Waldemar On The Life Of Vincent Van Gogh | Vincent: The Full Story (Full Series) | Perspective

hello this is Val de Mayo nostrack art critic producer and presenter of documentaries thanks for watching perspective YouTube's home for classical art here it is 620 000. 650 is here with Chris at 650 680. seven hundred thousand seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds you've 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 he's 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 Night [Music] paint your pellets Blue and Gray look out on the Summer's Day eyes that know 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 zundad this is the famous flower festival they have here and all these floats made of millions and millions and millions of flowers are dedicated to Vincent tens of thousands of people have turned up to see them 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 foreign [Music] [Music] 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 villum 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 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 seen this plaster 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 Starry Starry Night [Music] painter palette Blue and Gray look out on a summer's day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul Shadows on the hill foreign 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 gupil 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 Madam 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 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 for 40 years and it don't seem a day too much 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 foreign 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 it's very exciting actually is that one of his that's the valko and that's a full show cough too I mean he was obsessed with Vincent he 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 it's not a bit like it was when he was here it'll be more or less the same sort of fenced in the yes the stairs yeah 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 yeah that's right let's push our craft 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 quite 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 goopiel's London office and every morning he walked to work in a top hat he'd 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] but that 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 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 that's eight minutes more than Vincent I need to do it twice a day strolling to work strolling back he worked just there at group heels 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 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] 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 it's been turned into a loft so uh you're coming in the gallery this 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 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 more Mart 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 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 [Music] the 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 [Applause] [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 [Music] foreign 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 he decided he wanted to be some sort of missionary teaching 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 within London where a man with a religious Mission could find plenty to do foreign [Music] these are the minute books of the turnum green Congregational Church for 1876 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 Slade Jones tested nightly one imagined by Mr Van Gogh 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 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 angel and it all feels sneakily autobiographical [Music] is 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 that 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 foreign [Music] [Music] that's Christmas Vincent went home to his family that 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 had 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 [Music] the booksellers 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 he divided his paper into four columns and inched his way through the Bible in four languages at once [Music] this is a painting he did some years later of his father's Bible it's still being used in zundet [Music] the bookselling job didn't work out of course Vincent was still determined to join the church like his father and his grandfather see had a seahorse and Pastor teodorus 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 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 Larkin 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 a 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 boringage in an encyclopedia and this encyclopedia informed him that this was a happy working Community populated by a race of 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 and 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 thank you 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 boringage 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 encountered 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 rosh 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 Shaker 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 borinage 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 Miner's house in which he'd holed 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 he stayed in 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's 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 teodoras 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 boronage this difficult time he had amongst the the miners in Belgium this was really the first where he was determined to be an artist isn't it very important well you made a lot of dogs in 16 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 to Tower the landscape is the rising thunderstorm you know it's around about now isn't yet an hour 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 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 and 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 Christianity from 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 uh and the roundabouts yes that's right [Music] 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 kevos no no never she said how it must have hurt 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 trolled the red light 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 with which he 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 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 obscene he gave it an English title sorrow sorrow games [Music] this is where the hospital stood in which Vincent van Gogh was treated for the clap in the summer of 1882 for some reason there's no plaque he'd caught gonorrhea and has left us a detailed description of the treatment he received a catheter would be inserted into his bladder through you know where and gradually enlarged because that's what happens to men who can sort with prostitutes in The Hague with your long blonde hair in your eyes your eyes of blue the only thing I ever got from you is [Music] here [Music] scene had two children and the gossips of the Hague were suggesting that the youngest was Vincent ever do what you know this is the beach at scaveningen it's on the seaside outskirts of the Hague and in Vincent's time Hague artists used to troop out here for the day to draw the wild seas and the undulating Dunes Vincent would stay the night here with seen so Bohemian he bragged they'd sleep together on the dunes and in the morning they'd drink hot coffee together and watch the Sun going up and then Vincent would get down to work thank you Vincent sent his brother Teo a drawing of himself using a Contraption called a perspective frame here on the beach at scaveningen it had it built for him by the carpenter whose Workshop was round the back of Vincent's Studio see this Carpenter's Workshop quite clearly in the most luminous of the Hague watercolors so it was all going so well he had a woman a studio the pictures were pouring out of him when suddenly bad luck sniffed him out again someone discovered he was living with a prostitute this someone was almost certainly his old boss from goopiel's in The Hague Mr tastic wrote to Vincent's father who responded by trying to have his son committed in a lunatic asylum it was nearby a place called heal I've been there and it's not somewhere a father should seek to lock