Notes: English Art and the graphic

Notes for the Text

Reported on few paintings: BVG R42, March, 1884. In 1884, when Theo visited London, Vincent only specifically urged him to see one painting in the National Gallery, Meindert Hobbema’s Avenue at Middelharnis (see JLB 453, 8/4/1884; n. 3): “Constable was a landscape painter who lived about thirty years ago; he is splendid—his work reminds me of Diaz and Daubigny. Then there are Reynolds and Gainsborough, whose forte was very beautiful ladies’ portraits, and Turner, whose engravings you must have seen.” Context: JLB 435, 3/8/1884: “Look out for the Hobbema in the National Gallery—you certainly won’t forget to look at a couple of very fine Constables there (Cornfield) and also in South Kensington (where that farm is, Valley farm).” The Dulwich picture gallery: BVG 10a, 8/7/1873. Van Gogh also visited the vast new complex of museums just south of Hyde Park (JLB 36, 6/29/1875). With the support of Prince Albert, four museums were built on eighty-eight acres of land facing Hyde Park in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Porter, pp. 297-298). One of these, the South Kensington Museum, forerunner of the Victoria & Albert Museum, was founded in the 1850s and was, at the time Van Gogh visited it, housed in a “utilitarian affair of iron and glass dubbed ... the Brompton Boilers” (De Maré, p. 89). Its collection, then as now, ranged over a dizzying, disjointed array of fine and decorative arts. Its neighbor, the Natural History Museum, had only just begun construction in 1873 (Porter, pp. 297-298). Context: JLB 12, 8/7/1873: “I went with one of the Germans to Dulwich, an hour and a half outside L., to see the museum there, and afterwards we walked to a village about an hour further on.”

“Splendid” Constables: BVG 10, 7/20/1873. In the same letter, Van Gogh mentions two other giants of British art, Thomas Gainsborough and J.M.W. Turner, but without evaluative comment. Of the former, he says only that his “mostly painted very, very beautiful portraits of women” (not clear if “beautiful” refers to the ladies or the paintings); to his mention of the latter, he adds only “whom you’ll probably have seen engravings,” as if helping Theo to place the name (JLB 11, 7/20/1873). Context: JLB 11, 7/20/1873: “Moreover, among the old painters, Constable, a landscape painter who lived around 30 years ago, whose work is splendid, something like Diaz and Daubigny. And Reynolds and Gainsborough, who mostly painted very, very beautiful portraits of women, and then Turner, after whom you’ll probably have seen engravings.” George Henry Boughton: BVG 10, 7/20/1873: Elsewhere, Van Gogh calls Boughton “one of the best painters here” [i.e., in England] (JLB 14, 10/16/1873 and 10/31/1873). Van Gogh also mistakenly believed that Boughton, whose family had moved to America when he was an infant, was an American. He probably did not have a British accent. Context: JLB 11, 7/20/1873: “Then Boughton, of whom you know the ‘Puritans going to church’ in our Galerie photographique. I’ve seen very beautiful things by him.” John Everett Millais: BVG 10, 7/20/1873. Context: JLB 11, 7/20/1873: “There are some good painters here, though, including [John Everett] Millais, who made ‘The Huguenot’, Ophelia, &c., engravings of which you probably know, they’re very beautiful.”

Sentimental work by Boughton: Pickvance, p. 23. BVG R19, 11/16/1882: Nine years after viewing The Heir, in London, Van Gogh mentioned the image in a letter to his friend Anthon van Rappard. The Heir was Boughton’s only painting in the 1873 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition documented copy (Pickvance, p. 23). JLB note that this drawing has not survived and “it is not clear for whom it was made” (JLB 284, n. 9.) Context: JLB 284, 11/18/1882: “I know the Boughton, ‘The heir’ , as a painting. I saw it at the Royal Academy and later at Goupil’s. At that time I found it so beautiful that I made a drawing of it for an acquaintance in Holland to give him some idea of it.”

