(Full Episode) Vincent: The Full Story | BBC Select

foreign [Music] just seen a world record Being set 750 000 pounds it's the most ever paid for a letter it's a kind of Madness really it's Mania for Van Gogh is our favorite artist we spend Millions on him but we don't know that much about him not really Yet the full story of Vincent Van Gogh it's a tale worth hearing Starry Starry name paint your palate Blue and Gray look out on the Summer's Day do you want to witness just how dramatically the world has taken leave of its senses when it comes to Vincent van Gogh I recommend a visit to his hometown of zundut [Music] made of millions and millions and millions of flowers are dedicated to Vincent tens of thousands of people have turned up to see them I like flowers too and the effort that's got into creating these things is unimaginable I mean look at that it's fantastic but unfortunately all this has nothing absolutely nothing to do with the real Vincent van Gogh Vincent would have hated it [Music] [Music] Van Gogh's father was the preacher here in zundad Pasto theodorus Van Gogh of the Dutch Reformed Church if you look down from the pulpit there's a little brass Bowl that's the font in which Vincent was christened in 1853 a noisy little boy with red hair Vincent villain Van Gogh the first of six children all christened in this church all by their own father [Music] we're actually in Catholic brabant a tiny bit of Holland that pokes into Belgium it's Belgium really so the van goghs were surrounded by Catholics the Protestant Community here is tiny it kept them close they were outcasts together pioneers that house behind me the bright yellow one that's the house Vincent grew up in it's not the real one of course it's one they've recreated out of half a million dahlias they like growing flowers here in zundad but he did actually live just a little bit up the road in that house there that's been rebuilt too but it stands in exactly the place that Vincent spent the first 16 years of his life it's rather touching to be here and something I didn't know I didn't realize till I got here he did an early drawing there are about 12 of his early drawings left and there's one of this rather strange architectural feature it looks like a capital of a of a church or a bank or something and no one really knew where it was and I certainly didn't know where it was then you come here and you realize that actually it's a capital from the top of the Town Hall in zundad across the road he must have sat there in his bedroom looked straight out of the window and seeing this pilaster in front of him so what it actually is is the first of the drawings that Vincent did of the view from his bedroom window this funny little plaster and it's a habit he kept up all his life every room he ever stayed in he would draw what's outside of it and it began here as everything did [Music] look out on a summer's day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul Shadows on the Hills Vincent had been deliberately named after his uncle another Vincent van Gogh a hugely successful art dealer whom everyone called Uncle sent when Vincent was 16 he was packed off to the Hague where uncle sent had a gallery he was going to be an art dealer too Vincent had a special post created for him as an apprentice Clark at the Hague branch of goopiel and Co the world's most prestigious art franchise had merged with Uncle scent it was a behind-the-scenes job at first dealing with gupil's extensive International paperwork amazingly Van Gogh turned out to be good at this and was soon promoted to front of shop Rich Hague clients would turn up here in their carriages they'd be met by the teenage Vincent van Gogh who'd escorts Sir and Madame inside and commend them on their taste when sir and Madam decided on their purchase this is the three volume correspondence of Vincent to his brother Teo it's the biggest heaviest and most celebrated epistolic package in art I've tackled it a couple of times now and it took me several months each go Vincent's almost as famous for writing these letters as he is for painting the sunflowers there's so much Insight here into his creative thinking but the very first letter was just a brief note about the weather scribble to Teo from the Hague in September 1872. Teo was a couple of years younger than Vincent but he also decided to become an art dealer while Vincent was here they hoped one day they might work together but on the 17th of March 1873 a rather glum Vincent wrote to Teo to tell him that he was going to be moved it was another promotion he'd done so well in The Hague that he was being sent to London he was 20. he arrived at Victoria Station on the 19th of May 1873 and soon found some lodging somewhere in Battersea he spoke decent English it quickly improved within weeks he was reading Keats London came at him from all sides it was the largest city in the world and four million people had somehow squeezed themselves into it here's what it looked like this is Gustav dore's London published just before Vincent got here look at the state of it this is Ludgate Hill looking up towards Saint Paul's look at those crowds [Music] Vincent had a copy of this and treasured it you might recognize this image as well it's Newgate Prison two decades later he still hadn't forgotten it [Music] and it don't seem [Music] a Vincent described his first