my writing

Category: Painting

  • When Vincent met Arthur : Van Gogh and Rimbaud meet in London.

    Monday 30th March 1874, and a young man dressed smartly for the City, in a new top hat, is striding past Waterloo Station in London. He proudly shoots his cuffs to display the cuff-links sent by his beloved younger brother. In the evening he will write to thank him, while reminding him that, with his…

  • Vincent and I: Auvers

    Auvers-sur-Oise, 2006. ‘Vincent van Gogh, et Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,’ the patronne says firmly, and proudly, when I ask who are the men in the old photograph on the wall. My heart leaps – an unknown photograph of the mature Vincent? Only one is known, blurry and from the back. Vincent refused to be  photographed, embarrassed…

  • Vincent and I: Paris.

    Vincent arrives in Paris in March 1886, ten years to the month after he had left in ignominy – on his birthday, oh these anniversaries! – having been sacked by Goupil’s. His younger brother, Theo, is now manager of a Goupil’s Paris gallery. And he comes as an artist. He arrives from Antwerp without telling…

  • Vincent and I: Nuenen.

    From age 15, a dozen times, Vincent leaves the family home, with a plan and full of optimism, and within a year he is back, a broken failure. I’ve followed him to each place. To London to work in his uncle’s art gallery, Ramsgate to be a teacher, Isleworth to preach, Dordrecht to work in…

  • Vincent and I: A lifelong passion.

    A 1) It begins here. I take a photograph of the small gravestone: ‘Vincent van Gogh, 1852’. It is by the door of the Dutch Reform church in Groot-Zundert, a few hundred yards from the house where he was born. When the film is developed, this frame alone is blank, consumed in an explosion of…