Next door to Goupil: BVG 112, 10/30/1877. According to Bailey, the offices of the Illustrated London News were at 198 Strand and the Graphic at 190 Strand, “just a few minutes walk from Goupil’s” (Bailey, Van Gogh in England, p. 145). Context: JLB 133, 10/30/1877: “I imagine you know the woodcuts by Swain, he’s a clever man, his studio is in such a nice part of London, not far from that part of the Strand where the offices of the illustrated magazines are (Ill. Lond. News, The Graphic, Seeley &c.), not far from Booksellers’ Row either, full of all kinds of bookstalls and shops where one sees all kinds of things, from the etchings of Rembrandt to the Household edition of Dickens and Chandos classics everything there has a green cast (especially in foggy weather in the autumn, or during the dark days before Christmas), and it’s a place that immediately reminds one of Ephesus, as it is described with such singular simplicity in Acts.” He joined the crowd: BVG R20, 2/4/1883. Context: JLB 307, 2/4/1883: “More than 10 years ago I used to go every week to the display case of the printer of The Graphic and London News in London to see the weekly publications.”

“Quite wrong”: BVG 295, 6/22/1883. In calling the English black-and-white woodcuts “quote wrong” or “completely wrong,” Van Gogh was probably referring to their commercial potential (i.e., lack thereof) at a time when colored prints were becoming more sophisticated, cheaper to produce, more popular, and therefore more profitable—a fact that Van Gogh explicitly recognized in JLB 15, 11/19/1873: “But it’s a delight to see how the photos sell, especially the coloured ones ...” Context: BVG 295, 6/22/1883: “I felt this, especially with English drawings: at first I didn’t like them at all, and just like most people here, thought that the English were actually quite wrong; but that did not last, and I have learned to look at things from a different angle.” JLB 356, 6/22/1883: “I did that with the English manner particularly. I didn’t find it at all beautiful immediately and first thought, exactly like most people here, that the English were in fact completely wrong, but in my case that didn’t last, and I learned to see things from another angle.” “I didn’t like [them] at all”: BVG 295, 6/22/1883. Later, Van Gogh retroactively inflated his interest in these images (see JLB 267, 9/19/1882-9/17/1882 and JLB 307, 2/4/1883). In 1883, he wrote his friend Anthon van Rappard: “The impressions I gained there on the spot [i.e., in London] were so strong that the drawings have remained clear and bright in my mind, despite everything that has since gone through my head” (JLB 307, 2/4/1883). Although it is clear from subsequent events that these images were not “lost” on Van Gogh at the time (few images were), his appreciation of them was by no means immediate. Later the same year as the quote above, he writes Theo more candidly: “I know from my own experience how one can have a dislike for someone’s work or be indifferent to it, and feel that for a long time until, one day, one suddenly sees something by him, thinks about it and remembers his earlier work and says to oneself, wait a minute, that must be good after all ... I did that with the English manner particularly. I didn’t find it at all beautiful immediately and first thought, exactly like most people here, that the English were in fact completely wrong, but in my case that didn’t last, and I learned to see things from another angle.” (JLB 356, 6/22/1883.) Context: BVG 295, 6/22/1883: “… at first I didn’t like them at all …” JLB 356, 6/22/1883: ”I didn’t find it at all beautiful immediately …”

Van Gogh began collecting: BVG 169, 1/5/1882-1/8/1882. Van Gogh wrote this less than two weeks after arriving in The Hague. Context: JLB 199, 1/8/1882 or 1/9/1882: “And I’ve also acquired another ornament for my studio, I got a great bargain on some splendid woodcuts from The Graphic, some of them prints not of the clichés but of the blocks themselves. Just what I’ve been wanting for years. The drawings by Herkomer, Frank Holl, [Frederick] Walker, and others. ... Some of them are superb, including the Houseless and Homeless by Fildes (poor people waiting outside a night shelter) and two large Herkomers and many small ones, and the Irish Emigrants by Frank Holl and the ‘Old Gate‘ by Walker. And especially a Girls’ School by Frank Holl and also that large Herkomer, the invalids.” “Clumsy and awkward”: BVG 140, January 1881. This is Van Gogh’s assessment: “I’ve just finished at least a dozen drawings, or rather, pencil and pen croquis, which are, it seems to me, already a little better. They vaguely resemble certain drawings by Lançon or certain English wood engravings, but even clumsier, more awkward.” Context: BVG 140, January 1881: “They vaguely resemble certain drawings by [Auguste André] Lançon, or certain English wood engravings, but as yet they are more clumsy and awkward.” JLB 162, January 1881: “They vaguely resemble certain drawings by [Auguste André] Lançon or certain English wood engravings, but even clumsier, more awkward.” Bottomless supply: BVG 169, 1/5/1882-1/8/1882. Context: JLB 199, 1/8/1882 or 1/9/1882: “I bought them from Blok, the Jewish bookseller, and chose the best from an enormous pile of Graphics and London News for five guilders.”

