Original subtitles

Van Gogh's art blossomed in one of the most spectacular bursts of creativity in art history.

In just ten years, he produced over a thousand paintings and even more drawings.

His work seems effortless with an almost childlike touch, but it is in fact complex, passionate, expressive,

and the result of intense study as well as feeling, and which transcends the brief and tragic life of the painter himself.

Van Gogh was born in 1853 in a small town in the southern Netherlands called Grootsundet.

His father was a Protestant preacher who worked in the local church to provide for a family of six children,

of which Vincent was the oldest.

As a small boy, he was passionate about nature,

and often ventured miles away from home by himself to draw the surrounding countryside.

This drawing of a bridge near his house was completed when he was just nine years old.

On leaving school at 16, Vincent went to work for his uncle's art,

dealing firm in the haig.

Where he had the chance to meet artists,

and absorbed the style and technique of the paintings that passed through the doors.

He worked for the firm in London and Paris, but couldn't settle.

Becoming increasingly unhappy, Van Gogh returned home in 1877

to pursue a career in the church, leaving any ambitions for the art world behind him.

A year later Van Gogh took a job as a missionary in the bleak mining area

of the Borinage in southern Belgium.

It was a job that no one else wanted.

The miners harsh living conditions made a deep impact on Van Gogh.

He decided to share their hardship,

and the art, dressed and lived as they did.

However, the church authorities were so alarmed by his behavior

that within two years he was sacked.

But his time here hadn't been wasted.

While living with the miners, a real passion had been awakened.

He'd experienced the urge to draw again,

making numerous sketches of the men and women bent double under sacks of coal.

Van Gogh could finally decide it to become a full-time artist.

He wrote,

I will take up my pencil, which I forsaken in my discouragement,

and I'll go on with my drawing.

From that moment, everything has seemed transformed for me.

But Van Gogh was penniless.

His parents fed up with another change in their son's career direction,

refused to continue their financial support.

Instead, the responsibility passed to Vincent's brother, Theo, and art dealer in Paris.

The two had been close since childhood,

and continued to correspond frequently.

I heard in Etton that he'd sent me 50 francs,

wrote Vincent to Theo in 1883,

while I've accepted them with reluctance of course,

but I'm in trouble, and what else can I do?

And so I'm writing to thank you.

Van Gogh spent the next five years developing his skills as an artist.

Funded by Theo's money, he travelled around the Netherlands

from countryside to coast, looking for inspiration,

making sketches, and painting in oil, and watercolour.

Van Gogh searched for an artistic voice, and a location in which to paint,

brought into the Hague at the end of 1881,

and he lived in a flat, a few minutes walk from the sea front here,

it's Shaveningan.

Now, the sea had made a bit come back in Dutch art at the end of the 19th century,

and members of the Hague school were often to be seen out here, painting the sea.

And so, in one of his earliest oil paintings,

Van Gogh set up his ease along the beach and started to paint.

On a day just like today, when, as he said in a letter to Theo,

the sea was the colour of ditch water just before an angry storm.

This was to be the beginnings of a potent relationship between the artist,

and his natural surroundings.

But depression was also a powerful force in Van Gogh's life and work.

Living itself seemed to continue a struggle for him.

He'd no money, and he often went hungry.

When he was 29, he fell in love with one of his models,

a pregnant and alcoholic prostitute called scene hornic.

This is a drawing of her which he called sorrow.

It's a simple work, but it reveals all the signs of his ability

to convey powerful feelings through line.

He sent the picture to Theo and wrote,

in my opinion, the enclosed is the best figure I've drawn yet.

His family deeply disapproved of the relationship

and turned their backs on him still further,

so Theo visited Vincent in his squalid house and urged him to leave scene.

Thirty years old, desperate and poor, Vincent reluctantly left his lover

and returned home to his family in Noinen.

He set up a small studio in his room at his parents' house

and set about sketching and painting the local buildings and people.

His palette during this period is muted, lots of browns and grays.

But Van Gogh's work here is already showing how he was beginning

to alter nature in his pictures.

By bringing his own expressive vision to a scene,

rather than faithfully recreating what was in front of his easel.

During the winter, the local agricultural workers had little to do,

so Vincent found himself plenty of willing models.

He spent his time making studies of the farm hands, the weavers,

and the potato pickers.

And this is Van Gogh's first major oil painting.

Done in 1885, when he's 32,

and a culmination of all the studies in oil he's made

of the workers, the peasants, around the farm at Noinen.

What we see here is an incredibly unsentimentalized image.