up a son in any case it proved unnecessary [Music] Vincent had pledged to marry his marriage and never ever to Desert her but after a year it's impossible to know exactly what went wrong between them seen's mother certainly played a part she was now living in the house with them and since she was the one who originally since seen out onto the streets she can't have been a good influence or a welcome presence [Applause] I found Vincent's changing attitudes to scene hugely disappointing I didn't expect this fickleness from him one moment she's his savior his soul mate the only one then suddenly she's become that woman lazy bad tempered stupid [Music] at his part he was now sending Vincent 150 francs a month and Mata naturally resented his brother keeping a prostitute and her family on his money yeah Tayo wanted Vincent to leave the woman leave the Hague smarten up and concentrate on his art and the usually headstrong Vincent found some unexpected meekness within him and came round to the idea but before we too flee the Hague and head back into the Dutch Countryside as Vincent did I want to pay tribute to Christine clasina Maria Hornick whom everyone called seen with a long blonde hair in your eyes of blue the only thing I ever got from you maybe she drank maybe she was a prostitute maybe she was lazy but she stuck with me yeah [Music] [Music] we're Northeast of Amsterdam just about as far as you can go in Holland before you drop into the North Sea this is drender with its sudden bogs and sunken fence this is and was one of the poorest bits of the Netherlands people scratched a living here digging peat and picking potatoes and because it was so grim and damp and Melancholy drenter was cheap to live in so this is where Vincent fled from the Hague and how well this Melancholy landscape suited his mood the people lived like troglodytes half above ground half Below in lumpy humpy Cottages with moss roofs ghostly barges loaded with shadowy black baggage floated gloomly across the vistas Vincent was here for about three months he was in an awful State when he got here having decided to Desert seen and the children he tormented himself with it daily when he encountered a stooped mother working in the fields or a bundled up wife trudging along the paths she reminded him invariably of seeing and made him feel tearful well maybe but he abandoned her nevertheless [Applause] Van Gogh wrote some of his longest and most philosophical letters from drenter he obviously had a lot of time on his hands in the evenings and I guess looking around at all this there wasn't much else to do Vincent wrote to his parents as well about how the sunny Autumn days in drenter alternated with stormy wet ones he preferred the storms he said he liked rain and I don't think anyone's ever painted it as fondly or as often as he did all Vincent's early work is glum working people digging bending plowing again and again in the endless toil none of it's cheerful but by General repute the grimmest work he ever produced was here in drenter but you know what he never complained about the landscape or demeaned it he always found it inspirational to you and me we get in a place like this and all we see a Melancholy Browns but when you look at Vincent's pictures from drenter there's so much Radiance in them so much color I think it's one of his greatest talents where everyone else saw heartbreak and bleakness Vincent van Gogh found beauty in the end it wasn't the bleakness of drenter that drove him out of here but the lack of money Teo was having problems at work with the risk of Teo losing his job the only place left for Vincent to go was back into the arms of his family [Applause] yeah Newnan what a ghastly place so neat so pretty but when Vincent turned up here a few weeks before Christmas 1883 this was somewhere notoriously Bleak right in the middle of the Dutch poverty belt it's difficult these days to think of the Dutch as impoverished peasants toiling in the fields from morning till night digging potatoes dying young what a makeover they've had but Vincent's art from Noonan is compelling evidence of just how dark and tragic and miserable and exhausting life was right here his parents weren't pleased to see him the affair with the in The Hague had upset them mightily he told Teo that they shrank from letting him in as if he were a big Shaggy Dog who'd leave muddy footprints in the living room this is the house they lived in look at it it splendid Vincent's Behavior was that its uncompromising worst at dinner he'd refused to join the rest of the family and sat apart on his own chair with his food in his lap eating old bread crusts and cheese we'd have trouble chewing because his teeth were going when they'd got over the shock of him turning up they allowed him to clean out the mangle room at the back of the house where the washing was done Vincent put in a stove he bought a few bits of modest furniture and was soon working furiously in his first ever Studio foreign specialized in two types of rural poverty farming and weaving Vincent's pictures of Weavers are perhaps his most original early Works they're such strange and awkward machines these black Monsters of grimy wood as he called them in the middle of which sit and I'm quoting him again dark monkeys or gnomes or ghosts clattering away with the sticks from morning until night [Applause] water of Noonan's battered working population used to be linen Weavers and now there's just one Weaver's house left in the entire town it's become a new age shop selling occult and religious knickknacks but when you walk in it's still eloquently tiny and easy to imagine how little room there would have been in here for the people once the black mechanical monster was installed and chattering foreign collecting people as well with this same pictorial greed painting peasant heads time and time again at least 50 of these face paintings still exist and who knows how many more have been lost it is almost like a scientific collection of peasant specimens he'd got interested in phrenology that disquieting pseudoscience that was terribly fashionable in the middle of the 19th century and whose followers believed that you could tell a person's character from the shape of their head phrenology was the dodgy precursor of some truly terrible ideas the racial stereotyping of the Nazis for one had phrenology as its original inspiration it's utterly discredited now but not then and Vincent was interested in it in his paintings of the peasants he often distorts the physionomies of the Noonan people to give them animal characteristics snout-like noses sloping foreheads not to denigrate them I'm sure but to categorize them a touch spookily perhaps into rural types foreign the culmination of Vincent's manic investigation of country faces was the most ambitious painting of his Dutch years the dark and entirely Melancholy Potato Eaters Vincent's father Pastor theodorus died in March 1885 and he's buried here on the spot where that Tower used to stand that you see in the background of so many of Vincent's Noonan pictures they weren't really speaking by then they'd fallen out but I don't think there's any doubt that the darkness of this event infected the picture that Vincent began a few days later The Potato Eaters shows a family of noblyn and peasants sharing their evening meal potatoes with coffee tomorrow for a change they might have coffee with potatoes yeah Vincent was inordinately proud of this painting he considered it his Masterpiece so far it's endearingly clumsy and very him it's potato Heaven around here they're everywhere potatoes potatoes potatoes potatoes but they're not just the staple food of the peasants there's more to it than that Vincent said when he was painting The Potato Eaters then he wanted them to feel like potatoes the people themselves they had Hands Like Potatoes they had faces like potatoes to be honest I never quite knew what he meant by any of that until I got here and felt these things the people are indeed like that they're of the earth they're gnarled they're brown they're like potatoes together once you get out of Noonan the landscape hasn't changed that much with these plunging Avenues of poplars that he so loved to paint and Vincent Had A peculiar outdoor hobby who used to collect birds nests and apparently had about 30 of them all different while he was actually here and he used to display them in a line arranged on a decorative branch some of the nests came from rare birds including I was sad to see the nest of a golden Oriole why paint birds nests they're so