A Place Called Space: Vincent Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, Part 1

Saturday, 6 June 2026

Vincent Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, Part 1

'I am now going to be an arbitrary colourist ... Behind the head - instead of painting the dull wall of the mean room, I paint the infinite'.

Vincent Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, Part 1, at the National Gallery, London.

This exhibition consists of works that Van Gogh created in the course of two years whilst he lived in Arles and Saint-Remy-de Provence. It was a very productive period of his life where he created some extraordinary and innovative work. Some of these works are among his most famous and beloved creations whilst others are less familiar. What emerges from looking at these works is an intellectual artist of lucid intention, deliberation and great ambition.

Van Gogh varied his approach to style and use of colour to explore wide-ranging emotional and poetic possibilities, often with a literary or artistic source in mind. In aiming to convey meaning rather than accurately record nature, Van Gogh took a free hand in adjusting or recomposing what he observed to achieve his desired effects.

The Lover (portrait of Lieutenant Millet), 1988

The Poet's Garden, (Public Garden in Arles), 1988

The Poet (Portrait of Eugene Boch), 1988

The deep blue sky behind the figure, intended to express a man 'who dreams great dreams', is part of the symbolism of the work.

The Garden: Poetic Interpretations

The Public Garden, Arles, 1988

Entrance to the Public Garden in Arles, 1888, (oil on canvas)

Undergrowth, 1899

Path in the Park, Arles, 1988, (oil on canvas)

The Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Remy, 1889, (oil on canvas)

This is one of the first works Van Gogh painted after arriving at the hospital at Saint-Remy. During his first weeks, he was not allowed beyond the hospital garden but he found delight in its overgrown and intimate corners, which he associsted with 'nests of greenery for lovers'.

The Garden of the Asylum with Sawn-off Tree, 1889

and a drawing of the above (chalk, brush, diluted oil paint and pencil on paper)

Hospital at Saint-Remy, 1889, (oil on canvas)

Van Gogh chose a vertical format to give full height to the massive pine trees that dwarfed the male wing of the hospital building. The reddish soil, highly stylised tree trunks and interlocking branches overhead produce a vibrant but oppressive environment within which Van Gogh arranges a number of figures, including perhaps himself, just left of centre. The women are an invention; female patients were not allowed in this part of the grounds.

Trees in the Garden of the Asylum, 1889

Two curving tree trunks, cropped at the top and bottom of the picture, frame a view towards one of the terraced lawns at the edge of the hospital gardens. Van Gogh greatly admired and collected Japanese woodblock prints, in which such dramatic compositional devices were common. This work's graphic quality is counterbalanced by his choise to paint a densely worked sky.

Roses, 1889, (oil on canvas)

Iris, 1890, (oil on cardboard, later thinned and mounted on canvas)

Van Gogh isolated this single plant, just coming into full bloom, almost as if he were painting a portrait. He used cardboard as a suport as he was running short of canvas at the time.

Weeping Tree, 1889, (reed pen and black-brown ink, with black chalk on off-white wove paper)

'Today I've made one of those drawings which becsame very dark and quite melancholic for springtime' Van Gogh wrote to his brother in May 1889.

The Yellow House: An Artist's Home:

Initially Van Gogh only used the Yellow House, which he rented in early May 1888, as a studio because it needed both renovation and furniture. By September he moved in and had bold plans to turn the modest house into an 'artist's home' and a 'communal studio of the South' in which his artist friends from Paris could join him to work. He devised a decoration for the house that included his major paintings. This then evolved into carefully conceived ideas about how to present his art to the public. The works in this section were part of his ambitions and are also some of his most well-known.