year in London as the happiest of his life he went boating on the Thames he visited the museums the parks but what really cheered him up was moving here to 87 hackford Road Brixton where Vincent had a room at the top that he loved I don't need to tell you what Brixton is today it's Yadi country dangerous but it wasn't like that in Vincent's time in 1873 this was a prosperous middle-class suburb no one knew where Vincent lived in London until 1971 when a postman a van Gogh obsessive called Paul chowcroft tracked him down to this house chowcroft was on strike at the time getting ready for the three-day week with lots of hours on his hands there's a Mrs Smith living here now and I imagine it was a heck of a surprise when the Striking Postman knocked on her door and told her that van Gogh lived here you must be Mrs Smith hello good morning I've read so much about you really learn about this house you're welcome I really want to ask you right come through what was it like when the postman turned up the Striking Postman was very exciting actually is that one of his that's Valco and that's just full show cough too I mean he was obsessed with it absolutely knew everything about Vincent from the day he was born to the day when in fact his wife said me I don't know where to put all these pictures drawing of Van Gogh she's driving me by me not a bit like it was when he was here it'll be more or less the same sort of fenced in the yes I did this was the room he slept in this one here this one here there's two two windows that's that's all the paintings in there there's the the the the church that's right let's pull showercroft's work again and do you sleep here now Mr Smith is this your bedroom yes it's my bedroom so you sleep in the room that van Gogh slept in yes I do that must be cool exciting I'd be excited I can't hear him snoring at all how lucky you no I bet he did his landlady Mrs Ursula lawyer ran a small school here she also took lodges Vincent was working in Covent Garden at gupil's London office and every morning he walked to work in a top hat he bought specially he thought it made him look more English this journey to Covent Garden took him 45 minutes and that's not easy [Music] was a ridiculously fast Walker he shot past the oval where the English played that strange game called Cricket he didn't enjoy the fog it depressed him and the river pumped full of sewage you used to stink so badly he hurried across it but he loved this view over Westminster Bridge the houses of Parliament just built the Thames embankment newly reclaimed from 32 Acres of mud and he couldn't have missed the poverty you know that expression slumming it well slumming was something londoners used to do in Vincent's time it means going to look at the slums the worst ones were in the East End White Chapel bethnal green terrifying places underage prostitutes lurking in the alleys and an unbuilt sewage system pumping crap into the streets [Music] I know you won't believe this but I really did that it took me 50 53 minutes has eight minutes more than Vincent I need to do it twice a day strolling to work strolling back he worked just there at goopiel's which is a noodle restaurant now he's basically selling prints and earning 90 pounds a year it's actually a very good salary in those days about three times the average payment for a laborer [Music] favorite English writer was Dickens he read most of the novels and then re-read them he was always quoting Dickens in his letters gobbling up dickens's Sympathy for the London poor all those blighted Oliver twists scrounging in the streets Dickens opened Vincent's eyes to Modern human misery Dickens died in 1870 just before Vincent got here to commemorate his death one of Vincent's favorite Victorian sentimentalists Luke fildes produced an unforgettable image of dickens's empty chair pushed away from his desk Vincent bought this illustration and learned from it how an empty chair can stand in so poignantly for a missing person haunted by this image Vincent went on to become the greatest painter of empty chairs there's ever been [Music] [Music] wow Vincent's landlady in Brixton Mrs lawyer had a daughter Eugenie who was 19 a year younger than Vincent perhaps the chief reason why he enjoyed his first year in London so much was because Eugenie was here Vincent fell for her all the way he was besotted what's extraordinary is that he didn't tell her he was in love with her for almost a year he kept it bottled up he let it Fester Vincent never said a word when it finally came out an amazed Eugenie informed him that she was already secretly engaged to a previous lodger an engineer called Samuel Plowman the effect on Vincent of this firm and terrible rejection was devastating when Eugenie rejected him Vincent did what many before him have done and will always do he found religion he didn't have to look very far it was already there in his blood his upbringing he started reading the Bible at nights puffing away at his pipe coming home early from work he'd go to Salvation Army meetings at elephant and Castle hang around the soup kitchens and the prayer Halls sinking ever deeper into a Melancholy love stupor his work was now going so badly that his bosses decided to transfer him again to Paris this is the old gupil headquarters in Paris where Vincent was made head of pictures he didn't deserve it so it could only