The National Gallery's Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers is 'unmissable'

This blockbuster exhibition is a 'five-star cracker'

Van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhône
Van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhône, 1888
(Image credit: © Photo: Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt)

This "once in a century show" is singing from a different hymn sheet, said The Times' Laura Freeman, but "what a chorus they [the paintings] sing of "a blisteringly original vision".

It's a show, said Time Out's Eddy Frankel "full of themes: poets, lovers, gardens, peasants", but they all serve "a purpose greater than their own representation: Van Gogh was trying to paint meaning".

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"You'll be looking at a painting and your heart will simply explode with joy," said The Independent's Chris Harvey. One standout is the Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Rémy (1889), one of the first works Van Gogh painted after he started treatment there in May 1889 following months of poor mental health during which he sliced his ear off with a razor blade. Confined to his room and the hospital gardens, he found "delight in the overgrown sprawl of trees, shrubs, weeds and grasses", and this painting is both "restful and bursting with colour".

The ubiquity of the artist's work may have blinded us to the "depth of his talent", noted Harvey, but "these works come to life with a vividness that is impossible to convey in book plates and reproductions". Indeed, the stars in Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888) twinkle above a sea so "dark and blue that the impasto layers might be fathoms deep". This exhibition is "a five-star firecracker".

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