Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers

Amazing exhibition at the National Gallery looking at Van Gogh’s two years in Provence.

It was so good I almost don’t know what to write about it! The individual works blew me away so it was hard to follow the narrative. I’d done an online talk on the show earlier on the week so thankfully I didn’t have to!

It was arranged in gentle themes emphasising how Van Gogh used the same subject to express different moods and how he repeated images but never copied them.

The core of the show focused on the Yellow House and how Van Gogh saw it as a way to display his art. It was magical to have a room of pictures that had been shown there and don’t get me started on the fact they had two Sunflower paintings hung with “The Lullaby” as a triptych suggested in a letter to his brother.

It was a great idea to have minimal labels and a booklet with more information to carry round. Make sure you pick it up on the way in. It’s also fascinating to read where the pictures come from. You’ll never see this combination again. I became slightly obsessed by the beautiful frames used by Kroger-Muller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands.

I suspect I will be trying to go to this show a lot as a member of the gallery! This was just the preview day!

Closes 19 January 2025


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