Curious Orange - Van Gogh at the National Gallery (I)

 

The Times newspaper features a weekly section called 'My Culture Fix' where celebrities are asked a series of questions on their cultural touchstones. One of these questions - 'If you could own one painting it would be ...?' - found this week's invitee, the actress Tracy Ann-Oberman, honing in on Vincent Van Gogh's The Sower, a work that she had seen at the National Gallery's current exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers.  

Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower (1888)

The night before reading this, I'd paid my first visit to this extraordinary and incredibly rich exhibition. And it was this painting, too, that had left me in raptures. Strangely, it isn't like any other Van Gogh that I've encountered, and yet, paradoxically, it could only be the work of the Dutch artist. Its various elements, taken singularly, might be described as ugly: the bent and pollarded tree that slashes across the foreground; the peasant, a crudely delineated blob of dark impasto; and the oversized sun, resting like a curious orange behind the sower's head. 

Yet as a whole it mesmerises. As with so much of Van Gogh's work, the colours are extraordinary. The purple that dominates the bottom half, and the yellowy-golds of the upper, have a dazzling warmth that is balm for the soul; the seemingly careless dabs of pink and orange that make up the blossom, and the way they rhyme with the developing horizontal streaks of the sunset; and those vertical charcoal dabs that smoke upwards on the horizon - poplar trees, a nearby town, or both these things? It all feels rather un-European. 

Indeed, and as the accompanying note in the booklet informs us, there's a real sense of a Japanese print about the painting. For me, in the diagonals of the composition, they conjure up the genre of Ukiyo-e. And again, returning to those colours that the artist uses, there's also a strong sense of a Japanese palette at work. 

It also feels - and Van Gogh novice that I am, correct me if I'm wrong - that this is a painting employing something that isn't common in the artist's oeuvre, an explicit use of symbolism. Not only in the way that the sun haloes around the sower's head, a strong nod to Christian art theology, but also something more primitive, a worshiping of the sun. I love the way that one of the branches, almost electric-cable-like, is wired into the source of heat and the ultimate enabler of life on Earth. 

Van Gogh, detail from The Sower (1888)

  

As I sat adjacent to the painting, on a portable stool that I'd picked up at the entrance, I found myself privy to the reactions that it was garnering. Immediately to the painting's left, is the exhibition show-stopper, Starry Night, just as boxed in by people as it invariably is at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Perhaps they were all overwhelmed by the undoubtable beauty of that painting, as by and large, The Sower was dismissed with that adjective that I've already used above. But I also heard words bandied about like 'clumsy' and 'puzzling', and a very specific aversion to the way that the sower had been painted. For me though, it's stunning. A number of visitors lingered and I sensed that they too were finding something wonderful in this strange yet amazing piece of art.