In fact, the faces of the figures around the table,

at the end of the day, having their meal,

are almost caricatured.

But what really draws me to the painting are the hands,

they're nold but strong,

and these are the hands that have plowed

up and sewed the seeds and dug up the potatoes themselves

that they're eating.

And the whole picture is one of earthy colors.

In the right hand side here,

the woman pours coffee.

Again, part of the peasants' staple diet,

but this is Van Gogh fudging the composition.

He wants five people,

but she's out on a limb.

You don't have coffee and potatoes at the same time.

You spin the meal out.

And so his van Gogh putting the needs of a painter

before the actual truth in the scene.

But there is an honesty about the scene

that's reflected in Van Gogh's letters to Theo,

when he talks about the honesty of these people,

that fact they've earned their meal, honestly.

And he's trying to depict an image of them

that comes somewhere close to truth.

He says if you want sentimentalized images of peasants,

look elsewhere.

But right at the heart of the picture is the light.

It illuminates the faces,

it casts the shadow down on the table,

that itself is tilted up.

And when people saw this picture,

they said that they thought it was rather harshly painted.

They thought it was rather rough.

And he was slightly offended by that.

He said it was the best he'd done.

But look at the light itself.

There's this wonderful flicker, this jab of orange paint.

There's two spots of orange paint on the girls eyes there.

And I think you can see clearly just in that gesture,

and in that colour, Van Gogh's talent,

slowly coming to light.

Van Gogh spent months painting the workers,

but by the end of the year,

he was ready to move on both physically and artistically.

And he saw new stars of painting in Antwerp.

Here he found his inspiration on the streets.

Painting oil studies of ordinary people who lived and worked in the city,

as well as pictures of the houses seen from the window of his flat.

Vincent was still relying on the charity of his younger brother.

He wrote, if I received money, my first hunger is not for food,

though I've fasted ever so long,

but the desire for painting is ever so much stronger.

And I started once hunting for models to let nothing left.

Van Gogh also hungered for more stimulation,

which he thought he might find in Paris.

When Van Gogh arrived here in Paris in 1886,

the city was already the artistic capital of the Western world,

but it also introduced a new idea,

and a new concept to art history, that of the avant-garde,

where a group of radical artists shattered the idea of what painting was,

and what it could be.

Lead in the way with the impressionists, inspired by Manne,

and then Monne, Renoir, Suzanne and others,

who looked at the world around them and painted the optical effects of light and reflection,

not just in the countryside around Paris,

but also in its parks, and looked at its railway station,

in other words, they were painting modern life.

Van Gogh had a direct introduction into the amelior of the impressionists,

because his brother Theo was selling a lot of their work,

and was also Gauguin's dealer.

And so this heavy combination of a new location,

with artists of his own age,

and a new approach to painting, led in effect, to a new van Gogh.

Vincent was immediately excited by this new approach to art,

if he had to work feverously on self-portraits, landscapes, and still lives.

He abandoned his dark palette in favour of bright colours.

But perhaps the most noticeable change

was the technique of breaking up his brushstrokes into dashes and dots

of pure colour.

However, the cold dark winter of 1887 left Vincent irritable and depressed,

and he became restless again.

His two years in Paris had a tremendous impact on his evolution as an artist,

but now he acquired what he was seeking, it was time to move on,

and Vincent decided to leave Paris to look for the sun in the south.

In the February of 1888, he arrived in Al, Provence,

where he believed he could find the right warmth and brightness for his work.

By the time Summer arrived, Van Gogh was in his element,

and thought he'd found an artist's paradise.

He started painting like a man possessed,

his frequent letters to Theo back in Paris,

a full of passion for his painting and surroundings.

I'm up to my ears in work, he said,

for the trees are in blossom,

and I want to paint a province-all orchard of a standing deity.

Nature here is extraordinarily beautiful.

In Al, his palette brightened up even more,

a blossoming array of sky blues, bright yellows, and oranges.

He applied his oil paint thick, straight from the container,

to achieve pure colour.

And the result was the many vivid, eye assaulting canvases,

for which Van Gogh is now monumentally famous.

Vincent Van Gogh had entered his prime at the age of 35.

He became more confident in his work,

and his output was phenomenal.

Despite battling with frequent bouts of depression,

he painted relentlessly,

drawing directly from the bright new world and what he found himself.

And this is where Van Gogh lived in Al,

a small four-bedroom house, the yellow house, as he called it,

next to the cafe where he ate his meals.