difficult I rather disapprove of Vincent collecting bird's nests he took the eggs as well there is this ruthlessness to him that we tend to overlook we've become so mushy on the subject of Vincent Van Gogh later on when he was already at the insane asylum in San Remi he painted this beautiful study of an emperor moth he said it had turned up in the Asylum Gardens at night and that he'd had to kill it to see it properly that's meant to be Vincent going to work in the fields he would have hated it it's so Twee these days Noonan is ever so proud of the fact that van Gogh lived here for two years produced some of his most powerful early works here they love Vincent all right now but they didn't when he was here one of the girls from The Potato Eaters got pregnant they said Vincent was responsible and the Catholic priest from that church over there forbade his parishioners from posing for him the town campaigned against him kids began throwing stones at him they ran him out of town so now they're milking him for all his worth that's not true of his next location one of the world's most Cosmopolitan cities in November 1885 just in time to avoid the dreaded Christmas get-together of the van Gogh's Vincent left for Antwerp antwerp's only 25 miles or so from where Vincent was born in zundad so although it's in Belgium it was always geographically on Vincent's doorstep but symbolically this throbbing brabantine Metropolis famous for art and beer and diamonds was another world foreign the priest didn't take to their pulpits whenever someone got pregnant because they would have had to stay up there all the time this place he explored was down here the port typical Vincent this was where antwerp's low life was concentrated wandering through these streets in the rain he saw a sailor being chased out of a brothel by a gang of angry prostitutes which amused him he was out of noon and all right after two years of grim country living being treated as The Village Idiot this was the urban shot the complete change he needed from now on Vincent was an exile a man on the move and he never went back to Holland the and the cafe girls were the only models he could get he painted their portraits and paid them for it what he really wanted was to paint them nude but he couldn't afford it he was living on bread and coffee from the time he moved out of his parents house in Noonan to his first winter here which is over half a year he'd only eaten six or seven hot meals Vincent was literally starving I'm on Jewels Cabernet and some interesting evidence has emerged quite recently that Vincent was treated here in this house by a Dr Cabernet for syphilis Not only was syphilis fatal it also drove you mad the insane asylums of the 1880s were full of syphilitic lunatics Vincent's doubts about his own sanity had good reason to increase his teeth had gone he went to the dentist here in Antwerp and had to have 10 teeth pulled out if you've ever wondered why Vincent never Smiles in any of his self-portraits it isn't just that he's not the smiling kind it's also because he doesn't want you to see his teeth he was only 33 and already he was falling apart he knew he was smoking too much but he did it deliberately to subdue his hunger and with a grim sense of humor that's untypical of Vincent although it is admittedly rather Belgian he painted what I think should be seen as a comic self-portrait a skull with a in its mouth Vincent only 33 yet already facing death with a smile [Music] Vincent joined the academy here in January 1886 he'd already been in Antwerp a couple of months and was of course a lifelong mistruster of academies trouble with Academy from Noonan in the summer is that they teach you to paint Louis XV and Arabs but not Weavers or diggers or Sowers Vincent loathed academies and at the age of 33 he was singularly ill-suited to entering one foreign [Music] but the academy in Antwerp was the only place he could get free models particularly nude ones [Music] another student Vincent Hagerman has left us some delightful memories of Vincent's time here he wore a blue Smock of a Kind usually favored by Flemish livestock merchants and his fur hat of course hogman remembers a cast of the Venus de Milo being brought in and Vincent drawing her with great big hips the aghast Professor picked up this drawing and covered it with corrections slimming down the new child-bearing hips of the Venus de Milo Vincent exploded you clearly don't know what a young woman's like he bellowed a woman Must Have Hips buttocks a pelvis that can carry a child and out he stormed the academy board met in March 1886 and decided unanimously that Vincent should be put back to the elementary class but they were too late he'd already gone [Music] in February 18 Teo Van Gogh was at work at gupil busard and valadon just here in the boulevard more Mart won a porter from the guardian Nord arrived with a note unfortunately it was from Vincent I say unfortunately because Teo had been pleading with Vincent not to give up his studies in Antwerp not to come to Paris Teo had troubles at work he had troubles with his health troubles with his mistress and his flat was too small but all this pleading made no difference Vincent came anyway [Music] foreign [Music] teo's apartment was far too small for both of them so the brothers moved here to the Rue left peace a notably steep Road up which you must puff to enter my Mart [Music] you don't need me to tell you about more Mart in Vincent's time you've seen the film attempted the can can this was paris's Chief nocturnal pleasure ground busy with dance halls drinking dens and cabarets a shameful Hill of fun that marked the edges of civilized Paris [Music] Van Gogh's stay in Paris is surprisingly mysterious he wasn't writing to Teo obviously because Teo was here so there's a huge gap in their correspondence there are bits and pieces of testimony from other Parisian artists but it tends to feel unreliable and boozy let's try and put this in context when Vincent arrived in Paris in the winter of 1886 impressionism had been the art fashion for a decade already and the hunt was on for the next big thing foreign but Vincent had never even seen an impressionist painting though no impressionist pictures in Newnan there were no impressionist pictures in Antwerp so he had an awful lot of catching up to do a couple of Vincent's first Parisian Landscapes look out towards the city that way but most of them don't most looked deliberately that way back there on the slopes of the butman Mart you could still find a curious half-rural scrub land of overgrown allotments and pocket-sized urban Vineyards and Vincent's first paintings of the half rural more Mart may be stylistically undecided and to touch hesitant but they do give you a strong sense of The Bleak character of The Scrub land lots of people's dreams were broken here not just Vincent's [Music] [Music] Teo was complaining to anyone who would listen about the state of the apartment there are wet paintings propped up in every corner clothes everywhere and all this stuff that Vincent had picked up on his walks around more Mart it was a disastrous domestic Arrangement did Vincent ever screw the top back on the toothpaste tube I doubt it worse even than Vincent's chronic untidiness was his genius for picking quarrels with anyone over everything there are these touching letters from Teo back to the family in Holland in which he complains that no one came around to see him anymore they were all too frightened of Vincent the only solution was to get him out of the flat by enrolling him in some kind of art school does Vincent briefly became a pupil of the fashionably grotesque Parisian painter Fernand Corman specialized in neanderthals great hairy Primitives acting out violent scenes from the Bible this is Cain and his tribe fleeing after the murder of Abel horrible isn't it common Studio was here on the boulevard de cliche at the bottom of the monmart hill [Music] particular reputation for tolerance and seems to have had a nose for picking troublemakers the head pupil in corman's studio a kind of artistic prefect who is supposed to set the best example was tulo's lotreck what an error of judgment that was on corman's part the Trek and Vincent became close they'd go drinking and whoring together and the Trek produced a memorable pastel drawing of Vincent in a cafe much like this staring thoughtfully into the distance either because he had lots on his mind or more likely because he'd been drinking too much of that absinthe in front of him and his elastic had snapped was the drug of