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Writing and Research
This part of the website consists of:
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1 Art in Eastbourne: a personal perspective on Eastbourne's links with art and artists;
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2 Art and History: firstly, an introduction to some of the links between these fields, then extracts from my book, Van Gogh: A Beginner's Guide (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002).
Art in Eastbourne
Ancient, modern; nautical, terrestrial; fleeting, timeless… All these facets of time and place in Eastbourne have been captured by artists and photographers, both traditional and cutting-edge.
Whether or not renowned for locally-inspired motifs, many artists have lived in Eastbourne. In the 19th century, 
for example, there was Augustus Leopold Egg, RA, friend of Charles Dickens, whose art was celebrated for its moral and historical themes. Born when Disraeli was Prime Minister but living into the Beatles era, children’s illustrator Mabel Lucie Attwell lived for a time at Ocklynge Manor. Born in Eastbourne, the printer Hilary Kepler founded the St. Dominic’s Press and established the Ditchling artists’ community with his brother-in-law, the sculptor and typographer Eric Gill. Photographer and stage designer Sir Cecil Beaton was a pupil at the prep school St. Cyprian’s, while Robert Tavener and Eric Ravilious had close connections with Eastbourne School of Art(s and Crafts), later renamed the College of Art and Design. Renowned printmaker Tavener taught there from 1953 to 1980; artist, illustrator and designer Ravilious studied and was a tutor there. His students in the 1920s included the wood engraver and weaver Stephen Fergus Champ, who later became a distinguished art teacher and administrator in his own right, both in England and New Zealand. Eric Ravilious’s wife was the artist Tirzah Garwood; their son James, born in Eastbourne, was a master photographer of rural life and landscape.
For devotees of Eric Ravilious himself, the new Towner art gallery (situated next to
Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre) holds the largest collection of his work. This includes Cuckmere Haven and Downs in Winter. (Ravilious also created highly original compositions centring on the Long Man chalk figure at Wilmington.) The Towner also holds artworks by, among others, Pablo Picasso, Vanessa Bell, Walter Sickert and David Bomberg, and by contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Elizabeth Magill and Julian Opie. Victorian painters, such as J.F. Herring, are also represented.
There are other galleries, for example in South Street, exhibiting contemporary and more traditional art, while the Society of Eastbourne Artists (founded 1946) holds twice-annual exhibitions at the Lansdowne Hotel on the seafront. Other thriving organisations include the Eastbourne Group of Artists (professional and semi-professional; founded 1913). And there are locality-based groups within the Eastbourne area, for example at 
Wannock and Sovereign Harbour. The Eastbourne Festival and Artists’ Open Houses are a window for creativity in the visual arts.
In the hinterland, there lived Roland Penrose and Lee Miller at Farley Farm, visited by a pantheon of European artists including Picasso, Ernst, Miró and Man Ray. The Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were at Charleston Farmhouse. West of Firle, designer Peggy Angus had a holiday home named ‘Furlongs’, celebrated for its artists’ gatherings, while at Halland, architect Serge Chermayeff built his own house, Bentley Wood (1935-38), in Modern Movement style. It was at Bentley Wood that Chermayeff took the photograph of Eric Ravilious that appears on the left, and where in the garden they and their friends played boules. *
For the artist and photographer, the imagery of Eastbourne itself is rich, varied and often dramatic. Here follow some photographs, taken by me during 2006-2008, which underline the striking visual panorama that Eastbourne represents.
*I am indebted to Alan Powers, Professor of Architecture and Cultural History at the University of Greenwich , for this information about the Ravilious-Chermayeff connection.
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Art and History
As a working artist, I find inspiration in the art of the past. I am drawn particularly to various forms of Impressionism and to those artists who moved on from Impressionism, finding new ways to interpret and analyse the world. Also fascinating are the wider connections between art and history and between art and politics. What were the historical contexts in which artists functioned as artists? How far were artists politically engaged? What were the political causes, social conditions and scientific discoveries that might have contributed to the way they made art?
