-Jan 19, nationalgallery.org.uk
