Vincent van Gogh

Melvyn Bragg (0:00)

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Christopher Riopelle (0:03)

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Melvyn Bragg (0:12)

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Hello, starry nights and sunflowers, self-portraits and simple chairs. These are images known the world over, and Vincent Van Gogh painted them and around 900 others in the last decade of his short brilliant life. And famously, by the time he killed himself when he was only 37, he sold only one. Yet within a few decades after his death, these extraordinary works with all their colour and life became the most desirable of all modern art, propelled in part by the story of his artist's struggle with mental health. With me to discuss Vincent Van Gogh, 1853 to 1890, a Christopher Riopelle, the Neil Westreich curator of post-1800 paintings at the National Gallery, Martin Bailey, a leading Van Gogh specialist and correspondent for the Art Newspaper, and Frances Fowle, professor of 19th century art at the University of Edinburgh and senior curator at the National Galleries of Scotland.

Frances, what do we know about the early life of Vincent Van Gogh?

Frances Fowle (1:29)

Well, we know a certain amount. The most of the knowledge we have of Van Gogh is through the letters.

And unfortunately, there's not much correspondence from that early period. It's secondary information. So for example, Jo Van Gogh Bonga, who was Theo Van Gogh's widow, tells us that he was quite a difficult child. And one can assume from that that some of the kind of patterns which emerge in later life were formed in that earlier period.

He had a very happy, very secure childhood. And he was living in the south of Holland with his father and mother. His father was a Parson. He had a post in the Dutch Reform Church. He was a Protestant minister.

And they were brought up in this area, which is actually predominantly Catholic. And allegedly Van Gogh's mother, Anna, was quite a, you know, she was actually quite a snobbish woman, I think. She came from an upper middle class background in The Hague. And she was concerned that her children should be brought up as proper Protestants and not mix too much with the kind of local ruffians, one could say, the local ruffians in the village.

They were a very close family. They wrote to each other, you know, when he was older, particularly with Theo, who was his brother, the older of the two brothers that he had. He had to actually, there were six of them in the family. He had three sisters, two brothers. And he actually had another brother who was born exactly a year before him to the very day, who was also called Vincent. Not something which was uncommon in those days. It was quite usual for you to be named after a dead sibling.

Melvyn Bragg (3:00)

Was he attracted to the idea of being any sort of artist from an early age?

Frances Fowle (3:05)

He was introduced to drawing by his parents. He was given drawing lessons as well with children. And actually the, we have, there's an early drawing from about 1864 when he was 11, which shows him really being, it's quite a competent drawing in fact, of Farmhouse and Barn. And then when he went to school, he was actually sent away to school, to boarding school.

And the second school he went to, he was given drawing lessons there. So he would actually have learnt, set them out. But he doesn't write about this at all at any point.

Melvyn Bragg (3:36)

How did he become an art dealer and how did that help him?

Frances Fowle (3:39)

So at the age of 16, after he'd left school, he'd left school at the age of 15 and their parents were kind of wondering what to do with him.

Melvyn Bragg (3:45)

So why were they wondering if he was a bright chap?

Frances Fowle (3:48)

Well, he was a bright chap, but he was also quite a difficult individual and found it difficult to kind of stick to anything. So he had three uncles who were art dealers and one in particular, Uncle Vincent, Uncle Scent. He had set up the Hague branch of the Goupil Gallery, which was a prestigious art dealers based in Paris, which had branches in Brussels and in America and in London.

And so he, at the age of 16, he was sent to the Hague and taken under the wing of the manager there, who was a man called Ter Steg, and had quite a happy time. He was, it was a really important period for him because he was exposed to the art of the Hague School, who were a group of artists who were interested in painting in a very realistic way. And his uncle had a collection of these modern artists.