Full-scale obsession: In July, after he shared his enthusiasm for English graphic artists with Van Rappard, he reported proudly: “I take enormous pleasure in the fact that that chap is so fascinated by his English woodcuts. ... He’s almost as enthusiastic as I am.” (JLB 251, 7/26/1882.) Although the English illustrators and the weeklies that featured them (Graphic, Punch, London News) clearly had priority in Van Gogh’s collecting mania at this time, he continued to collect prints by other artists from other magazines as well. Among the latter were the British publications British Workman and Cottage and Artisan (“sometimes have very tame things but sometimes strong, beautiful things” [JLB 273, 10/22/1882]), the French magazine L’Illustration (JLB 268, 9/23/1882), and the Dutch equivalent, Illustration (JLB 267, 9/19/1882). Among the American publications he monitored were Scribner’s Magazine (“there are very fine things more in [it]” [JLB 273, 10/22/1882]), Harper’s Weekly (ibid.), and Harper’s Monthly (“there are things in it I find astounding” [JLB 262, 9/11/1882]). To Van Rappard, not Theo, he gave several other indications of just how large his collection had grown by late September. “Thus, for example, I now have as many as 50 prints about Ireland” (JLB 267, 9/19/1882). He also reports having acquired “40 large and small prints” by the French illustrator Charles Paul Renouard (JLB 268, 9/23/1882).

“They are great”: BVG R13, 9/18/1882-9/19/1882. Context: BVG R13, 9/18/1882-9/19/1882: “They have quite another way of feeling, conceiving, expressing themselves, to which one must get used to begin with—but I assure you it is worth the trouble to study them, for they are great artists, these Englishmen.” JLB 267, 9/19/1882: “It’s a different way of feeling, conceiving, expressing, which one has to get used to first. Studying them more than repays the effort, for they are great artists, the English.” “They have quite”: BVG R13, 9/18/1882-9/19/1882. The translation has been altered. Context: BVG R13, 9/18/1882-9/19/1882: “They have quite another way of feeling, conceiving, expressing themselves, to which one must get used to begin with—but I assure you it is worth the trouble to study them, for they are great artists, these Englishmen.” JLB 267, 9/19/1882: “It’s a different way of feeling, conceiving, expressing, which one has to get used to first. Studying them more than repays the effort, for they are great artists, the English.”

Eventually, Van Gogh bought: BVG R22, 1/15/1883: Van Gogh does not report this purchase until January, but he apparently began negotiating it the previous September at the time he was retreating from painting. “I’m in negotiations with someone [Blok] who’s selling a number of magazines that come from a subscription library” (JLB 268, 9/23/1882). Of course, at a time when he is using the expense of painting as an excuse to curtail it, he does not tell Theo about these negotiations. Context: JLB 302, 1/18/1883: “I recently bought 21 volumes of The Graphic, namely 1870-1880. What do you say about that? I’ll receive them this week, I hope. I got them very cheaply, you understand, otherwise I couldn’t have managed it. But I heard that they were for sale and got someone else interested who also appreciates them.” Twenty-one volumes: BVG R23, 1/20/1883. There was one hole in the set Van Gogh bought, but he vowed: “I’ll find that first volume as well, sometime” (JLB 303, 1/20/1883). Context: JLB 303, 1/20/1883: “I’m missing part of volume 70, but apart from that 70-80 complete. Altogether 21 volumes.” “Something solid”: BVG 237, 10/22/1882. Elements have been combined from both translations. Context: BVG 237, 10/22/1882: “That is also why I always feel attracted to the figures of both the English draughtsmen and of the English writers, whose Monday-morning-like soberness and studied restraint and prose and analysis is something solid and substantial to which one can hang on in days when one feels weak.” JLB 274, 10/22/1882: “And similarly the figures of either the English draughtsmen or the English writers, on account of their Monday morning-like sobriety and deliberate austerity and prose and analysis, continue to attract me as something solid and firm which gives one something to hold onto on days when one is feeling weak.”

Dickens’s Christmas Stories and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: BVG 582, 3/29/1889. Van Gogh adds a few days later: “These last few days I’ve been reading Dickens’s Contes de Noël, in which there are things so profound that one must re-read them often, it has a very great deal in common with [Thomas] Carlyle” (JLB 754, 4/4/1889). A few weeks later, he writes his sister Wil in a much more emphatic testimonial on behalf of his new/old reading: “I’ve re-read Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom with extreme attention precisely because it’s a woman’s book, written, she says, while making soup for her children, and then also with extreme attention C. Dickens’s Christmas Tales.” (JLB 764, 4/28/1889-5/2/1889, emphasis in original.) Context:
JLB 753, 3/29/1889: “I’ve had another few books brought in order to have a few solid ideas in my mind. I’ve re-read La case de l’oncle Tom—you know, the book by Beecher Stowe on slavery—Dickens’s Contes de Noël.”