have been intended as a deliberate confidence booster it's for sale now turned into a loft so uh you're coming in the gallery it's head of pictures Vincent was the chief salesman here the way it was supposed to work was that Vincent would greet the rich clients commend them on their taste and sell them the most expensive stuff on the walls simple but it didn't work out like that the new religious Vincent chose instead to question their taste argue with them and suggest they buy some proper Landscapes instead of the salon nonsenses that were hanging all around them here thank you it was actually a fascinating time in the Parisian art World a few months before Vincent was transferred here A bunch of disaffected artistic Rebels whom cruel critics had dubbed the Impressionists had opened and closed their first show but Vincent was too immersed in his new obsession with the Bible to take any notice of them whatsoever Vincent had found a room up here in more Mart Monmouth means the hill of Martyrs and a martyr is definitely what he now fancied himself to be he spent every evening up in that little room reading the Bible and praying feverishly get rid of all your books he wrote to Teo and keep only the Bible employees were expected to work over Christmas it was the busiest selling period of the year but without telling anybody Vincent bunked off at Christmas that year and spent it in Holland with his family when he returned to Paris he was summoned into the boss's office and asked to resign okay Maxi Messi good pills gave him three months notice which was generous of them Vincent had been reading the English papers in Paris looking through the classifieds for a job he eventually found one here in Ramsgate teaching French German arithmetic and dictation to young boys at a school opened in this building by a Mr William Stokes this job was unpaid just bored and lodging but he was teaching and that pressed Vincent's vocational buzzer [Music] the school was crummy dickensian one might say the floors of the bedroom in which the boys slept were rotten the windows broken and Vincent complained desperately about the bed bugs he did a couple of drawings out of the school window of this View they're rather delightful [Music] Stokes turned out to be entirely unreliable just two months after he got here Vincent learned that the school was closing and moving to isleworth a London suburb where Stokes promised Vincent a proper job Vincent decided to walk there and to visit his sister on the way who was teaching in Welling a mere 100 miles away Vincent got there in three days [Music] this walking business wasn't just a case of saving on rail fares he was driven to do it by the religious mania that was growing in him he'd been reading Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan it's affected him immediately he wasn't a penniless Dutch teacher walking to see his sister he was a humble Pilgrim making his difficult way in life it's a feeling Vincent never lost and did any man ever show as much affection for his trusty boots as Vincent years later went on to show [Music] stokes's School in isleworth turned out to be another no hoper but just down the Twickenham Road was another boys school run by the Reverend Thomas Slade Jones a congregational Minister the first man ever to understand fully Vincent's religious passion [Music] the Reverend was one of the few Heroes of Vincent's life he gave him a job at this school and paid him [Music] it was in this house that Vincent's frantic Bible reading and growing religious mania finally found an outlet decided he wanted to be some sort of mission wasn't enough for him he thought about going up north to work among the poor in the dark satanic Mills but there was quite enough poverty to be getting on with in London where a man with a religious Mission could find plenty to do he runs away annum green Congregational Church for 1870 76 and look who's in them named as a new church worker an assistant preacher Mr Van Gogh look at the spelling it's wrong that's why he began calling himself Vincent he was fed up with the English getting his name wrong as Mr Richardson proposed Mr Stembridge seconded that Mr Vincent van Gogh spelled g-o-f be accepted as a co-worker the Reverend slayed Jones pestered mightily one imagined by Mr Van Gogh and boy could Mr Van Gogh pester was finally persuaded to allow Vincent to step across that crucial religious divide that separates the sheep from the Shepherds on the 29th of October 1876 on a sunny Autumn Sunday Vincent Rose before the faithful at the Richmond Methodist Chapel in Suburban West London and delivered his first sermon we still have it we know exactly what he said to his first congregation it's an old belief and a good belief that our life is a Pilgrim's Progress that we are strangers on the Earth but that it's long well-meaning repetitive boring every few sentences it resorts to thick bundles of biblical quotation and would have left many of us dozing in the aisles the most impressive thing about it for me is that it's in English a language he'd mastered so quickly costs the glory he must have had help writing it perhaps from the Reverend Slade Jones on the road walks a pilgrim staff in hand he's been walking for a good long while since none of us has time to listen to it all let me tell you that its main theme was pilgrimage life is tough the road is