choice in my Mart you know how then you pour some water into it it turns a yellowy green well they used to call it the green fairy and Vincent liked it so much that he painted a still life of a glass of absinthe that feels almost like a loving portrait of it [Music] the chief hallucinogenic ingredient of absinthe is called wormwood which gets its name from the biblical story of Satan disguised as a snake hiding in the tree of knowledge and tempting Eve a sensible man stays clear of absanth but tula's La Trek and Vincent van Gogh didn't or couldn't [Music] [Applause] this is where a cafe called the tambaran used to stand it served delicious Italian food served up by fetching winches dressed in Italian Peasant outfits [Music] tambourine shaped and presided over by the tamarans interesting owner agustina segatory she was from Naples originally but came to Paris to be a model and with her dark Neapolitan Beauty she made it passable Egyptian slave girl or Turkish Harem wife in those absurd orientalist fantasies that come on and his friends were producing [Music] counted agostina she was in her late 40s swarthy a faded Beauty his kind of woman he painted her in the corner of the tambaran dragging on a Vincent and agostina had some sort of Affair this is surely her in the rather frantic and angrily sexy nudes that Vincent suddenly emerged with [Music] it's not the Vincent we used to I don't know how good the geography of but if you imagine the hill of more Mart here with sakurakur on top the river sen flows along the front and then doubles back on itself in a sharp Loop so if you walk down from one Mart Hill in this direction you end up where I'm standing now at Anya the notorious Riverside pleasure ground of the Impressionists the monets and the renoirs made something terribly pretty out of any but Vincent didn't Vincent's impressionism has a bleakness to it that no Frenchman would have sought out or admitted to used to walk here from one Mart with a new pal the painter sinyak who was a plantilist a DOT painter they'd work around here all morning and then stop off for a late lunch on the way back Vincent painted a couple of the restaurant interiors that he and sineak used to drop into and they're done hilariously in the full dot Manor that was all the rage that year [Music] when you look at Van Gogh's Parisian output it's like looking at a big box of samples shall I paint this way or that way shall I be an impressionist or will I take up the dot and plantilize Van Gogh produced 230 paintings in his two years in Paris and hardly any of them seem alike [Music] with imported Japanese goodies [Music] money the brothers began manically collecting Japanese prints hundreds and hundreds of them geishas actresses musicians courtesans on the left is a courtesan from Vincent's collection on the right is an exact copy of her that Vincent did it's slightly erotic but then so was he [Music] here's another of these peculiar plum trees in flower originally by hiroshige Vincent added some extra calligraphy to it I've had it translated it's an advertisement for a brothel called yoshiwaras foreign and you know what the van Gogh Museum still has the tracing paper he used squared up exact [Applause] Japanese prints changed Van Gogh's art as the sun coming up in the morning turns night into day as they say around here The Great Divide in his work is between his pre-japan pictures and the post-japan ones his colors become clearer brighter the perspectives less Western Shadows are banished and a striking Japanese flatness enters his work Vincent was so excited by his own Japanese Prince that he organized the monmart exhibition at the cafe Tambora to show them off you can just about make them out on the wall behind Augustina sigatory [Music] the umbrella on her stool that's definitely Japanese it was probably important things [Music] this is agustina too after Extreme Japanese surgery Vincent fell out with her Vincent fell out with everybody okay Paris nearly finished Vincent off and certainly ruined his health he later complained that he'd become an alcoholic Heir his nerves were shot from the constant arguments the late nights the absent the pitching and the backstabbing his fellow painters he spats disgusted him now one of Van Gogh's more reliable character traits was a tendency to rush into decisions once he'd made his mind up to go away from somewhere he was on the next train out the departure from Paris was as abrupt as the arrival had been as the train puffed out of Paris all Vincent could think about he wrote to Teo was his arrival in Japan he meant it as a befuddled metaphor I suppose where he was really going was the town of all in the south of France [Music] foreign on Monday the 20th of February 1888 to find all blanketed with snow who would have thought it I spoke to a chap at our hotel who's lived here all his life and he's only seen snow once so this was truly exceptional weather but Vincent was far too excited to let this unlikely snow dampen his enthusiasm besides these were the only possible weather conditions that could make the south of France resemble Japan a vague resemblance perhaps but a resemblance nevertheless if you've never been here and you only know all through Vincent's art which is how most people in the modern world first get to know it and it's my duty to tell you that all is none of the things you think it is when I first came here I was expecting a sleepy and cute provincial Country Town surrounded by sunflowers and lavender populated by kindly country folk Brown as nuts because that's the image of the place Vincent has left us but I'll isn't like that at all and wasn't then Vincent complained that it was a dirty Town surprisingly industrialized the manufacturing center a French Rolling Stock trains carriages they were all made here look carefully at the horizons of his distant views of all and you'll see as many belching Factory chimneys as there are Church Steeples [Music] where there are factories and the railways there's misery and Al had plenty of that a few days after he arrived Vincent was walking through here the red light district of Isle in those days when a commotion broke out outside of brothel Two Italians had murdered a pair of local soldiers zwaves they were called light infantrymen stationed in the town [Music] Vincent took advantage of this murderous commotion and popped into the brothel himself became a frequent user but as a result of this Sensational double murder every Italian in town was run out of all was good at running people out of town as Vincent himself would later find out but not just yet while the snow was still on the ground that marvelous weather defying nut tree the Almond was already blossoming Vincent picked a branch took it to his hotel put it in a glass and watched it so fondly there was snow outside but in his little room spring had come and soon everything was In Bloom in The Orchards and Vincent embarked upon an orgy of Blossom painting he produced 14 pictures in a few days pears peaches cherries and he envisaged them hanging in threes to form triptychs like religious pictures here at last was a religion he could give his all to once again the religion of nature you know so many people come to all hoping to find the real Van Gogh the trouble is there's not much of the real Van Gogh left what the good people of all didn't knock down the second world war bombers got rid of however if you really poke about and search hard there are some places that come up as a little bit of a surprise I mean he did so much work when he was here so many paintings so many watercolors so many drawings that if you look around you're bound to come across some of them again like this beautiful little Bridge here [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] one of the chief reasons Vincent had chosen to come to lowly all out of all the places he could have gone to in the south of France is because the town was famous for its women they were called they were picturesque Black costumes and were said to be the most beautiful women in France Vincent was disappointed to find when he got here that the town wasn't overrun by beautiful arlesiens as he'd imagined it's one of the first things he complains about but just as he was to edit all itself to fit his mental image of it so the propriet tress of the cheap bar he'd found rooms in Madame genox he was called was turned into the enticing Isle as Yen of Vincent's imagination this was a pub landlady who ran an all-night bar but Vincent had always had this thing about women in black makes her Noble