I have enjoyed the field of art history since childhood. Eileen Jessop Price (see About the Artist) gave me a copy of Ernst Gombrich’s lucid and approachable The Story of Art, and for an Art Prize I was awarded a book on The Fauves (Matisse, Derain and co.) and those artists who influenced them - not least Vincent van Gogh. Art History was inspiringly taught by Brad Gooch at Suffield Academy, Connecticut, where I was a student in 1966. As part of Mr. Gooch’s course, I wrote a term paper on the ‘Ash Can’ School, a group of American social realists including John Sloan and Everett Shinn. These artists, working in the early 20th Century, projected the highs and lows of New York life and landscape so vividly that, for this viewer - fifty years on in the 1960s - art really did become experience.
Later in life I taught Art History at Woking Sixth Form College. At the end of the course, students sat two exams: one on the Art of Early Renaissance Florence, the other on Painting in Paris, 1900-1914 (basically the sources and practice of Fauvism and Cubism). Students were also required to write a piece of extended analysis: their projects included the history of Gauguin’s painting Nevermore; the use of perspective in art from Alberti to Vermeer, and the Guerrilla Girls (a feminist art collective in the United States). Some of my students went on to read Art History at university.
Teaching also gave me the opportunity to write on historical and art-historical subjects. In 2000, Routledge published my analysis of the origins and course of the Spanish Civil War in their ‘Questions and Analysis’ series, and I was later commissioned by two Spanish Civil War scholars, Daniel Kowalsky and Kenneth W. Estes, to write a closely-argued piece on the defence of Madrid during 1936-37. The resulting essay appeared in History in Dispute : Vol. 18 (St. James Press, 2005).
In 2002, my book Van Gogh: A Beginner’s Guide was published by Hodder & Stoughton. This examination of the life and work of Vincent van Gogh sought in each chapter to contextualize the artist in a different way. Extracts from my book appear below, these extracts rotating monthly. In turn, they will be from:
- Chapter 5, Vincent the Writer;
- Chapter 4, Vincent the Painter;
- Chapter 3, The English Connection.
PREFACE TO EXTRACTS FROM ‘VAN GOGH: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE’
These extracts from Van Gogh: A Beginner’s Guide are reproduced by permission of Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.
Please note: No unauthorised copying or distribution of material from these extracts is permitted without the written permission of the publisher.
In these extracts, the correspondence of Vincent van Gogh is quoted from two sources:
- The 1958 English translation of The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited by J. van Gogh-Bonger and V.W. van Gogh, and translated by J. van Gogh-Bonger and C. de Dood. This three-volume translation was published by Thames and Hudson in London in 1958 and reprinted in 2000.
- The more recent concise edition, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, selected and edited by Ronald de Leeuw and translated by Arnold Pomerans, was published by Penguin Classics in Harmondsworth in 1996. This selection re-translated the letters into English and re-dated some of them.
A number was assigned to each letter in the Van Gogh correspondence in the 1958 edition, and this numbering system was retained in the 1996 concise edition.
Please note that where the quotations are from the three-volume 1958 edition, this is indicated in the text by the letter number. Where the quotations are from the 1996 edition, this is indicated in the text by the letter number and an asterisk.
Letters followed by ‘L’ were from Vincent to his brother Theo van Gogh unless otherwise stated.
Those followed by ‘R’ were to Anthon van Rappard, an artist friend.
Those followed by ‘W’ were to Vincent’s sister Willemina (‘Wil‘).
Those followed by ‘B’ were to the artist Emile Bernard.
Please note: For an update on the Van Gogh Letters Project, go to the Van Gogh Museum web site.
‘Keywords’ in the extracts that follow appear in bold and are defined at the end of the extract. For a clear chronology of Van Gogh’s life, see the comprehensive Van Gogh Gallery web site, www.vggallery.com . All the paintings mentioned in these extracts also appear on that web site.
EXTRACT 1 FROM VAN GOGH: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE
VINCENT THE WRITER
VINCENT: HIS INNER BEING
Health
‘For days my mind has been wandering wildly … I apparently pick up dirt from the ground and eat it.’
St.-Rémy, August 1889 (L601*)
Vincent’s letters tell us that he experienced vertigo and extreme fatigue and that he suffered from insomnia, a weak stomach, bad teeth, melancholy, neurosis, gonorrhoea and a form of epilepsy. It is clear from reading the letters that Vincent could articulate his experiences clearly and objectively; he did not confuse delirium and reality. From St.-Rémy, for example, he wrote that during his outbreaks of illness his sense of time and space became distorted, with people and voices coming to him from a great distance, ‘and to be quite different from what they are I reality’ (to his sister Wil, October 1889, W15). But such traumas did not blunt Vincent’s zest for life; indeed, in the face of physical and mental adversity he demonstrated formidable resilience.