Houseless and Hungry: BVG 235, 10/1/1882. Context: BVG 235, 10/1/1882: “It seems to me that it takes on more significance when one views it as: the poor and money.” JLB 270, 10/1/1882: “It becomes more meaningful, I believe, if one thinks of it as THE POOR AND MONEY.” The actual title of the famous Fildes image Van Gogh describes is Houseless and Hungry. The later painting based on this Graphic illustration was titled Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874). “Poor people”: BVG 169, 1/5/1882-1/8/1882. Context: JLB 199, 1/8/1882 or 1/9/1882: “The drawings by Herkomer, Frank Holl, Walker, and others. I bought them from Blok, the Jewish bookseller, and chose the best from an enormous pile of Graphics and London News for five guilders. Some of them are superb, including the Houseless and homeless by Fildes (poor people waiting outside a night shelter) and two large Herkomers and many small ones, and the Irish emigrants by Frank Holl.” The Foundling: BVG R24, 1/25/1883-1/30/1883. By English painter Frank Holl. (See Bailey, p. 140 [cat. no. 93], reproduced p. 74). This is the engraving of Holl’s painting Deserted, which Bailey also reproduces (Bailey, p. 54, cat. no. 71). Context: JLB 304, 1/25/1883: “For example, The foundling by Frank Holl. This shows several policemen in waterproof capes who have taken up a child left as a foundling between the beams and planks of a quay beside the Thames.” The Last Muster: Bailey, pp. 76, 79: Bailey very nicely cites as evidence for the relationship between Von Herkomer’s Chelsea Hospital and The Last Muster and Van Gogh’s orphan-man drawings: “Van Gogh’s use of the distinctive Dutch word ’weesmannen’ to describe both Von Herkomer’s pensioners and the old men in his own drawings.” Edwards comes right out and asserts that Van Gogh’s orphan-man drawings and lithographs “[were] directly inspired by the previously mentioned examples by Herkomer,” and cites several examples of specific works that “indicate how closely [Van Gogh] had absorbed the poignant mood as well as the individual poses of Herkomer’s workhouse illustrations” (Edwards, p. 134).

Luke Fildes’s famous image: BVG 626a, 2/10/1890-2/11/1890: Van Gogh later writes about Gauguin’s chair. Van Gogh’s use of quotations suggests a conscious allusion to Luke Fildes’s image, The Empty Chair, Gad’s Hill—Ninth of June 1870, which appeared in the Christmas issue of The Graphic in 1870. (Fildes’s title refers to the place and date of Dickens’s death.) Context: JLB 853, 2/9/1890 or 2/10/1890: “A few days before we parted, when illness forced me to enter an asylum, I tried to paint ‘his empty place.’” BVG 252, 12/11/1882: The memory of the Fildes image sets Van Gogh to meditating: “ Empty chairs—there are many, more will come, and sooner or later instead of Herkomer, Luke Fildes, Frank Holl, William Small &c. there will only be Empty chairs. And still the publishers and dealers, not listening to a prophecy like H[ubert] H[erkomer]’s, will go on assuring us in words like those in the enclosed folder that all is well and that we’re making very good progress.” (JLB 293, 12/11/1882; emphasis in original.) A year later, Van Gogh had shared his love of this image in a letter to Van Rappard: “If you don’t have any of [the Graphic], I can send them to you. I hope to get a copy of Fildes, C. Dickens’ Empty chair for you. I’ve been promised it.” (JLB 321, 2/23/1883-2/26/1883; emphasis in original.) In the next letter, Van Gogh apologizes: “Unfortunately, I can’t get you the print Empty chair by Fildes, which I was promised along with some others. The man now remembers ‘clearing them up’ a few years ago.” (JLB 325, 3/5/1883; emphasis in original.) Lubin lists other works in which Van Gogh employed the imagery of a chair, and invokes other images in which an occupied chair figures prominently as a symbol of impending death or departure (Lubin, p. 13). Context: JLB 293, 12/11/1882: “Edwin Drood was Dickens’s last work, and Luke Fildes, having got in touch with D. through those small illustrations, comes into his room on the day of his death—sees his empty chair standing there, and so it was that one of the old Nos. of The Graphic had that striking drawing THE EMPTY CHAIR.” (Emphasis in original.)