and thoughtful and if you line up all the women he ever yearned for in his life you'll find a powerful family resemblance sad dark women with much on their mind were Vincent's preferred type [Music] no one's ever said anything happened between Vincent and Madame Chinooks and I don't suppose it ever did but this was woman [Music] but look closely at the back of this compelling billiard scene he painted of Madame genox's all-night bar isn't that her could in the Night Vincent Drank in the days he painted this was his preferred route out of all the Terrace gone Road Vincent did a painting of himself striding into these fields unfortunately it was destroyed in the second world war perhaps the greatest loss there's been in Van Gogh's art it's such a poignant image of him troping off to work like a peasant farmer I really wish I could show you the real thing but at least we've got this someone had the wit to take a photograph before it was burnt Vincent and his splattered blue overalls and straw hat lugging around his painting gear like a porter at Paddington Station has he trudged along these roads in this heat weighed down with all sorts of painters luggage it's not surprising that Vincent started to look for ways of losing some of that Luggage in any case he was running out of paint and canvas because he was so alarmingly prolific but with a typical piece of Vincent Ingenuity he soon found a new way to work out doors luckily for him the roadsides of all are overgrown with these things the camarg Reed now Vincent knew that Rembrandt had used Reeds and made great works with them the thing is they're absolutely everywhere they're free plentiful and they're terribly easy to turn into pens all you need is a knife a decent Stout Reed and look at that it sharpens up so beautifully into a lovely point and they're surprisingly versatile when you look at Vincent's drawings the re-drawings he did here all that stippling the dots the lines they really do represent the hay fallen over the Harvest growing the trees blossoming he really was so masterful with this and I find there's something very fitting about the fact that this stuff gathered from Nature's Bounty should have been responsible for so many of his most delicate old pictures so light to carry around easy there you go this is mon majour the complex of medieval ruins on a hill from which there are Splendid views to be had of all in the distance with the plane of Lacroix in between Vincent produced one of his finest Reed pen drawings from this viewpoint he walked here from all with his Soldier friend second Lieutenant milier the Suave to whom Vincent was now giving drawing lessons read pen is black and white of course but when the two of them look down at this great Vista they must have noted how yellow it was the Harvesters the wheat fields [Music] and in this golden sea it's a particularly Vivid patches of yellow would have stood out [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's just a cheap cash crop around here grown in bulk to make cooking oil for frying sausages but by the time Vincent van Gogh are done with it this cheap yellow cash crop would have been transformed into the most famous flower ever painted when I was a boy my mother took out a subscription for me to a magazine called knowledge I don't know if you remember it knowledge used to have full page reproductions in it of famous paintings and the first one I remember cutting out and sticking to my wall was Van Gogh's night Cafe in the place du forum I suppose its sense of nocturnal Urban alienation chimed with mine or something awful like that but take away a few thousand tourists drop the prices massively and it's unchanged [Music] [Applause] Van Gogh wasn't the only Troublemaker in all in the summer of 1888 the town was also home to a Garrison of lurid French soldiers called zwabs these exotic zwarves had started out as Algerian Warriors the silly uniform was based on Algerian tribal wear red fez's voluminous red pantaloons and these pretty embroidered waistcoats it's ridiculous gear for a soldier well these dwarves were stationed here where the police station is now this was an important base for them and where there are soldiers there are women drink trouble people in all had an expression acting the Suave it meant being flash cocky Lippy Vincent's first friend in all his first drinking buddy was an officer in the zwaves second lieutenant milier this Millie would go to the brothel before important Army exams put himself in the right frame of mind Vincent was mightily impressed it's a talent he wished he had very little has ever said about Vincent's sexual instincts which were powerful and coarse his friend Gogan who was soon to join him here in Isle was disastrous consequences is always being accused of Beastly sexual behavior but Vincent has somehow avoided this condemnation we think of him as an eccentric elder brother turbulent perhaps but essentially safe and kindly [Music] as he was kind but there was a dangerous and sexually explosive side to him and unless we accept this we can't begin to understand what may have happened to him here in Al when Vincent's elastic snapped all the time he was here he was a manic brothel goer when the good people of all finally chucked him out the petitioning women accused him of molesting them we don't want to believe it it doesn't fit our cozy fantasies about Vincent in our imaginations he's been neutered he's the Artist as the friendly family pet [Music] there's a painting he did here that's so significant it's of a girl she's 13 or 14. he called it the museme he'd been reading this atrocious book about Japan Madame chrysanthem by Pierre Lottie are typically sexist outpouring of Western drivel about Japanese women [Music] temporarily married to visiting westerners Vincent thrilled at this idea this painting seeks to evoke these illicit desires see what the Muslim is holding in her hand it's a sprig of Oleander a local Blossom that's poisonous to touch whose Aroma can be fatal the stories going around among the zwaves of soldiers in Algeria who'd built themselves temporary huts with roofs of Oleander that all died in the night Vincent's moose May that sweet looking little girl is a dangerous temptation what am I going on about this because Vincent had some sort of sexual crisis here in Isle he wrote the Teo that he could no longer get it up as he put it so bluntly he was as impotent as a character in a Guida montpazan story of course he was impotent he was drinking too much but the effects of this impotence have been underrated it explains so much the explosive atmosphere of his night scenes the taunting and constant presence of happy couples in his pictures the crisis Vincent had here had powerful sexual fuel thrown onto it the Knight had always fascinated him and he'd harbored an ambition to paint it for a long time the night he wrote is more colored than the day he painted a magical view from just here his first Starry Night painting at night of course is impossible so Vincent apparently stuck some candles to the rim of his straw hat and they threw out just enough flicker for him to paint the Stars as one of the letters Vincent wrote from all as the most revealing it'll be the one he sent to Teo in July about stars he said looking up at the night sky from here and seeing the Stars was like opening up a strange map and seeing all those black dots representing Faraway towns and places and just as you had to take a train to reach one of these far away places so to reach the Stars you had to die it seems to me he writes that cholera and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion just the steamboats omnibuses and Railways are the terrestrial means to die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot this is the same letter in which he admits to being impotent foreign [Music] I've been racking my brains trying to think of an artist's house that's more famous than this one and you know I can't this the yellow house in all is surely the most celebrated artistic Abode there's ever been foreign it's the only house Vincent called his own but that's not the chief reason for its notoriety it's notorious because remarkably Gogan lived here too look at it it's tiny yet somehow two huge artistic egos squash themselves into their simultaneously but it's never going to work was it Vincent's rather pathetically have been trying to get someone anyone to come and live with him in all he was lonely he needed artistic company he tried to lose track who never wrote back but above all he tested Gogan over and over