long but faith in God will see us through that it all feels sneakily autobiographical further ahead in our story after some turbulent religious times the preacher who stood up here and delivered his first sermon was to give up religion rather fiercely and claim to despise it but one of the keys to understanding the real Van Gogh is to realize that once all this has soaked into his art it could never be removed never [Music] amazing foreign [Music] Vincent went home to his family he said he'd returned to London after the holidays but he never did whatever promises he'd made to his new flock in England his family forced him to break instead of returning to isleworth after Christmas Vincent was packed off to this cute little town dortress where his family he'll come up with a new calling for him he was going to be a Bookseller his boss was to be a Mr brat and the Bookshop stood right there where that Cafe is actually I can easily imagine Vincent as an eccentric book dealer his family always remembered him with his nose stuck in a book and later he'd go on to paint books with such love and excitement it didn't matter how humble a book was Vincent's art always stressed its preciousness foreign [Music] sellers I know tend to be scruffy cranky unwashed types lost in their own world just like Vincent he'll sit in the corner wearing his English Top Hat ignoring the customers as booksellers do and busying himself with a remarkable task he'd set himself here in dortrecht Vincent remember spoke four languages fluently and he decided to produce a translation of the Bible in all of them simultaneously Dutch French German and English who divided his paper into four columns and inched his way through the Bible in four languages at once this is a painting he did some years later of his father's Bible it's still being used [Music] the book selling job didn't work out of course Vincent was still determined to join the church like his father and his grandfather Amsterdam University had a six-year theology course and Pastor theodorus fixed it for his son to get on it providing he passed some exams in Latin and Greek Vincent alas turned out to be unusually hopeless at both of them something unsettling happened here in Amsterdam something I find disturbing if Vincent's studies weren't going well he used to punish himself by picking up a cudgel and beating himself across the back until he bled and on particularly cold nights he used to come home late deliberately so that the door to this house would be locked and had to be forced to spend the night outside shivering these were weird habits and perhaps they were habits he never lost Vincent never made it onto the theology course he dropped out the only religious calling still open to someone as unqualified as him was to become a missionary the lowest of the low a place called larkan in Belgium had a training school for evangelists which he failed to get into of course but a kindly teacher at this school the Reverend Peterson remember that name liked something about him and arranged for Vincent to be given a trial period ministering to the miners in the notorious boringage Geographic nickname hereabouts is the Black Earth country it's a bleak industrial stretch of slag heaps and mine workings straddling the border between France and Belgium spoiling the land on both sides he looked up the borinage in an encyclopedia and this encyclopedia informed him that this was a happy working Community populated by a racer friendly miners who descended into the Earth every day content in the knowledge that they were being useful and serving God but that's in the encyclopedia in real life the borinage was hell on Earth and while the mine owners back in Brussels were coining it the poor sod stuck here were leading some of the grimmest lives available to man in so-called civilized Europe Vincent's duties as a preacher were twofold here in wam where he lodged in the interesting pink house behind me there was also a converted dance hall that was used as a makeshift Protestant Chapel Vincent preached there to the few miners who turned up in their families and he'd deliver his notoriously long sermons he would also do the rounds of the miners houses and conduct Bible classes there communal gospel readings thus he found out exactly how the miners were living and it appalled him there's a trait we need to keep an eye on with Vincent it's a powerful urge a recurring one to hurt himself he wanted to do more with the miners than just conduct their Bible classes he needed also to share their misery so he began giving away his food and his clothes too starving himself shivering in the cold just like them he even stopped washing so that he too like the miners were stained a permanent black now in this community Grim though it was the preacher was still someone you looked up to Mrs Denis the landlady of the house here complained about him not washing oh Esther he replied don't worry about the details they don't matter in heaven Vincent persuaded one of the older miners to take him down into a pit and he described the experience in a particularly evocative letter to Teo down in the mine shaft the diggings were arranged like a beehive with one cramped chamber next to another inside Each of which a pathetic black figure would be picking away at the walls pick pick Vincent was surprised to find horses down here tragic