And it was here that he was able to settle for the first time,

really, over the previous ten years.

And almost fulfill his desire

to create a studio in the south, as he called it.

The picture itself looks rather roughly painted.

There's something almost naive about it.

Texture and brush work is everywhere,

but in fact, he's extraordinarily complex

and rather sophisticated,

spatially, the way the roads cut down

and the painting create this abstract cube in the middle.

Also, you see the railway lines there.

The train cutting another angle through the picture,

and also linking Van Gogh to his former life up in Paris,

and in the north.

But this is also everyday life for him,

where he eats his meals, the streets he handles down,

and as he says in a letter to Theo,

between the two railway bridges,

that's where he's only friend,

or his real friend, the postman Rulan lives.

It's also a picture, though,

that is more broadly an evocation of contemporary life.

The train itself, on one hand of the picture,

and here on the left-hand side, the gas lamp,

are two symbols and modernity, two inventions of the 19th century.

Color, too, is incredibly subtly balanced.

In a letter to Theo, he says,

how wonderful the light is in our,

and how the yellow house against the blue sky

is something that takes off in his eyes.

And you see it here in the painting,

with the orange on the edge of the roofs there,

and often on the edge of the buildings,

being the complementary of blue,

to give the picture an extra sparkle.

And he'd spent the whole summer painting outside, feverishly.

In September, he paints the yellow house,

and then he turns his attention inwards.

In fact, straight through that window,

which takes us here into Van Gogh's bedroom.

It's a wonderful picture this.

It's become almost an emblem of Van Gogh himself,

and in a way it is a self-portrait.

What we see is Vincent's bed,

his own pictures, two portraits that he painted hanging on the wall,

there's his hat and his coats hanging by the bed.

We see the towel hanging by the bathroom,

and this simple pine furniture.

It's wonderfully thickly painted.

You can see globules of paint that have been scraped along

to create the floor.

His blanket is this thick my asthma of red paint,

and the pillows, likewise,

this kind of haze of ice cream yellow.

It's a picture, though, where everything is slightly skewed

to make a more effective image.

The bat wall certainly seems tilted,

and in fact it was in the yellow house.

But look at the way the bed and the floor and the chairs

are all slightly tilted.

To give a Japanese style patterning,

he says in a letter to Theo,

he wants to try and recreate the impact of a Japanese print.

And colour is supremely well balanced here.

It really is a modelling how you make complementary colours,

in particular blue and orange and red and green work,

with yellow then dominantly seeping through.

For me, though, even though this picture comes vibrantly

to life, it's a symphony of colours,

it's tinge with sadness.

The two pillows in the single bed,

the monastic cell-like aura that's creative,

and it hints, I think, at a growing isolation in Van Gogh.

In fact, Van Gogh's mind was troubled by much more than isolation.

He found himself gripped by terrible seizures and hallucinations.

Doctors later diagnosed epilepsy,

but Van Gogh feared insanity.

He told Theo,

there are moments when I'm twisted by enthusiasm or madness or prophecy.

The attacks made in prone to moments of delusion,

an experienced startling religious visions,

which he sometimes incorporated into his work.

The illness was becoming a central part of his painting.

The artist Paul Gogh, seen here in a self-portrait,

was persuaded by Theo to go to Al and visit Vincent in 1888.

He stayed for an exhausting two months.

Van Gogh had hopes of setting up an artist's colony in Al,

and he saw Gogh's visit as the beginning of that plan.

Gogh, on the other hand, was just doing his art dealer a favor.

In anticipation of Gogh's visit, Vincent redecrated the yellow house

and painted sunflowers to hang on Gogh's bedroom walls.

When Gogh visited the yellow house, he compared Vincent's sunflowers

to those painted by Monnae and stated that he liked Van Gogh's better.

These words meant a great deal to Van Gogh.

He wrote the ugly right-get, the older, sicker and poorer,

the more I want to avenge myself by going in for brilliant,

resplendent colour.

He used thickly applied paint,

in some places it stands out from the canvas in great blobs,

giving an extra dimension to the flower heads.

In fact, Van Gogh produced a series of sunflower paintings.

This one, though, is more stylized than the others,

the petals are angular,

there are flashes of blue and red in some of the flowers.

Because of their emblematic quality,

to many people, the sunflowers are Van Gogh.

In 1987, one of the sunflower painting soldered auction for nearly $40 million,

the ultimate accolade in a market-driven world,

but supremely ironic given Van Gogh failed to sell more than a single picture

in his lifetime.

