Van Gogh Tate Britain exhibition: 20 of the artist's greatest works

Van Gogh and Britain looks at how he was inspired by British art, literature and culture and how he in turn inspired several prominent British artists

Roisin O'Connor
Tuesday 26 March 2019 10:51 GMT
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Britain's influence on Vincent van Gogh is being explored for the first time in a major exhibition at the Tate Britain in London.

Van Gogh and Britain looks at how he was inspired by British art, literature and culture and how he in turn inspired several prominent British artists.

Van Gogh lived in London between 1873 to '76 while he worked as a young art dealer. and while he did not begin painting until four years after leaving London, those years are regarded as crucial to his development as an artist.

Take a look at some of Van Gogh's most famous works in the gallery, below:

The Tate exhibition is the largest collection of Van Gogh paintings shown in the UK for nearly a decade. It includes some of his most famous works, including "Self-Portrait" and "Starry Night on the Rhone".

The exhibition reveals the artist's enthusiasm for writers including Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Christina Rossetti, as well as British artists like John Everett Millais and John Constable.

Arguably Van Gogh's most famous work, "Sunflowers", is on loan to the Tate from the National Gallery. Another, "Prisoners Exercising", was inspired by one of Van Gogh's favourite prints of Newgate Jail, that he collected while teaching himself to draw and paint.

"He couldn't afford paintings," Carol Jacobi, the exhibition's lead curator, told ITV News, "but he could afford prints and he collected 2,000 prints of British pictures, and they were very important to him."

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