Arguments of bright color: BVG 626a, 2/10/1890-2/11/1890: More than a year later, Van Gogh described the painting of Gauguin’s chair to the critic Albert Aurier. Context: JLB 853, 2/9/1890 or 2/10/1890: “It is a study of his armchair of dark, red-brown wood, the seat of greenish straw, and in the absent person’s place a lighted candlestick and some modern novels. If you have the opportunity, as a memento of him, please go and look a little at this study again, which is entirely in broken tones of green and red.” Crustaceous impasto of Monticelli: BVG 563, 11/23/1888. Context: JLB 721, 11/19/1888: “In the meantime I can tell you anyway that the last two studies are rather funny. No. 30 canvases, a wooden and straw chair all yellow on red tiles against a wall (daytime). Then Gauguin’s armchair, red and green, night effect, on the seat two novels and a candle. On sailcloth in thick impasto.” (Emphasis in original.) Gauguin’s Symbolist excesses: Sund, pp. 212-213: According to Sund, “many viewers have noted the phallic positioning of the candle and the virility implied by its erectness and its flame. This reading is perfectly congenial to the books’ previous unions with emblems of germination (bulbs, flowers, blossoming branches) and with Van Gogh’s assessments of their author’s robust styles and creative potency—here linked, apparently, to his admiration for similar qualities in Gauguin and his oeuvre.”

“I tried to paint”: BVG 626a, 2/10/1890-2/11/1890. Van Gogh wrote more than a year later from the insane asylum at Saint-Rémy, “A few days before we parted, when illness forced me to enter an asylum, I tried to paint ‘his [i.e., Gauguin’s] empty place’. It is a study of his armchair of dark, red-brown wood, the seat of greenish straw, and in the absent person’s place a lighted candlestick and some modern novels.” (JLB 853, 2/9/1890 or 2/10/1890.) Van Gogh’s memory has compressed the time between the painting and the parting, which was actually about a month, not “a few days.” This is probably an indication that he was aware that Gauguin was slipping away as early as mid- to late November 1888. Context: BVG 626a, 2/10/1890-2/11/1890: “A few days before we parted company, when my illness forced me to go into an asylum, I tried to paint ‘his empty place.’ It is a study of his wooden armchair, brown and dark red, the seat of greenish straw, and in place of the absent person, a lighted candle in a candlestick and some modern novels.” JLB 853, 2/9/1890 or 2/10/1890: “A few days before we parted, when illness forced me to enter an asylum, I tried to paint ‘his empty place.’ It is a study of his armchair of dark, red-brown wood, the seat of greenish straw, and in the absent person’s place a lighted candlestick and some modern novels.”

“More than 10 years ago”: BVG R20, 2/4/1883. Context: JLB 307, 2/4/1883: “I do assure you that The Graphics I now have are amazingly interesting. More than 10 years ago I used to go every week to the display case of the printer of The Graphic and London News in London to see the weekly publications. The impressions I gained there on the spot were so strong that the drawings have remained clear and bright in my mind, despite everything that has since gone through my head. And now it sometimes seems to me as if nothing lies between those old days and now—at any rate my old enthusiasm for them is now greater rather than less than it was originally. I don’t doubt for a moment that you’ll have no complaints if you come to see them one day.”

Notes for the Plates

I once met the painter: BVG 102, 7/15/1877 | JLB 122, 7/15/1877. How beautiful: BVG R28, 10/22/1882-10/29/1882 | JLB 275, 10/24/1882, 10/27/1882. In my view prints like these: BVG R25 2/9/1883 | JLB 311, 2/10/1883. For me the English: BVG R13 9/18/1882-9/19/1882 | JLB 267 9/19/1882. Fildes has a scene: BVG R24, 1/25/1883-1/30/1883 | JLB 304, 1/25/1883. Especially as I myself: BVG R12, 9/12/1882-9/14/1882 | JLB 263, 9/12/1882-9/17/1882. The drawings: BVG 169, 1/5/1882-1/8/1882 | JLB 199, 1/8/1882 or 1/9/1882. An artist need not: BVG 240, 11/1/1882 | JLB 278, 11/1/1882. No result of my work: BVG 245, 11/16/1882 | JLB 283, 11/16/1882 or 11/17/1882. Luke Fildes, having got in touch: BVG 252, 12/11/1882 | JLB 293, 12/11/1882.