Neither The Poet nor The Lover, whose portraits open this heart-stopping Van Gogh exhibition, were quite what they seem. The Lover’s eyes gazes dreamily from a face of blue-green tints, wearing a red cap flaming against an emerald sky, in which a gold moon and star twinkle. In reality, he was an army officer called Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose affairs were less ethereal than the painting suggests. “He has all the Arles women he wants,” wrote Van Gogh enviously. The Poet’s face, meanwhile, is anxious and gaunt, its ugliness badly hidden by a thin beard, as the night around him bursts into starshine. He was a Belgian painter called Eugène Boch whose work Van Gogh thought so-so. But beggars can’t be choosers. They were among the few friends Van Gogh had in Arles, after he arrived in February 1888 to renew himself.
Why does this exhibition start with these two paintings, instead of the blossoming trees or golden fields he painted that spring? The answer lies in the portraits’ very lack of prosaic fact. Van Gogh is an artist we’re still catching up with. We all know his turbulent story – that less than a year after arriving in Arles, he would cut off his ear, and be narrowly saved from bleeding to death – but we’re not so clear what made his art so extraordinary. Wasn’t he just an especially intense observer of sunflowers?
