We think of Vincent van Gogh in the south of France, delirious in the Provençal sun, frenetically painting sunflowers to decorate the communal studio he hoped to set up in Arles. The story of what went wrong is told and retold - how Gauguin, the painter he had selected as leader of the new Studio of the South, came to stay, how there were rows, and finally the appalling disaster when Van Gogh threatened his friend with a knife then cut off his own ear. The exhibition Van Gogh and Gauguin: the Studio of the South, which opens next month at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and includes a newly identified portrait of Gauguin by Van Gogh, promises to unfold this tale with a new precision and intimacy. And yet, while Van Gogh's two years in Provence are the most mythicised in any artist's life, the two years, and more, during which he lived in the UK are barely remembered.
Van Gogh first came to the UK when he was 20, in June 1873, to work in the London branch of the art dealers Goupil and Cie. He worked there until 1875, and although he started out with the highest hopes, it was here that the protestant clergyman's son started to go off the rails. In 1876, having been dismissed from his job, he returned to England with a wild project that was the beginning of his difficult quest for purpose in life: he set out to become a missionary to the London poor.
The south coast of England was painted into art history by JMW Turner and John Constable. But Van Gogh's debt to this landscape is less well known. In the spring of 1876 he was working in Ramsgate as an assistant teacher at a boys' boarding school. Ramsgate is poised on top of the cliffs, with a wide, dramatic vista of the sea. In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh describes a spring storm there: "The sea was yellowish, especially close to the shore. On the horizon a streak of light, and above it immensely large dark grey clouds, from which one could see the rain coming down in slanting streaks. The wind blew the dust from the little white path among the rocks into the sea and shook the hawthorn bushes in bloom and the wallflowers that grow on the rocks." It is only when you picture him in this context that you realise the extent to which the English weather blasts Van Gogh's cornfields.
Van Gogh was never just a painter of landscape and nature, never just a celebrant of colour, an apostle of light. At the end of his life, he wrote blistering letters to his avant-garde friends, denouncing them for painting what were tantamount to abstract canvases. Emile Bernard, who along with Gauguin was Van Gogh's closest artistically, came in for a scorching denunciation for making abstract art for art's sake. In the years he spent teaching himself to be an artist, Van Gogh drew and painted the backbreaking realities of rural life in the Netherlands. But it is wrong to think that when he travelled to Paris in 1886 and encountered impressionism, he simply abandoned his realist mode. Van Gogh's unique, tough beauty lies in his distillation in every brushstroke of the most deeply felt ideas about God, society and the individual. His paintings are animated by thought. And the ideas that never left him were formed partly in the UK, by English literature and above all by the spectacle of the London poor.
Working as an art dealer in London was a socially ambiguous experience for Van Gogh. Based in offices at 17 Southampton Street, between the Strand and Covent Garden, he saw the glamour and squalor of the capital of the British empire. He lived south of the river in Lambeth, initially in Hackford Road, near Kenilworth Park. Walking through London, the young Van Gogh was acutely aware of others' suffering, though he also saw the smoky beauty of the city. He described to Theo the lovely sight of London by gaslight on a rainy evening, and yet this was not what he was to remember. His vision of the city was closer to that of French engraver Gustave Doré - he was a big admirer of Doré's nightmarish portrayal of poverty in his series of prints London: a Pilgrimage, published in 1872.
Rain. Van Gogh remembered the rain. The rain gave him plenty of time to read. He read Shakespeare: "My God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with ecstasy," he wrote to Theo in 1880, when he re-read King Lear. Van Gogh's Shakespeare is a pantheistic nature poet; the artist found his writing almost too intoxicating. In the asylum at St Rémy, where he was voluntarily hospitalised in 1889, Van Gogh read Shakespeare's history plays, but had to look out of the asylum window and "contemplate a blade of grass, a branch of pine, a blade of corn . . . to calm myself down again". It was as if he needed to convince himself that objects were separate and distinct, after being swept up in Shakespeare's interconnectedness.
