Solitary in Stockwell: How London shaped the art of Van Gogh

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Did he walk or did he strut? Did he swagger or did he saunter? What posture did Vincent Van Gogh adopt during the autumn of 1873 as he commuted on foot from south London to Covent Garden? Nobody knows. Because nobody saw him. In a city of four million people, its buildings caked with soot and its trams, tube trains and pavements crowded with the inhabitants of the largest city on earth, Van Gogh was invisible; a 20-year-old who, speaking little English, made his way each morning from humble lodgings to the back room of an art dealership.

Yet what we know about Van Gogh’s short tenure living in Stockwell tells us much about the emerging young man whose intensity, melancholy and predilection for unrequited love would manifest in some of the paintings that the National Gallery is exhibiting this autumn in its first major retrospective of his work.

It was a gallery that the young Van Gogh visited many times during a period of his life that he later described as ‘austere, cold and sterile.’ Van Gogh hadn’t particularly wanted to come to London. After dropping out of his art studies in Tilburg, Holland, in 1868, he trained as an art dealer under the tutelage of his uncle Cent in The Hague. Considering his nephew a gauche young man with little flair for dealing with customers, Cent conspired to have him transferred to the London branch of his business, Goupil & Cie, then located on Southampton Street, just off The Strand.

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night over the Rhône, 1888. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Donation subject to usufruct of M. et Mme Robert Kahn-Sriber, in memory of M. et Mme Fernand Moch, 1975. Image courtesy Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt

‘It has been decided that I have to go away’, wrote Van Gogh at the time, with mordant simplicity. Unknown to the aspirant artist, his new position would only increase his feelings of isolation and detachment from the world around him.

Arriving in London in May 1873, via a train to Dieppe and a boat to Brighton, Van Gogh was startled by the bustle of the city. He first sought sanctuary in Greenwich and then at 87 Hackford Road, Stockwell, a neighbourhood that was undergoing a lightning-fast transformation from obscure hamlet to overcrowded, industrialised inner city neighbourhood.

Close enough to Southampton Street for him to walk there in under an hour, his new home was a lodging house and day school for boys run by 58-year-old Urusla Loyer and her 19-year-old daughter Eugenie. Van Gogh quickly fell for the young Eugenie, it seems, a woman who would later be described by her own daughter as ‘domineering and difficult’ with an eruptive temper and ‘sharp wit’.

Ursula was a widow, her husband having died years earlier of consumption in France. Van Gogh, taking a tiny room on the third floor, seemed, at first, to enjoy the noise of the school boys and the feel of the slightly chaotic home, filled with collections of butterflies and bird’s eggs. ‘I never heard or dreamed of anything like the love between them,’ he wrote to his sister, Anna, referring to the relationship between Ursula and her daughter. He spent the Christmas of 1873 happily ensconced with his adopted new family.

As his English improved, Van Gogh adapted to life in London. He spent weekends boating on the Thames, and would picnic with his new boss Carl Obach at Box Hill, Surrey. He even bought a top hat and started attending London’s small Dutch Reform Church.

Van Gogh’s working life was less sanguine, despite the cordial relationship with Obach. The London branch of Goupil & Cie was a wholesale dealership with no gallery, meaning that Van Gogh had almost no contact with the general public. This may have pleased his uncle back in the Netherlands, but for Van Gogh the job made for tedious graft. Calling his employment ‘grubbing’, he filled wholesale orders from print dealers, making frequent trips to and from the stockroom that processed more than 100 commercial prints a day of pieces that held no interest for him.

Creative stimulation came from frequent visits to the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery. In letters home to his family, he wrote of his admiration for the pre-Raphaelite works of John Everett Millais, as well as the landscapes of Turner and Constable. But Van Gogh hated what he saw on the walls of 1884’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, castigating the works on show as ‘very bad and uninteresting’.

Back at Hackford Road, he and Eugenie had agreed to be ‘like brother and sister’, although it seems clear that the young Dutchman harboured desires that were far more carnal in nature. What happened next isn’t clear. What seems most likely is that Van Gogh had his advances rebuffed, with Eugenie claiming she was already, surreptitiously, engaged to another suitor.

Was it true? Certainly Vincent’s parents and sister back in Holland thought it unnatural that Ursula would allow such ambiguities to swirl around her daughter. Either way, the episode seems to have had a deleterious effect on the sensitive young Van Gogh. Returning to the Netherlands in order to escort his sister back to London so she could find work as a governess, the artist gave notice on Hackford Road, ending up in nearby Kennington with his sibling.

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive trees with the Alpilles in the Background, 1889. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest, 1998. Image courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

It would be a short-lived arrangement. Anna found employment in Welwyn, leaving Van Gogh isolated. He wrote of his time in Kennington as being one where his mood was ‘stony… arid… hardened instead of sensitive… towards people.’

Seeking intimacy, even a fleeting and transactional one, Van Gogh began visiting prostitutes. This was an era when there were thought to be more than 3,000 brothels in London, and many more coffee shops and ‘night houses’. Uncle Cent wrote how he ‘wished Vincent would get out and see people’. Vincent would call sex workers ‘girls who love so much,’ attempting to rationalise his actions in letters to his brother, Theo. ‘Virginity of soul and impurity of body can go together’, he implored, seemingly as keen to convince himself as his sibling.

As Van Gogh’s letters home to the Netherlands became sparser, Anna wrote how ‘he has withdrawn himself from the world and society… He pretends not to know us… He is a stranger.’

Vincent van Gogh, Oleanders, 1888. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Loeb, 1962. Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In 1875 his family decided to act. His uncle and father, Dorus, organised a transfer to the Paris branch of Goupil & Cie, so as to bring the troubled young man under their care. Although Van Gogh would return to England not long after, to reside in distant Isleworth, and then in even remoter Ramsgate (where he worked as a teacher), he would never again live in the cynosure of London’s gas-lit miasma of smoke and grit.

The rough sketches Van Gogh made of Ursula and Eugenie’s Stockwell home look benign, almost wholesome. But his time there was just the first in an oft-repeated era of disappointment in the artist’s life. As Anna later wrote, ‘(people) don’t live up to his too-quick judgement, he’s so disappointed that they become like a bouquet of withered flowers to him.’

Van Gogh may have found a temporary sense of belonging at 87 Hackford Road, but it seems London never captured the artist’s heart the way in which Eugenie did. Of his short, strange time in the capital, Van Gogh wrote, ‘I never felt in my element there.’

Vincent Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers opens on the 14 September 2024 and runs until the 19 January 2025, nationalgallery.org.uk

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