Et in Arcadia Ego - Van Gogh at the National Gallery (IV)

‘All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.’ (Ecclesiastes 3:20)

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The blaze of colour that greets you when you first lay eyes on The Green Vineyard sets you up for a fall. That there is little that is disturbing in this Van Gogh exhibition, focusing, as it does, on the last two years of his life, should come as something of a surprise, particularly when you consider the troubled biography.

Van Gogh, The Green Vineyard (1888)

It takes a few minutes, but this painting supplies the unease. The superficial sensations first, though. The richness, the colour, the thick impasto all draw you closer. The gorgeous, tessellated blue of the sky. It’s a lovely day for a walk in the vineyard. Two women make their way towards the foreground, red parasols - up close, like a pair of lipstick marks left on a letter - sheltering them from the heat. To the right, a white horse draws what is probably a plough.

Van Gogh, detail from The Green Vineyard

And then you begin to delve deeper into those vines. Here the paint - laid down thickly, tangled and violent - almost writhes in a kind of agony. As I stared, I was put in mind of mycorrhizal networks, and I couldn’t shake that image off. Yes, they are - as Merlin Sheldrake’s amazing book on fungi, Entangled Life informs me - essential to life on Earth; but they are also, dependant on decay, and thus in their largely hidden machinations, denizens of the underworld.

As you let your eyes drop to the base of the painting, you see that the vines suddenly begin to thin out and those bare patches of clayey ochre appear. Is this where everything is heading? The women with the red parasols, the horse and ploughman, all the occupants of the houses on the horizon?

Van Gogh, detail from The Green Vineyard

Vincent complained to his brother Theo that he had ‘sweated blood and tears’ over this painting. Incredibly pleased with the finished result, nevertheless, he too, within the next few years would be making the same journey back into the earth and into oblivion.

Make no mistake, I think The Green Vineyard is an astonishing painting. In its own wonderfully implicit way, it is just as unsettling as works by Goya, Francis Bacon or Bosch. And in the midst of so much work that can be described as calming or bucolic, it gives you a serious and scary reminder of the aphorism that best captures the paradox of Van Gogh’s life and work: Et in Arcadia ego.