Heartbreaking Secret Hidden Inside Van Gogh’s Canvas | World's Greatest Paintings Season 1 Episode 2

[00:00:01]These are the stories of 10 of the greatest [music] paintings in the world.

[00:00:08]I'm Andrew Marr.

[00:00:09]Art, not politics, is the great passion of my life.

[00:00:14]For me, it gets to the heart [music] of what it is to be human.

[00:00:18]In galleries across the globe, there are great paintings, works made with almost supernatural skill, fierce passion, and extraordinary brainpower.

[00:00:31]Now, I want to tell stories behind some of the most iconic images in history, pictures like Leonardo's Mona [music] Lisa, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, and Turner's Fighting Temeraire, paintings that represent [music] the pinnacle of what people can do with paint and bristles.

[00:00:50]>> His watercolors, described as miraculous, people can't believe the effects that he manages to achieve.

[00:00:56]>> It was like you could [music] touch these people. It was like the portraits could speak to you.

[00:01:02]>> Behind every [music] picture, there is a story. I'm going to peel back the layers to find out more about the lives of their creators [music] and the worlds they came from.

[00:01:13]>> There was something about this middle-class Florentine housewife that intrigued him.

[00:01:21]>> Why are these the paintings [music] we all know and love?

[00:01:25]How were they created?

[00:01:28]And what makes >> [music] >> them the greatest paintings in the world?

[00:01:42]>> [music] >> I'm in London's [music] National Gallery just after the doors have closed for the evening, which is lucky for me, because if they were open, I could not [music] be standing here because of the 5 million people who come through these rooms every year, so many are attracted to just one image like bears to honey or bees to nectar.

[00:02:12]>> [music] >> What is the image you ask yourself? But already you know the answer.

[00:02:18]>> [music] >> This is the Sunflowers [music] by Vincent van Gogh, the patron saint of loneliness.

[00:02:29]It's a deceptively simple image, just 15 sunflowers in a modest pot.

[00:02:36]And yet, this picture is a phenomenon.

[00:02:41]It quite literally dazzles anyone who comes into its orbit.

[00:02:50]This is one of the brightest pictures you will ever see. You walk into this room, which is full of fantastic paintings by very famous painters, and this punches you hard in the eye, so hard you can almost fall over. But here is the paradox. Behind the brightness, it is also a surprisingly dark picture.

[00:03:14]For an [music] artist who produced almost 2,000 drawings and paintings, it's often said that this picture is the one [music] that Van Gogh was most proud of.

[00:03:25]It's a deeply [music] personal painting that captures a definitive moment in his life.

[00:03:36]Van Gogh did not paint this to hang in the National Gallery or any other gallery, frankly. He painted it for a much more personal and intimate reason.

[00:03:46]He painted it to hang in the bedroom of a friend for whose company he was desperate and who he had invited down to his house to stay. It was, if you like, a kind of lure. And although it may appear to be a joyous picture, the story behind it is, frankly, harrowing.

[00:04:07]It's a story which begins with the artist as a boy in a life tarnished by tragedy right from the start.

[00:04:16]A year to the day before Van Gogh was born in [music] 1853, his parents had another son who died a few hours after birth, also called Vincent.

[00:04:30]>> From an early age, he was quite intense.

[00:04:31][music] In the churchyard outside the room where he was born and where he first grew up, there was a tombstone with his own name and [music] date of birth 1 year earlier. So, it must have affected [music] him.

[00:04:45]>> Brought up in Brabant, southern Holland, Van Gogh was the eldest of six, but he was also always a loner.

[00:04:53]>> Van Gogh, I think, was a really interesting, extraordinary, possibly quite frustrating young man. He was baffling. And he was somebody who would become instantly enamored of something and possibly just as quickly give it up again.

[00:05:09]>> He was a missionary. [music] >> A bookshop assistant.

[00:05:13]>> He was a preacher.

[00:05:14]>> He wanted to be a priest at one point.

[00:05:16]His family actually offered to pay for him to go to theological college, is that right? He didn't do that.

