How Victorian England inspired Vincent van Gogh and his art

Abstract

Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) is usually associated with his native Netherlands or with France, the country where he painted many of his most famous works, and much less often with the UK. The latest feature film about him, At Eternity's Gate, directed by the American painter and film-maker Julian Schnabel, with the American actor Willem Dafoe as a compelling Van Gogh, adds to this tradition. It dramatises the last 2 years of the artist's life in France, including the rejection of his art in Paris, his failed attempt to live with Paul Gauguin in Arles, his slicing off his ear, and his confinement in an asylum—sensitively, if not always accurately. By contrast, the latest exhibition about him, Van Gogh and Britain at Tate Britain, is a pioneering project covering the period from the 1870s to the present day, inspired by original scholarship. It displays more than 50 of Van Gogh's own works; numerous British works that he admired according to his own writings, including socially conscious black-and-white prints of Victorian life and the landscapes of John Everett Millais and John Constable; and works by British artists influenced by Van Gogh—for example, Jacob Epstein (Sunflowers, 1933) and Francis Bacon (Van Gogh in a Landscape, 1957).