Six Stunning 19th-Century Paintings by Vincent van Gogh - National Gallery - YouTube

It's one of the innovations of his period, this new kind of representational portraiture. Hello, my name is Christopher Riopelle. I am the Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings here at the National Gallery. My name is Cornelia Homburg. I am the guest curator of the exhibition Van Gogh, Poets and Lovers, and we invite you to look at some of the pictures in this exhibition. When Vincent Van Gogh lived in Arles, he rented a little house that became known as the Yellow House. It looked out onto a small public park, and Van Gogh very much enjoyed exploring this little park in his paintings. In this case, he wanted us to see daily life, very much down-to-earth, every day, strolling around, sitting on benches, reading a newspaper, and the whole thing surrounded by beautiful vegetation that he found there. One of these parks just leads us into the distance, but we see a variety of trees, also oleanders on the left behind the man with the yellow straw hat, a typical plant of the south of France, which Van Gogh admired intensely. He thought about this picture in terms of Honoré Daumier, an artist of the mid-19th century in France whom he admired very much, and who had captured daily life in wonderful caricatures as well as in paintings. Van Gogh was trying to create something of that atmosphere, which was quite different from other paintings of the same space where he, for example, imagined a poet's garden. One of the most remarkable groupings of pictures in the exhibition is the three I am standing in front of, the National Gallery's own Sunflowers, this Sunflowers from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and this portrait of a nursemaid, a berceuse, in the middle. The National Gallery's very famous Sunflowers was executed in the summer of 1888. It actually hung in the bedroom of Paul Gauguin in the Yellow House when he came to visit and work with Van Gogh. At the same time as he painted it, he painted another version with a blue background, and then after his breakdown at the end of 1888, when he was back at work, he began to paint other versions of both the yellow background and the blue background as sunflowers. At a certain moment, in 1889, we know this because he makes a little drawing in a letter. He says, I would like to make an arrangement of these two sunflowers with a picture of the nursemaid, this image of comfort, this image of a kind of elegant, almost musical arrangements of tones and figures and forms. The triptych was never realized until now when you see them in front of us here. It is a moment to really reassess what Van Gogh meant when he talked about decorations in his painting. When Vincent van Gogh lived in Saint-Rémy, he got very interested in the olive orchards that were growing in abundance, as well as the rocky outcrops of the Alpil Mountains, which were very close by. He had seen them only from afar while he was living in Arendt. You see here one of the great, great pictures that he made in the summer of 1889, addressing both subjects in one composition. It is a very energetic, very intense depiction of olive trees here in the foreground with the undulating ground in front and the various recognizable rock formations of the Alpil Mountains in the background. The whole thing is held together by this extraordinary white cloud that is hovering above the composition and the whole painting seems to brim with energy. Throughout the exhibition, you see a number of portraits. In every case, we know who the person is, we know their name, we know what they did. They were friends of Van Gogh's, whom he met in Arles. But in each case, he wants that person not only to be themselves, but also to represent a sector of society, to stand in for everyone like them. Here is one of the first of these. The man's name is Patience Escalier. He was a gardener in Arles at that time. He had a very ruddy complexion from living in the sun, working with the earth. Van Gogh does a very realistic portrait of him, brilliant colors but realistic, but at the same time, he gives it the title, The Peasant. It is Patience Escalier but he is standing in for a whole category of Provençal person, the people who work with the land. It's one of the innovations of his period in the south of France, this new kind of representational portraiture. And so you now have a sense of this exhibition, of the way it is presenting this remarkable artist, Van Gogh, of the innovations he is making. We hope that visitors to the exhibition will come away with a new sense of his variety and innovation.