and over again Gogan came here chiefly for financial reasons he was basically blackmailed into it by Teo who offered to support him if only he'd joined Vincent in all Gogan complained bitterly that he was being asked to prostitute himself but he did it anyway to welcome his notoriously argumentative painter buddy Vincent decided to decorate the yellow house with pictures of a flower he'd grown fond of that was grown locally in bulk for cooking oil Vincent's plan was to produce a dozen of these flower paintings and to hang them in the guest bedroom one next to the other in homemade orange frames if someone's coming to stay with you it's normal isn't it to put a bunch of flowers in the room welcome your guest what isn't so normal is to fill this room with Relentless and hallucinatory expanses of raw yellow the sunflowers are seen rightly I think as disguised self-portraits their famous behavior that magical way they always turn to face the sun makes every sunflower a Botanical Vincent Vincent had already painted sunflowers back in Paris people used to grow them in more Mart outside their Cottages great big tall things leaning over the fence like a nosy neighbor [Music] in Provence however the sunflowers don't come in singles they come in oceans unbelievable expanses of the fiercest yellow it's still a sight that makes you dizzy up at dawn and into these Fields collected 10 15 flowers took them home put them in the vars and painted them until they wilted all the time he'd be drinking extra strong coffee deliberately over stimulating himself getting himself on a caffeine high so he could reach what he called that high note of yellow like a singer straining to reach that difficult top sea [Music] when Gogan finally walked into his new room in all his bedroom and saw these things can you imagine how uncomfortable it must have made him [Music] it's like Mozart going around to Beethoven's and being forced to listen to The Fifth Symphony all day and all night if you'd been Gogan you would have done what he did taken them off the walls and put up something a tad more neutral I apologize for the fact that we can only show you this underwhelming model of it but the Allies Bond it successfully in 1944 and completely destroyed the yellow house in awe that's Vincent's room on the right God it's so familiar from that cozy and delightful painting of it that he did there's gogan's bedroom on the left filled with sunflowers see how small it is much smaller than Vincent's room on the right which Gogan would have noticed Gogan arrived on the 22nd of October 1888. he only lived here with Vincent for 63 days the two of them should never have squashed themselves into this tiny place but they did and what wonders they produced [Music] [Applause] [Music] Vincent's chair and gogan's chair both by Vincent [Music] the postman's wife by Gogan the postman's wife and the postman's baby by Vincent and there's the baby again again by Vincent please no one knew that Vincent had painted Gogan then this turned up a sneak from the back [Music] the single most prominent structure in all the one building you really can't miss in the town is the bull ring the old Roman Arena where all would stage its famous Caritas [Applause] [Music] [Music] Vincent lightning ball fights so did Gogan is a Vincent painting of a crowd much like this come to see the bloodletting the painting was done in December it was probably a small pre-Christmas carida to which Gogan and Vincent came together the carida would have been a welcome relief from the arguing and the boozing tensions in the yellow house were growing impossible The Matador has fought particularly well against a bull the custom here is to present this Victorious Matador with the Bull's ear they just cut it off and give it to him it's a gory celebration of the Bull's defeat and the matador's victory on the Night Before Christmas Eve 1888 Vincent approached Gogan in the street and threatened him with a razor Gogan as he remembered it stared him down and Vincent slunk off into the night it was only the next day that they found out he'd taken his shaving razor you can just about make it out in that Charming interior of his bedroom by the washing Bowl he grabbed his ear here and starting from the top in front of a mirror I imagine slashed down through the ear with the razor cutting most of it off and severing an artery started bleeding profusely and he wrapped the piece of Flesh he'd cut off in a newspaper and took it to the brothel and he presented it to his favorite Hall Rachel everyone screamed fortunately wulong the old Postman was at the brothel at the time and he took Vincent home police were called they arrived at the yellow house to find it dripping with Vincent's blood he was nearly dead we'll never know exactly what happened between Gogan and Vincent I'm pretty sure it was something to do with women Gogan was successful with them Vincent wasn't in this public Arena the defeated bull has its ear cut off when it loses in the private Arena the yellow house Vincent did his own ear cutting Gogan had been threatening to leave for weeks the day after Vincent slashed himself he was gone and never saw Vincent again this was the hospital in all to which the bleeding Vincent was brought to heal up he couldn't remember anything that had happened to him it was and is a most mysterious collapse he was lucky though with his physician Dr Ray a young and sympathetic inhabitant of all though not alas a lover of Modern Art Vincent did a portrait of him which the doctor's family used infamously to board up their chicken coop when he was well enough to paint again they let him out and he produced that poignant and haunted self-portrait with the bandaged ear Tayo had asked a local vicar to look after him there was another attack a raving Vincent thought the good people of all were trying to poison him which they probably would have done given the chance if he went out in the streets the kids would chuck things at him cabbage stalks rotten fruit this disheveled figure with the fur hat and the bandage howling back at his tormentors it was too much for the good people of all 30 of them got together a petition and brought it here to the town hall insisting that the painter Van Gogh be put away he was a menace to society a drunk and a molester of women that petition is still in the archives of all this is it this is the petition that the good citizens of all Drew up and handed into their mayor asking for Vincent to be put away somewhere dear Mary says we the undersigned would like to point out to you that this Dutch painter Vincent in Brackets has lost some of his mental faculties and also drinks too much when he drinks too much he's an annoyance to the women and the children and it's signed it's signed by all the people that got together and asked the mayor to ensure that Vincent was put away foreign something had to be done before Vincent was lynched it was the Protestant vikka sales whom Teo had asked to keep an eye on Vincent who recommended this Asylum at San Remi 15 or so miles from all Saint Paul De masolat was called had a reputation for progressiveness and Vincent voluntarily checked himself in here on the 8th of May 1889. San Rami is renowned for two things one is the Nostradamus that celebrated predictor of human Doom was born here the other is that Vincent that unpredictable painter of human Hope was locked up here for a year he produced 150 paintings but he only signed seven of them this was a period of transient uncertainty and flux by an eerie coincidence the asylum in San Remi like the one in all was a former Monastery 12th century Augustine with a Cloister that's also reminiscent of all [Music] it's a space for walking round and round and round in circles thinking there's a powerful sense here of an enclosed Society a private World Within These Walls these Monkish atmospheres quickly infiltrated Vincent's art the first painting he did here was those swirling irises that now hang somewhat perversely in the grand Getty museum in Los Angeles was a clash of spirits that is between here and there Vincent's iris's humble Wayside flowers that come out all through the fields here at Easter time have long ago been roped into symbolizing the end of the winter in provincial folklore and Resurrection all those blue irises in the painting and just one white one standing out against the crowd I wonder who that represents these includes Gardens of San Remi became Vincent's private Little World his Cosmos his art began paying such minuscule attention to everything in here the butterflies