Van Gogh and Gogh quarrel frequently,

and the relationship between the two headstrong artists

became increasingly strained.

The tension between them came to a head

when Vincent attempted to attack Gogh with a cutthroat razor.

Nothing came of the attack, but soon after,

Van Gogh turned the razor on himself,

and mutilated his own ear.

In the morning, he was found unconscious in his bed,

and taken to hospital.

He'd suffered one of his worst fits.

This painting shows the artist a month after the attack,

and you can see that he's a broken man.

The fact that the bandages on full display

suggest that Van Gogh is painting his physical,

and by implication his mental injuries.

Van Gogh painted many self-portraits.

Between 1885 and 1889,

he completed over 40 pictures of himself,

in a whole range of emotional guises.

He left hospital after a few weeks,

but the people of our old were anxious about Van Gogh

posing a menace to the community.

He therefore returned to the hospital,

where he was kept in isolation for a month.

During this time, Van Gogh grew extremely depressed.

His dream of an artist community in our land tatters.

I don't dare to ask other painters to come here

after what has happened he wrote.

They're risk losing their mind, just like me.

Van Gogh continued to paint

despite his growing mental illness,

but the attacks made things difficult.

He wrote of his fears to Theo,

I know the opportunities of working don't return,

especially in my case,

in which a more violent attack may forever destroy my part of paint.

This letter was written from an asylum

in the nearby village of San Rame,

where he'd become a voluntary patient.

Here in moments of sanity,

he painted anything in everything he could see,

the other patients, the rooms,

the grounds outside,

and the night sky.

And it was here that he painted the monumental work,

Starry Night.

Perhaps more than any other Van Gogh painting,

it reveals the state of the artist's mind.

The sky swallows around the enormous yellow stars and moon,

above a town that is not San Rame,

but an imaginary place.

It's thought that his condition intensified

the colours and lights that he saw,

and that this inspired him to create such a turbulent effect in the sky.

Theo exhibited the work in Paris,

the painting grabbed everyone's attention,

it was like nothing they'd ever seen before.

The painting illustrates Van Gogh's development of impressionist ideas,

the broken brushwork is reminiscent of their style,

but the bold contrast and dynamic movement in the painting

goes far beyond an impression of starlight.

Van Gogh, his presenting is actually experience of the night,

how the landscape under the stars actually makes him feel.

In May 1890, Van Gogh left the asylum

and the south of France,

and arrived in Oversea Wars,

an artist community just north of Paris.

In Oversea, Van Gogh worked prolifically,

completing 70 campuses in as many days.

Many of these works were turbulent landscapes.

He wrote a Theo,

their vast fields of wheat under troubled skies,

and I didn't need to go out of my way to try and express sadness

and extreme loneliness.

I almost think that these campuses will tell you

what I can't say in words.

This is Van Gogh's last great work,

painted between one and two weeks before he died.

He's called Wheatfield and Crows,

and what it shows is an image of absolute emptiness and chaos.

When your eye looks at the painting first of all,

you're drawn this way and that,

the whole eye patterns swirls over the paint surface itself,

rather as Vincent has done with his brush,

stabbing these thick yellow wheat sheaves,

and then look at the sky itself.

It's as if he's almost sculpturally moulded it with his hand,

he's got his hands stuck into the paint,

and swirled around,

and then you try and find a path through.

And then in the end,

the route literally in metaphorically through the painting

is the road here that myanders his way,

and then dumps you nowhere,

and perhaps onto oblivion just beyond

you can see it there on the horizon.

And then as an afterthought,

it's as if the ghosts of despair are descending upon him,

with just the shortest of little black brush strokes,

he puts in the crows these great symbols of foreboding.

And this painting tragically marked the sight of Vincent's suicide.

It's thought that he walked into the field

and shot himself in the stomach,

he then struggled back to his lodgings,

and learned his bed till he was found in a pool of blood.

Bangkok died two days later on July the 29th, 1890.

He was buried in over,

where sunflowers were thrown onto his grave.

Bangkok lived his life in isolation,

poverty, obscurity,

and then notoriety, feared as a madman,

but now he's loved around the world.

He's become a cultural legend,

the stuff of which creative dreams and Hollywood movies are made of.

But amidst the industry that's grown up around Bangkok,

it's easy to lose sight of the radical expressiveness of his paintings,

their edginess, their delicacy, and precariousness.

Surfaces which still seem fresh,

radiating light, and energy, and feeling.

If you want to find out more about the artists and work explored in this series,

there's an accompanying book called Great Artists,

available in all good bookshops.