In London in the 1870s Van Gogh developed a passion for English literature that was to stay with him until the end of his life. Second only to Shakespeare he rated Dickens. He started to smoke a pipe because he read in Dickens that tobacco was a cure for suicidal urges. Dickens's novels fired his imagination even before he came to London - a favourite character was the self-sacrificing Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. He saw England through Dickensian eyes: when he came back to teach in Ramsgate in 1876, he wrote to Theo of the misery of the boys at the boarding school as they traipsed down a dark staircase and washed in a cold communal bathroom, adding a stark drawing of their view of the street as they watched their parents returning in carriages to the railway station. It's touching, yet self-conscious, as if Van Gogh is deliberately casting himself as Nicholas Nickleby championing the oppressed at Dotheboys Hall. Later, when he worked among miners in the Borinage region in Belgium, his favourite reading would be Hard Times.
It was the English Victorian novel with its social conscience that helped to turn Van Gogh away from a business career. In addition to Dickens, Van Gogh read George Eliot's Scenes from Clerical Life, which inspired him with the idea of working as a priest among the urban poor. The art he loved at this time, and which he later collected, was the graphic realism of the English artists who depicted the ills of society in magazines such as the Illustrated London News and the Graphic. He particularly admired Luke Fildes's picture of homeless Londoners queuing in the street to be admitted to a "casual ward" for the night.
Although Van Gogh had the company of his sister Anna, who came to lodge with him while looking for work as a governess in England, he must have felt isolated. He cultivated an unrequited love for his landlady's daughter, in the house that still exists on Hackford Road. When he declared his love and proposed marriage, his refusal to take no for an answer (she was secretly engaged to someone else) led to a hasty move for him and Anna - to Kennington Road, a few minutes away. This hopeless passion established a pattern for Van Gogh's love life, but was not an explanation for his turbulent behaviour - rather a symptom of it. He was a lonely man looking for communion. In London he started to think that this might come from a Christian immersion in the sufferings of others. He became obsessed with John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. Van Gogh's journeys around Europe and his sense of landscape as a space through which the individual searches for meaning are shaped by this 17th-century English protestant classic.
After returning to the UK in 1876, he walked all the way from Ramsgate to London and spent a night sitting on the steps of a church, watching the sky. He got a job as an assistant preacher in the south London suburb of Isleworth - he had told Theo he wanted "a job between clergyman and missionary among working people among the suburbs of London". In October 1876 he gave his first sermon, in English, at a church in Richmond.
He walked there from Isleworth along the bank of the Thames, and again his path crossed Turner's. Turner had painted the view from Richmond Hill into which Vincent walked, "along the Thames, in which were mirrored the tall chestnut trees with their burden of yellow leaves and the bright blue sky". His sermon returned to the storm imagery that he had enjoyed at Ramsgate, as he elaborated the argument that life is a pilgrim's long progress in which our little boat endures terrible storms. Even in his most extreme phase of religiosity, Van Gogh could not stop thinking about art. "I once saw a very beautiful picture," he digressed in his sermon, and went on to describe a painting by the Victorian artist George Henry Boughton that shows a pilgrim facing a hard uphill road.
The intense, compassionate Dutchman seemed to have found a vocation in London, but his family disapproved. That Christmas he went home, and never returned to England. Fortunately for us, he found an outlet for his desire for connection in painting.
Yet English literature stayed with him, as did the socially engaged art of the illustrators who worked for the Graphic. Van Gogh read that Fildes and other artists associated with the magazine rented a house where they lived communally as a "brotherhood" - an inspiration for the Studio of the South. One of his favourite engravings by Fildes was a sentimental Victorian tear-jerker called The Empty Chair, published in the Graphic in 1870 on the death of Dickens and depicting the empty chair in Dickens's study.
In late November 1888, as the rift between Van Gogh and Gauguin was becoming obvious, Van Gogh painted two empty chairs - his and Gauguin's. He took the idea directly from Fildes's picture, a copy of which he owned. Gauguin's chair is red and lit by a candle at night; Van Gogh's, in the National Gallery, is eerier, and we can't help seeing it in the light of his death. His pipe and tobacco, as recommended by Dickens to keep away melancholy, rest on the simple straw-seated yellow chair, but he has gone.
· Van Gogh and Gauguin: the Studio of the South opens at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, on February 9. Details: www.vangoghgauguin.nl All Van Gogh quotations in this piece are from The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited by Ronald de Leeuw, translated by Arnold Pomerans, Penguin, £11.99.