The Beatles the irises and the Roses [Music] foreign a huge moth in the garden and had cruelly to kill it in order to paint it he said it was a death head moth but that's just wishful thinking on Vincent's part and bad lipidoptery it was an emperor moth and they should change the label at the Van Gogh Museum immediately [Music] Penny's sense of the cosmos being represented in every blade of grass every moth every beetle in this enclosed Garden this monastic Greenhouse the mysticism inside him was growing Fierce again but you'll want to know about his so-called Madness we're coming to that [Music] this is Vincent's cell who won just like it many of the paintings he produced here at San Remi were views done just through there and we never painted the bars [Music] through the window he saw a Reaper down there cutting through the corn in the field outside he'd painted Reapers before but never with this much ecstatic yellow energy he said this Reaper was an image of death sithing through the corn representing us of course [Music] the mood of the picture is so manically positive death with a smile on its face he wrote all he looked down on from his window repeated in picture after picture was a stubborn Mantra it's only the wall of the garden but it seems so sternly to Mark the limits [Music] so what was actually wrong with him the short answer is that no one really knows if you squeezed a hundred psychologists into this tiny cell and asked them to diagnose Vincent you'd get a hundred different answers the latest contribution to this popular psychiatric pastime of analyzing Vincent comes from the chief psychologist here at San Remi Dr Jean mark boulon [Music] hello circumstances characters did you get that manic depression with epilepsy thrown in at least the syphilis seems to have faded in Vincent's time the chief cure here for all of them indeed for everything was A long soak [Music] I have this image of Vincent in his grave laughing himself silly at the confusion he's caused in the ranks of our brain specialists the very first diagnosis of his illness from the head doctor here at San Remi Dr payron was that Vincent was suffering from epilepsy pure and simple which of course meant there could be more attacks the good thing about being diagnosed as an epileptic is that it presupposes that you'll have these long periods of rational and reasonable behavior in between the attacks so they let him out he started walking around the local Countryside exploring it it's one of the first places he came spooky ravine having quarries here apparently since Greek times they'd formed these spectacular Caverns he had a young assistant with him who was delegated to look after Vincent on these walks through the countryside and isn't found him a bit annoying one time they came back from painting the Ravine now going up the stairs in the Asylum and Vincent just suddenly turned around and kicked this man right in the stomach why people said again it was a sign of Madness but I think he did it and the cover of Madness he's just getting his own back for being bossed around I think this is the Ravine where Vincent had the first of his San Remi attacks he was painting The View through there when it came on her dizziness a storm he managed to stumble back to the Asylum where he tried to poison himself by eating his paints it all lasted about a week when he recovered he described to Teo with interesting shame his blurred memories of singing hymns and ranting superstitiously about God and he despised what he called this absurd religious aspect of his mind storms and he blamed the gloomy monkey surroundings of the Asylum for it but the Mindstorms came from him not from them the timing of Vincent's attacks is I suggest highly revealing the first one back in all came when Gogan threatened to leave the yellow house then when Teo announced he was going to marry Vincent had a relapse here in San Remi teo's new wife Joe wrote to tell Vincent that she was pregnant and he had that attack by this ravine for most people her baby in the family triggers uncomplicated Joy but for Vincent needy selfish aggressive willful Vincent had been chronically dependent on Teo for most of his adult life the new baby was a threat look at these incidents together and you have a pattern Vincent's attacks came at moments of perceived rejection when he felt left out when the fear of being alone unbalanced him the landscape around the Asylum was conspicuously different from all which is only such a little way away the cypruses for instance were bigger more prominent they're supposed to be the tree of death of course and around here they grow them in the cemeteries but Vincent cypresses aren't in the least bit Melancholy or hushed they're great Burly ecstatic trees writhing up to the heavens Egyptian obelisks he called them he found their struggle to reach the Stars inspirational and it was here that Vincent painted his second great starry night that Celestial Orchestra of Astral Catherine Wheels spinning through the heavens playing Wagner in the sky [Music] [Music] foreign s of the Vincent myth is the belief that he never had any success in his life he only sold one picture he was always misunderstood etc etc it's true he did only sell one picture it happened while he was here at San Remi one of his old Vineyards was sold in Brussels for 400 francs but what was it doing in Brussels it was part of an important display of French avant-garde painting Teo had put his work into the salon De refuse Monet said they were the best things in the show a Dutch reviewer went into ecstasies about how important Vincent was who will save Modern Art he asked Vincent was his reply Van Gogh wasn't discovered after he died he was discovered while he was here locked up in San Remi but it gave him so little pleasure bullish expression for which I can't quite think of an exact English translation it means to go off something to develop a revulsion for It Whatever the right translation is some think of this order happen to Vincent's feelings about San Remi and the south of France [Music] for the warm and cozy fires of his dark Dutch childhood the low black Cottages the hard-working country folk until he went back to visit them [Music] these obsessive reworkings of other artists pictures aren't really copies he did them from black and white prints that Teo sent him their ambitious reimaginings in color starting from scratch almost and I think that some of his most exciting paintings but their psychological meaning the darker stuff only becomes clearer when you consider his situation he was desperate to get away from San Remi away from the Asylum away from that maddening Sun away from the south of France back among his Potato Eaters back in the Gloom back home if you like in the northern stretches of his imagination foreign and among these Northern reworkings is Vincent's version of an old print by Gustav Dorey he'd collected in London of the inmates at Newgate Prison marching round in circles many now consider Vincent's version of this London jail scene to be the archetypal image of his imprisonment at San Remi we need also to consider this humble stuff ivy from the time he was a boy running around those woods in zundirt Ivy had always been Vincent's favorite plant his Horticultural Alter Ego it stood for him the way it clings its dependence on others its Fierce survival instincts and its fondness for gloomy Forest floors as a boy he'd drawn it and collected it and now in the scruffy Gardens of San Remi he sorted out again and painted it so very symbolically foreign Madness you sense was over Vincent had become an ivy man again [Music] I have a terrible craving he wrote to Teo to see my friends again and the countryside of the north [Music] he bullied Teo into letting him abandon the Asylum the doctor signing him out wrote one word in the hospital log cured it was wishful thinking since no one could be found to take him up to Paris Vincent set off on his own on the overnight train he got there safely enough and spent a couple of days with Teo and teo's wife Joe and their new baby Vincent villain named after him of course but it was all too much and he couldn't bear to be separated from his paint box and so on the 20th of May 1890 Vincent's train pulled up here at his final Village over there about 20 miles north of Paris was and is a pretty place that attracted artists the Impressionists came here Barbizon painters and now Vincent too [Music] it had been arranged that Vincent was to be looked after by a Dr Paul gashe an art-loving medical man and friend of