beasts fated to spend their days trudging backwards and forwards pulling the carts there were eight-year-old kids as well small enough to squeeze into any hole I was wondering why missionaries were being sent to the boronage at all I mean it's hardly the deepest Congo and Brussels is only a few hours away I found the answer here in German Al by Emile Zola it's the finest mining novel ever written and it's set on the French side of the borinage read page 45 and you'll see that there were women down here too with their smaller bodies they too could squeeze into tighter spaces but it was hot and they didn't wear much Zola describes her minor coming around a dark corner and countered the immensely tempting sight of one of these young girls down on her hands and knees with her back to him I won't go on but this is why they sent the missionaries to the borinage to preach against promiscuity and sin and it's true every Slither of symbolism you encounter in these Minds feels satanic and hellish remember Vincent was on trial here his appointment as a preacher was temporary he wanted it renewed but it depended on his performance after he'd been here about six months they sent someone down from Brussels to inspect him the Reverend rosh dear was his name OSH dear in French means the rock of God a terrifying name and this terrifying wash deer discovered Vincent's starving filthy unkempt manically identifying with the miners and recommended that he be sacked Vincent's example reported Austria was a bad one Vincent was devastated absolutely devastated he'd already been brutally rejected in love and now the church to which he'd given so much was also rejecting him as soon as he'd shaken out some of the shock he set off on another of his absurd walks this time all the way to Brussels it took him over a week and he cornered one of his old superiors from Larkin the kindly Reverend Peterson and for some unknowable instinctive curious reason Vincent took with him to Brussels a batch of the drawings he'd been making of the boronage miners they looked as if they'd been scrawled out of crude black bits of the boronage itself raw clumsy he's already 27 and he has the drawing skills of a child but Reverend Peterson saw something here and encouraged Vincent to go on and there is something isn't there thank God say I for the kindly Reverend Peterson because without him Vincent might still be in two minds today about his true calling he came back here to the borinage and prevaricated some more for a whole year but finally in this lonely little miners house in which he'd hold up Vincent van Gogh concluded he should be an artist Hallelujah he knew at last what he wanted to become but he couldn't do it here there was no art here to set him an example he knew that he had to get back to what he called the land of pictures that after two years in the boringage he decided abruptly to return to Brussels we can't show you the little room above a cafe into which Vincent moved in Brussels when he turned up here in October 1880 it's been modernized into a Railway Bridge but I can show you something better than that I can show you this it's a self-help book for artists published originally in the 1860s by Charles bark Vincent would have known it from his days as an art dealer and now here in Brussels he began dutifully to work his way through it the idea with barg is that you copy one page after another learning as you go it's a mechanical slog it wouldn't suit everyone but it suited Vincent he was as we'll be seeing throughout the artistic Helter Skelter ride that Now lies ahead of us an instinctive copyist foreign Brussels for over six months everyone advised him to join the Academy of Arts up the road from here but Vincent was reluctant he knew what he was like in classroom situations this was his Academy but you'll be wondering how this failed preacher with a talent for self-flagellation paid his way in Brussels City where a little goes a long way the small room above the cafe was 50 francs a month there was food to buy materials [Music] the fact is that Vincent's father was still sending him money it's not very impressive is it 27 years old and still scrounging off his parents Pastor teodorus was sending him 60 francs a month and then suddenly for no obvious reason this went up to a hundred francs it was only later that Vincent found out the extra 40 francs were coming from his brother Teo Teo had been in Paris for two years working as an art dealer and making quite a name for himself and Teo was perhaps the only man on God's Earth who welcomed Vincent's decision to become an artist as soon as that decision was made he began sending Vincent money and would continue to do so for the rest of Vincent's life this is Eton a Dutch Village in brabant that was once so pretty car park that's where the van goghs used to live Vincent left us such a sweet drawing of his father's parsonage breaks my heart to look at it Pastor theodoras have been moved here just up the road from zundad and in 1881 Vincent turned up for Inglorious and obvious reasons he was broke and needed once again to scrounge from his family now that he decided to become an artist and as a cycle route you can go on now that takes you through some of the places he drew as he launched his great struggle to conquer the pencil I'm wobbling around it in the company of a local Van Gogh historian