Sunflowers. Iris. The rush-seated chair. The bandaged ear. The starry, starry night. All these and a surprising number of other paintings were already familiar friends who leapt out and greeted us from the walls of the National Gallery last month. Yet the yellows were yellower, the blues bluer, the paint richer and thicker, the brush strokes more energetic, more spirited than any reproduction could convey. Everything about this collection of Vincent’s paintings was a shot in the arm, a high-octane injection of irrepressible vigour and colour. And how deeply impressive - nothing short of miraculous, in fact - that all these life-affirming works date from the last two years of Van Gogh’s life when he was at his most disturbed, lurching from one mental health crisis to another, hospitalised many times and for many months until his death by suicide in 1890.

One of the paintings in the exhibition which was new to me has stayed with me since. It is called The Sower and has become a new friend. Like many others in this collection, it was inspired by Van Gogh’s rural surroundings in the south of France at this time. His fascination with what he understood to be the nobility of those labouring on and with the land is well attested. He was moved by their humanity, their hard and honest work, their continuity with ages past. He respected their relationship with the soil, the timeless cycle of sowing and tending and reaping which they curated. His respect for all this was so great, in fact, that The Sower hanging now in the National Gallery is just one of over 30 works in which Van Gogh explored the same theme.

But in addition to all that, the artist must have been aware, even if subliminally, of the key role held by the sower figure in the gospels, particularly Matthew’s. He must have known that to title his painting The Sower would sound a string of resonances in many of those looking at his painting, for telling stories about seeds and growth and harvests was one of Jesus’ favourite ways of getting his hearers to think harder about God’s Kingdom.

Vincent has taken us to a field at dusk. If we look for long enough, we will see the dark shape of the sower moving slowly across the bottom of the canvas. From his open palm we watch as seeds fall to the ground and the sower’s own head is turned to watch them too. He is sowing with great care. Who is he? The gathering dark and the peak of his cap join forces to hide his face.

But is it an accident that Vincent has slung his setting sun low enough for it to double as a halo behind the sower’s head? And what of the tree? The angle at which he has stretched it across his painting makes me think of the tree in Titian’s depiction of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Jesus two days after his death. That tree too crosses the scene diagonally, dividing it into two. Perhaps, then, this is not just a compositional device on Van Gogh’s part. Could he, like Titian, be hinting at The Tree? Are we being helped to ponder the mystery of newness emerging from death?

Wispy shoots mimic the roundness of the dying sun. And from an otherwise lifeless trunk, a pink froth of cherry blossom erupts at the top. There is so much here which nudges us to think of Jesus’ words about a grain of wheat having to fall into the earth and die before it can bear fruit (John 12. 24). The Christ-like sower scatters nothing less than the seed of his own life.

November 2024

Van Gogh

‘The Crown of all Creation’?