Quiet Drama - Van Gogh at the National Gallery (III)

Four of the men in the painting - the stevedores of the title - seem to be staring directly at us, and thus at the artist himself, pitched on the banks of the Rhône at sunset painting. Often the people in Van Gogh’s work seem to be indifferent to the gaze, and they go about their business without giving him a second glance. But here, there seems a directness, almost an aggressiveness, a questioning of what he’s up to. Is it a fierce nationalistic pride that they are hoping to get across, one enhanced by the three splodges of colour that make up the French flag? Or, late in the working day, a moment of vanity and the chance to have their lives and toil depicted - and unbeknownst to them - immortalized on canvas? Or the question that really blazed out at me, did these men get a glance at the painting or preliminary sketch, finished or otherwise? 

 

Van Gogh, The Stevedores (1888)

 
It’s these little idiosyncrasies and the differences between particular paintings that are such a joy in the National Gallery exhibition. Your eyes and imagination are unleashed as you move back and forth, puzzling away at the painter’s genius and motivation. 

 

This is, indeed, another work that causes you to linger. Again - as with The Sower - there’s a crudity and ugliness in some of the individual details. But taken as a whole it is dazzling. Despite the stillness of most of the figures, there’s a strong sense of hard work and motion here, captured by the way the forestays and backstays curve away from the masts and how the gangplanks rest precariously on the foreshore sand.

Van Gogh, detail from The Stevedores

And then - as your eyes drift over the water - you pick out four blobs of yellow and begin to admire how they coalesce into the violet vertical and horizontal brushstrokes that merge the embankment and the spires. Best of all though, is the economy at work in the orange, yellow and green sky: a few dabs of beige and blue, and then darker orange creating the sunset. These latter strokes gently multiply and drift down towards the town. 

There’s a quiet drama about this painting that Van Gogh carefully rolls out. You walk away thinking of the lively town of Arles on the other side of the Rhône, filled with a probable revelry that the dockhands - maybe wearying somewhat of this peculiar, bearded figure at work in front of them - will shortly return to.