To what did Vincent attribute his illness? In April 1889 he admitted that it was something of an occupational hazard: that he and the painters with whom he identified (‘we other painters’, L588*) were ripe for the asylum. He further believed that his neurosis was partly ‘a fatal inheritance, since in civilisation the weakness increases from generation to generation’ (to Theo, Arles, May 1888, L481). The times in which he lived also had much to answer for: ‘We are exposed to the conditions and illnesses of our age’ (L595*). By September 1889, Vincent was resigned to his ‘attacks’, and around 10 July 1890 (a fortnight before his death), he wrote to Theo and Jo van Gogh, ‘My life is also under attack at its very root’ (L649*).
What remedies did Vincent follow? In July 1889 he wrote to Theo that for nearly six months he had cut right down on his drinking and smoking. To help overcome his insomnia, he put camphor oil on his pillow, and it is possible that, to ‘[purify] the blood’ (L489*), i.e., to kill bacteria, he took potassium iodide. He believed in, but did not always practise, a balanced regimen: ‘To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one’s fling from time to time, smoke one’s pipe and drink one’s coffee in peace’ (to Emile Bernard, Arles, September 1888, B17). As a deterrent to suicide, Vincent followed Charles Dickens’s prescription: a glass of wine, a piece of bread and cheese, and a pipe of tobacco. In the asylum at St.-Rémy (1889-90), he took hydropathic baths. However, as early as 1882 Vincent had written to Theo from The Hague that the best remedy for ill health was to paint!
When he arrived in Arles from Paris in February 1888, Vincent was physically weak, but by mid-August he wrote that his stomach had recovered and that the heat of the southern summer had restored him. He could write to Gauguin of energy so tremendous that ‘my bony carcass makes straight for its [artistic] objective. The result is a degree of sincerity, perhaps original at times, about what I feel’ (October 1888, L544a*). Although at the young age of 29 he had written to Theo that he had wrinkles on his brow and lines in his face, looked 40 and - in an ironic pass at the landscape that he loved - had hands that were ‘full of furrows’, Vincent also showed he could bounce back.
Character, personality and moods
Vincent’s letters are testimony to the fact that his melancholy was balanced by a strong streak of optimism, his seriousness by a cutting sense of humour, and his directness b y a heavy dose of irony. From the Borinage in July 1880 he wrote of his family to Theo, that they had ‘perhaps never been wholly weaned from prejudice and other equally honourable and respectable qualities’ (L133*). Concerning the family quarrel over his relationship with a prostitute, Vincent asked them not to cut his head off - he still needed it for drawing! (to Theo, The Hague, May 1882, L98*). Nevertheless, Vincent did not bear grudges; although wounded by Rappard’s attack in June 1885 on his lithograph of The Potato Eaters, Vincent invited him to work in his studio and in fact they continued to correspond for some months. Enclosed with Vincent’s last letter to Rappard were some bird’s nests, sent for Rappard to copy.
Vincent wrote frequently of his progress as an artist and how it helped to build character. ‘Taking things lying down is what I did in years gone by; taking action and being alert is what I do now, having found my work and my vocation’ (to Theo, The Hague, May 1882, L98*). His letters speak of strong will-power and resolve: from Amsterdam in April 1878, Vincent wrote to Theo of the merits of leading an upright life and refusing to be crushed by setbacks; that way one was worth more than the person who had it easy … one should keep one’s inner fire alight!
These assertive traits found their reverse, however, in elements of resignation and self-criticism. Admitted to St. Paul’s asylum in St.-Rémy, he wrote that he was resigned to being an outsider, ’to living under surveillance, even if it is sympathetic, and to sacrifice one’s liberty, to remain outside society with nothing but one’s work as distraction’ (to Theo, May 1889, L631*). In the early 1880s Vincent had written frankly of his own imperfections as an artist, while from Arles in early 1889 he expressed remorse for Gauguin’s departure and for the failure of the ’Studio of the South’.
