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Van Gogh and Britain review – on the town with Vincent

Tate Britain, London
The artist’s heady London years are the backdrop to a show that struggles to locate a British influence on this singularly self-propelled genius

Van Gogh loved Dickens. He wore a top hat on his daily walk to work from Brixton to Covent Garden. He rowed on the Thames, studied Turner and Constable in the National Gallery, even took the new underground railways. That he lived in London, on and off, between the spring of 1873 and the winter of 1876 still seems as surprising as Géricault painting the Epsom Derby and Canaletto working for nine years in Soho. But there is a crucial difference: Van Gogh was not yet a painter.

He was only 20 when a posting came up at the London branch of Goupil, the French art dealer for whom he worked in The Hague. A thumbnail sketch of Westminster Bridge on the company’s headed notepaper is one of only three drawings that survive from Van Gogh’s time in England. Fired from Goupil, and from his Brixton boarding house, where he fell in love with the landlady’s daughter (or possibly the widow herself, it is sometimes said), he briefly taught at a school in Ramsgate, before a stint as a Methodist lay preacher in Richmond. Not until the summer of 1880, when Van Gogh was 27, did he decide to become an artist.

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