the Impressionists whose special interest was the creative mind cachet lived here in what had been a girl's boarding school three days a week he'd commute to Paris where he had Consulting rooms his diagnosis of Vincent was that there was nothing wrong with him all Vincent needed was a good rest foreign this kindly eccentric in his medical approach and his remedy for heart problems was to administer digitalis the essence of fox gloves from which they make absanth around here and gashe was himself a sufferer from what Winston Churchill used to call that black dog depression if I were ill in any serious way I wouldn't have gone near this man a scared Vincent rode back to Teo gashe is sicker than I am foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is Dr gashe's salon cachet was a widower he had two children her boy who was 17 Paul and a daughter who was 21 Marguerite apparently Vincent could have stayed in this house there was room but Dr gashi was nervous of having his beautiful daughter so close to Vincent nevertheless Vincent painted her he did a lovely picture of her out there in the garden just there with a view of oh there behind her and most famously he painted her playing the piano this piano [Music] he used one of those canvases that were his over specialty the very long low ones normally he used them for his Landscapes he painted the cornfields on those but for margarita the piano he also used one and tipped it up so she's seen playing the piano long ways [Music] oh [Music] one of the most famous pictures that Vincent painted in over as of the church which until they get here it's not obvious but it's actually at the top of the hill overlooking the village and it's also strangely one of his most detailed pictures if you look at the church it hasn't really changed at all from the time he was here and he must have sat there all day looking ever so carefully I mean for example the tracery around the windows it's exactly as it is on the church there's a few bits which I'd rather enjoy where he's obviously really just skipped over the details he couldn't be bothered to do them properly for example there are these corbels above the window and in the real church so that a row of lovely gargoyles which he's just flattened off squared off he couldn't be bothered to do them but the greatest thing he did I think is to take this simple relatively small Parish church and to turn it in his painting into this great soaring Cathedral one thing you'd never know from looking at Vincent's picture is how small this place is [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] over has an interesting topography which is worth understanding to get a sense of what Vincent painted here it's a long thin Village that basically follows the river Wars along its Valley and then climbs up the Valley's sides in these higgledy-piggledy clusters of cottages built steeply up the hill until you get to the top where if you're a van Gogh admirer a most thrilling sight awaits you it's a huge flat stretching Plateau an elevated plane a mini America almost of long low endless wheat fields when you come up the hill from the village parts of the church and into these giant Fields there's an immediate change of scale from higgledy-piggledy to vast from those cramped Village streets below to these daunting Open Spaces makes you want to breathe that's Vincent's art from over there also alternates energetically between the claustrophobic Cottages below and those Great Plains above you know Vincent was only in over for 69 days the final 69 days of his life but in those 69 days he managed to produce 80 paintings and the usual cluster of watercolors go ashes drawings most of the time he was clearly enjoying himself and working like a man possessed but just as it was all going so well disaster struck [Music] for you and me I don't think it would have been a disaster all that happened was that Teo and his wife Joe decided to take their new baby to Holland for the summer instead of coming here to over and visiting Vincent as Vincent had hoped a minor disappointment he would have thought but for Vincent it added up to a major betrayal he flipped his letters to Teo got nasty he picked a fight with gashe and stopped going round there now I'm no psychiatrist but even I can see that here was a man deliberately engineering his own isolation in order to prove that no one wanted him back here at his lodgings his landlord ravu didn't notice any obvious change in his Wayward artistic lodger Vincent got up at five in the morning as he always did went out to paint the fields all day as he always did came back at night full ate his supper and was in bed by nine as he always was on July the 27 1890 Vincent wolfed down his lunch more quickly than usual and set off up here at the back of the village this is the wall that runs behind the village Chateau you can see it in a couple of his paintings up here you're pretty much hidden from the rest of the village no one can see what you're doing Vincent took out a revolver he'd got his hands on somewhere the locals try to cover themselves I think said later it was the gun he used for frightening the crows but why would Vincent want to frighten the crows he shot himself around here aiming vaguely at his heart but it wasn't much of a gun by all accounts and the bullet never made it out the other side Vincent fainted but he wasn't dead a few hours later he stumbled back down the hill and saying nothing to anybody made his way to his bed with the obese The Innkeeper followed him out to his room this room he sent for the village doctor a doctor masary Vincent insisted that gache come as well so these two profoundly inappropriate sore bones a village Doctor Who specialized in Midwifery and gashe who cured his patients by giving them Fox gloves for their heart disease inspected Vincent together and together agreed that the best thing to do was to leave him as he was had it happened to him today he would have been operated on immediately and probably saved it wasn't until the next day that Teo was notified he rushed onto the first train and got here to find Vincent sitting up in bed at first puffing away at his pipe Teo cradled him in his arms and as the hours ticked by he could feel Vincent slipping away at 1 30 in the morning on Tuesday the 29th of July 1890 still in teo's arms Vincent went gashe did a drawing of him on his deathbed on a paper napkin from the obese ravu Vincent was 37. he'd been an artist for just nine years [Music] because Vincent was a suicide of the Catholic priest refused to allow his hearse to be used or for a church service to be held the man who made Vincent stretches for him built the coffin the tragedy doesn't stop there either just six months after Vincent died Teo of all people followed him into the grave he'd been behaving most strangely for some months violent outbursts rants collapses at the time this unexpected descent into madness was blamed on a mysterious liver condition it was only much much later that the van Gogh family finally admitted that it was syphilis it was teo's wife Joe who planted this symbolic ivy on their graves go was to do so much for Vincent she became the tireless promoter of his work and eventually made him famous but it's for planting this Ivy here that I want to thank her now it came from Dr gashe's Garden she said it was meant to symbolize Vincent and Teo clinging together even in death but it does more than that I think on this grave that Ivy is a touching Monument to the real Vincent this Ivy not those infernally popular sunflowers was his favorite plant it clings it needs the damp and above all it's of the North Vincent was that too had he lived longer I'm certain he would have gone back to Holland and returned to the dark Dutch Taproot of his childhood there wasn't meant to be his last stop it was meant to be a staging post on Vincent's Journey Back Home [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: Perspective

Views: 216,234

Keywords: history documentaries, art history documentaries, art and culture documentary, TV Shows - Topic, art history, Documentary movies - topic, tv shows - topic, the arts, full episode, vincent van gogh, van gogh, van gogh documentary, waldemar januszczak, the starry night, history of art, art explained, vincent the full story, episode 1, Who was van gogh, van gogh sunflowers, sunflowers, van gogh tomato soup, soup, museum, amsterdam, vincent, waldemar, perspective, full series, dutch

Id: 365r2m7_B10

Length: 145min 27sec (8727 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022