From his letters, Vincent’s modesty is strongly evident. He called his career as a painter ’humble’ and within the profession saw himself as a secondary figure compared to Gauguin and Monticelli. Yes, he said, he could paint cypresses and olive trees, but their symbolic language should be conveyed by artists more capable than he. Vincent’s modesty was linked to a keen intelligence and he wrote to Rappard in March 1884 that technique should be so skilful that it is not seen as technique. ’Let our work … not reek of our cleverness …’ (R43*). Vincent did not feel he was yet that good an artist. He condemned immodesty in others, albeit with a poetic subtlety. ‘And not being too troubled by our weaknesses, for even he who has none, has one weakness, namely that he has none …’ (to Theo, Amsterdam, April 1878, L121*).
Beliefs, philosophy of life and values
For generations, the Van Gogh family had been closely associated with the Church, but what was the place of religion in Vincent’s personal life? Although traumas in love may have affected him deeply, it seems it was the melancholy and alienation that Vincent experienced during his posting to Goupil’s [an art business] in Paris (May 1875 to March 1876) that led him to seek personal fulfilment in religion - and a particularly exacting, even masochistic, form at that.
By July 1875, the religious references in Vincent’s letters were frequent. Vincent tells Theo he will soon be sending him a French Bible and a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ; in August he quotes the text of sermons he has heard in Paris, including ‘Happy are they for whom life is all thorns’, and in the same letter, ‘Fear God and keep his commandments’ (L34). In September Vincent tells Theo to read only the Bible, and he asks God to ‘teach us to deny ourselves, to take [up] our cross every day …’ (L39b). A philosophy of self-denial, suffering and pushing himself to the limit would continue to colour Vincent’s brief life on earth.
When teaching at Reverend Slade-Jones’s school in Isleworth, Vincent’s religious fervour was palpable. ‘I want’ he wrote to Theo in August 1876, ‘to be bound to Christ with unbreakable bonds, and to feel these bonds. To be sorrowful yet always rejoicing’ (L74*). With his letter to Theo of 31 October 1876, Vincent enclosed the text of his first sermon in English. In it he expressed his belief that embracing Christ throughout life could make life ‘evergreen’ (enclosed with L79*).
Vincent’s letters to Theo in the late 1870s express a deep faith in God’s power to renew the soul, and he saw the word of God as a protective cloak against the storms of life. Indeed, as he was to write in November 1881, in taking necessary risks, in putting out to sea, there is ‘safety in the very heart of danger’ (L156*).
Yet Vincent’s spiritual connection with the Church was not to last. In December 1881, having a bitter confrontation with his parents and Uncle Stricker (a priest, like Vincent’s father) over his love for his cousin, Kee Vos, Vincent became deeply disillusioned and referred disparagingly to the clergy: ‘[their] Jesuitisms no longer have any hold on me now … I believe in life and something real’ (L164*), and he regretted he had ‘allowed mystical and theological profundities to mislead me into withdrawing too much into myself’ (L164*).
However, although Vincent may have abandoned the Church as an institution, he did not turn his back on Christ. He retained a ‘code of life’ based on personal rules (which he distinguished from rules invented by others), remaining committed to turning these principles into action.
Valuing individuals for their worth rather than their wealth, he felt empathy for the poor. Pondering his family’s disapproval of his relationships with those ‘beneath’ him, Vincent wrote, ‘I don’t have a great deal of thought to the question of lower or upper orders’ (to Theo, Nuenen, March 1884, L358*). Despite conflicts within the family, Vincent was distressed when they became ill and, conscious of the strains in Theo’s own life, felt rather guilty that he had to rely on Theo to keep him in paint and canvas. (As it happened, Theo himself was to die aged 33 in January 1891. He had been suffering from syphilis and kidney disease.)
In his letters, Vincent often expressed a deeply held wish to be of use. He valued commitment in relationships and wrote to Theo that it melted his heart when he felt compelled, in September 1883, to leave his prostitute girlfriend Sien and make for the wild landscapes of Drenthe. Vincent’s sense of duty applied to art and artists; he believed in accomplishing great things in art (which he distinguished from ‘ambition’) and in ‘self-control and willpower, sustained by one inspiring idea’ (to Theo, August 1883, L309*). On the other hand, Vincent himself was open-minded and he baulked at narrowness in others. He advised Emile Bernard to respect artists who were different from himself, otherwise he would become like those ‘who utterly despise all others and believe themselves to be the only just ones’ (B1). From Arles in 1888 he told his sister Wil, ‘It is not right to know only one thing - one gets stultified by that; one should not rest before one knows the opposite too’ (W4). And, once having started to look at things with an open mind, one should not ‘backslide’ into prejudice (to Theo, Amsterdam, April 1878, L121).