Martin monden and he knows everything there is to know about van Gogh in Eton so this this is a famous tree this is the tree that Vincent Drew when he was in Eton yeah that's right it was called The Orchard and we called the murder tree that means it is about close to 350 years old when Vincent came here after the boringage this difficult time he had amongst the the miners in Belgium this was really the first place where he was determined to be an artist isn't it very important well you made it a lot of don't 316 and he was here till December 1881. so Martin yeah I recognize that view that's the that's the two towers yeah yeah that's the two towers with the roundabout Two Towers the landscape is the rising thunderstorm you know it's around about now isn't yet and now we're around about we send flowers this would have been the place that before was full of What fields people digging laborious Cottages yeah that's right did Russia a very small Narrow Street with on both sides a small houses and farmer houses and the diggers were living here which were dropped by by Vanguard there's some of the I think some of these most beautiful drawings here were the drawings of people working there's the man by the fire but there's also the diggers people Gathering potatoes they're all done around here in this area all around here yes I recognize that his father's Church of course that's the one on the right yeah that's right the right-hand church and that's the Christian reform church at least it hasn't changed very much everything else has hasn't it it is the same like 120 years ago only the parsonage is gone and the roundabouts okay that's right something horrible happened to Vincent here in Eton his cousin K Vos a widow with a baby boy came to spend the summer in the parsonage and Vincent inevitably fell in love with her women in black widows were a weakness of his when Vincent could no longer contain his passion for K and blurted out how he felt about her she dealt him and his love of widows a mortal blow no no never she replied words he couldn't forget and kept quoting no no never stupidly Vincent took this as a maybe so he followed her to Amsterdam pushed his way into her house but she wasn't there she was hiding from him so he put his hand into a flame and told her family he'd keep it there unless he saw her her uncle just stood up and blew the flame out it was a ridiculous but critical event his parents were appalled at his behavior everybody was but Vincent couldn't see what he'd done wrong was loving someone too much a crime years later when he was in awe with Gogan Vincent painted a mysterious picture called memory of the Garden in Eton it shows a pair of widows one is his mother and he always said that the other was his sister Willamina but doesn't she look like the spitting image of K VOS no no never she said how it must have hurt [Music] you know Vincent's life was peppered with lousy Christmases when he hacked off his ear at the other end of this story that was at Christmas and the one he had in Eton in 1881 was another of the very worst he stormed out on Christmas Day itself refused to go to church and left immediately for here The Hague there he must have a district or perhaps visited an address he already knew where he sought out a prostitute called Christine clasina Maria Hornick who for some complex Dutch linguistic reason was called scene Vincent seems all ready to have known this scene how else to explain the extreme abruptness well that she took up with her before Christmas kevos was his life his Destiny his everything after Christmas he's with seen and wants to marry her from one to the other in a week scene was a few years older than him and as people are fond of pointing out she was no Beauty pockmarked with smallpox she had a shrewish face and looked used discarded seen already had a five-year-old daughter she'd had two miscarriages and was pregnant again when Vincent met her she would later have that baby whilst they were living together so life had dealt her one crappy hand after another and wrinkled her prematurely [Music] but these wrinkles attracted Vincent every bit as fiercely as some men are attracted by long legs or fluttering eyelashes [Music] he liked his women faded she was bad tempered but he forgave her that she swore crazily but he forgave her that she drank she smoked he forgave all of it because unlike the rest of them she stayed with him the woman is as attached to me as a tame Dove he wrote so pleased scene is the only woman Van Gogh ever lived with they set up house in the street behind me here in The Hague outskirts where it used to be cheaper and the trains keep you awake at night with your long blonde hair in your eyes of blue Beyond Vincent's best drawing so far his first Masterpiece was of scene he gave it an English title sorrow sorrow you're right he wanted her to look like a root he said clinging to the Earth for survival and she does [Music] it was all looking so good he had a woman he was settled but would it last what do you think [Music] thank you I tried to find it cause I can't resist it I never knew how much [Music]

Channel: BBC Select

Views: 15,292

Keywords: bbc, tv shows, english tv, british tv, uk tv, documentary, Documentaries, bbc documentaries, bbc documentary

Id: T60VhXxhcN0

Length: 48min 25sec (2905 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023