VINCENT: HIS CREATIVE PROCESS
As with his paintings, Vincent could cast a spell with words. At times he seems to have created a new form of expression in the way he fuses the visual and the literary ‘image’. In a beautiful example of such a word painting, Vincent described for Theo the village of Zweelo in Drenthe.
‘Tones in the moss of gold-green, in the ground of reddish or bluish or yellowish dark lilac-greys, tones of inexpressible purity in the green of the little cornfields, tones of black in the wet tree trunks, standing out against the golden rain of swirling, teeming autumn leaves … The sky smooth and bright, shining, not white but a barely detectable lilac, white vibrant with red, blue and yellow, reflecting everything and felt everywhere above one, hazy and merging with the thin mist below, fusing everything in a gamut of delicate greys.’
To Theo, Drenthe, November 1883 (L340*)
Not only do Vincent’s letters express the poetic soul of the countryside, but they also offer a dramatic sense of the physical act of painting. To his mother, he wrote in October 1889 that, just as peasants ploughed their fields, so also he ploughed his canvases, as if painting were a three, rather than a two-dimensional process. Similarly when describing the physical structure of a painting, he wrote that it should have clearly-defined planes: the first (to the rear) was the really essential one, for without this solid foundation the painting would lack depth and things would come ‘too much to the forefront’ (to Rappard, 1884, R46).
Whatever the medium - for example paint or lithography - the artist should be true to it, and not try false effects. Writing to Rappard in 1883, Vincent noted that a friend of Rappard’s was trying to use a ‘little pen’ on a lithographic stone: ‘Very fine pens, like very elegant people, are sometimes amazingly useless’ (R30). One medium Vincent felt damaging to art, was photography, which he described as giving a ‘dead’ effect. Art should give impassioned expression to the true character rather than restate what the human eye through the camera lens could merely ‘see’.
That Vincent, physically and psychologically, engaged with the subject and the medium as he painted, is conveyed in this fiery passage from a letter he wrote to Emile Bernard from Arles (April 1888):
‘I hit the canvas with irregular touches of the brush, which I leave as they are. Patches of thickly laid-on colour, spots of canvas left uncovered, here and there portions that are left absolutely unfinished, repetitions, savageries…’ (B3)
Vincent’s letters offer rich insights into his use of colour: ‘By intensifying all the colours one arrives once again at quietude and harmony … There are colours which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple, which complete each other like man and woman’ (to Wil, mid-Summer 1888, W3 AND W4). But the demands of balancing primary and secondary colours could lead to serious mental strain. Vincent wrote to Bernard that the process of painting La Mousmé (the daughter of the Ginoux family, who ran the Café de la Gare in Arles) with its red, blue, yellow (primary) and green, orange and ‘lilac’ (secondary) had so exhausted him that he could hardly write. Nevertheless, to Vincent the power of colour to evoke atmosphere and express character was undeniable. For the background to his portrait of the Belgian poet and artist Eugène Boch, Vincent used ‘the richest, most intense blue I can contrive’ (L520*) to paint infinity (Boch’s dreams). Vincent again used blue to dramatic effect in Café Terrace at Night, 1888 - a night scene without any black, ‘done with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square acquires a pale sulphur and greenish citron-yellow colour’ (to Wil, September 1888, W7).
Painting the olive trees at St.-Rémy was a complex process: ‘They are silvery, sometimes more blue, sometimes whitish and bronze-green, against a yellow, purple-pink or orange to dull red-ochre ground’ (to Theo, Autumn 1889, L608*). More than a year before, Vincent had written, ‘The painter of the future will be a colourist the like of which has never yet been seen’ (L482*). By the Autumn of 1889, he himself was that painter.
‘Art is jealous, she doesn’t like taking second place to an indisposition.’ (To Theo, July 1882 (L218*)
Why was art so important to Vincent? He felt that its fundamental purpose was, like music, to restore and comfort the living. But Vincent also wished his art to reveal truths to both present and future generations, about nature and about humanity. Concerning his own oeuvre, Vincent felt it crucial that it should be judged as a whole. Using an ingenious analogy, he compared individual works to a series of blocks seen in perspective. The near end of a block will be seen larger than the far end and it joins to the ‘short’ end of the next block. But if you remove one block, you will be judging the art work out of context and deny that the artist’s output is a developing whole (to Theo, August 1883). [You would be diminishing the artist as a creator.]
In 1885, Vincent wrote about himself as a modern artist because he did something neither the Greeks nor Renaissance artists nor the Dutch old masters had done, which was to paint peasant figures in action. He also did not moralize in his paintings. In 1888, he also identified expressive portraiture as the art of the present and future; because he was a humanitarian and a colourist he could make a personal contribution to this genre. His portraits of the gardener, Patience Escalier, and of Lieutenant Milliet, from Arles, show the truth of this statement.
But could the modern artist succeed in isolation? He wrote to Emile Bernard twice extolling the virtues of the fraternal collective of artists in September 1888. The collective’s members would, he explained to Theo soon after arriving in Arles, still maintain their individual prestige by giving a certain number of their own pictures to the group each year for sale, so that every member could go on living and working. The intensely creative (but ultimately destructive) partnership with Gauguin was the nearest Vincent got to realizing his dream of an artistic collective. He and Gauguin were ‘pioneers’ of the South, which Vincent saw as an aesthetic frontier.
Recovering in January 1889 after severing his left earlobe, Vincent wrote that he would not be able ‘to reach the heights to which the illness to some extent led me’ (L570*). However, the masterpieces of the future would show that Vincent’s summit lay ahead.
KEYWORDS:
Jesuitisms: intrigues or equivocations (‘necessary’ lying)
Orders: classes of society
Planes: ‘layers’ in the composition of a picture, which lend depth from background to foreground
Lithographic stone: stone onto which the design for a lithographic print is drawn
La Mousmé: originally a young Japanese girl
Genre: type of subject - landscape, nude, battle scene, etc.
Collective: co-operative association practising the principle of equality and self-help.
SUMMARIES OF THE THREE EXTRACTS
1. Vincent the Writer
- Vincent’s letters, 1872-90, show his evolution as an artist and his pilgrimage through life.
- They engage the reader in the creative process and are a guide to understanding what makes good, and bad, art.
- Vincent’s sayings still speak to us today and his ‘code of life’ is as relevant for our own times as it was for his.
- The letters show Vincent to be a man of principle yet, ultimately, free from rigid dogma.
- From his letters, Vincent’s shining humanity emerges, as well as his profound artistic ideals.
2. Vincent the Painter
- Vincent van Gogh was a prolific artist and the range of his subjects is immense. Whatever he painted, he evoked its spirit and not just its form.
- In portraits Vincent explored human character and his self-portraits reflect the experiences of a changing self.
- Stylistically, Vincent was a bold experimenter, receptive to artistic influences, yet in the final analysis ‘his own man’. He also used a wide range of media, but he is most celebrated for his oil paintings.
- His handling of colour shows an imaginative command of the spectrum. As with much of his subject matter, colour was used symbolically to convey a meaning, and not merely to describe.
- Vincent had ambitious artistic goals - to convey truth, compassion, creation and renewal. A thread of spiritual imagery is to be found throughout his painting career.
- Vincent sometimes painted different versions of the same motif (theme): Sunflowers in a vase (at least four); his bedroom in Arles (three); Wheat field with cypresses (two); the self-portraits (around 40).
- Vincent received some significant formal tuition but was, for the most part, self-taught. He never stopped learning.
- He had a profound gift of communication, through his art and his letters.
- Vincent’s output represents a rich harvest of images, the seeds sown in childhood and brought to maturity by his fertile imagination.
3. The English Connection
- Having taken up drawing again in The Hague, Vincent kept up his pastime in England. The themes of his later art were inspired partly by English novels, poetry, illustration and painting.
- The definitive story of Vincent’s love life in England may never be known. Whatever the truth of it, some personal crisis turned him towards religion, and by late 1876 Vincent was preaching sermons in and around Richmond, Surrey.
- Vincent taught languages and Bible study at schools in Ramsgate and Isleworth, and later at an English-run Sunday School in Amsterdam.
- Later in life, Vincent talked of returning to England to work as an illustrator or in an art gallery. But this was not to be.