[00:05:20]>> An apprentice art dealer.

[00:05:22]>> Some say he was a baker.

[00:05:24]>> He's also a bookseller.

[00:05:25]>> This is my favorite, an unpaid assistant prep [music] school master in Ramsgate. His family were showed signs of [music] absolute desperation in trying to think of what Vincent could do.

[00:05:37]>> But there was one member of his family who saw [music] talent in Van Gogh from the start. His younger brother and closest [music] friend, Theo.

[00:05:45]>> Theo suggested to him, "Why don't you try your hand at being an artist because [music] you know, you're quite good." He never had any formal art training. He taught himself.

[00:05:54]Um and he enjoyed it.

[00:05:57]>> It was a career he was able to pursue only because Theo, by then an art dealer in [music] Paris, offered to support him.

[00:06:05]>> Van Gogh's relationship with his brother is complicated, like all his relationships, but nevertheless it's the most enduring relationship. Theo is his anchor and without Theo's support, financial, moral, emotional, Van Gogh may never have developed as an artist.

[00:06:26]>> His early paintings are a world away from the sunflowers.

[00:06:29]He painted what he saw around him, miners and struggling [music] peasants.

[00:06:34]The subject of an ambitious early work which is almost a caricature of the Dutch tradition of peasant portraits, >> [music] >> The Potato Eaters.

[00:06:43]>> It is a work which is about peasant family gathered around this rather meager meal and it's a symphony of browns and beiges, >> [music] >> no bright color at all.

[00:06:52]>> It also shows his identifying [music] with the people who he's painting. It seems to contain anguish within it.

[00:07:00]>> [music] >> You see these people who are pinched by poverty. There's really not enough to eat and Van Gogh gets this across in his work in a quite extraordinarily empathetic way.

[00:07:12]>> He painted the peasants with [music] haggard features and desperate expressions.

[00:07:18]He was quietly pleased with the finished canvas. Perhaps [music] this would be the piece to launch him as an artist.

[00:07:25]But it didn't [music] sell. Not only was it bleak, his critics complained, but the figures were [music] badly realized.

[00:07:35]It was >> [music] >> at this point that Van Gogh made a crucial decision. He would leave the low countries.

[00:07:44]>> [music] >> He decided to go to France, or rather to its beating cultural heart, Paris.

[00:07:50]Good call.

[00:07:53]Paris would help him unlock a new creative style, a fresh vision.

[00:08:02]What Vincent would find in Paris would change his entire approach to painting.

[00:08:10]Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers is one of the most famous paintings in the world.

[00:08:16]Created in 1888, it still dazzles us more than 130 years later.

[00:08:22]This is such a familiar image. [music] It's quite hard to remember just how strange and radical this painting is.

[00:08:31]First thing to say, every painter is told you need lots of contrasts of color, different colors rubbing up against each other. And what has Van [music] Gogh done? It's basically all yellow. Primrose yellow, orangey yellow, a kind of creamy yellow, a greeny yellow. Yellow, yellow, yellow, and yellow. He has more or less used up all his yellow on this one image.

[00:08:54]The reasoning behind this reckless use of color originated in the next chapter of Van Gogh's life.

[00:09:05]Paris.

[00:09:06]>> If you are interested in painting, [music] that was the place you had to go. There was an awful lot of exciting avant-garde ferment and controversial cutting-edge stuff being done in Paris.

[00:09:19]>> Paris at the time was so different to what he was used to. There was color, there were bars, there there were brothels. He fell in love [music] with the museums, with the art, with the fact that all the artists were there as one big family, and he wanted to be [music] part of that family.

[00:09:39]>> He soon became friends with radical artists like Toulouse-Lautrec. They were as inspired as [music] he was by the Impressionists.

[00:09:51]>> The great revelation of Paris for Van Gogh was color.

[00:09:55]>> When he saw the Impressionists, he was so flabbergasted by the colors they were using and their small light brush marks.

[00:10:03]Impressionism and and its fizz of color was so exciting to him.

[00:10:11]>> The Impressionist techniques changed everything. This was how Van Gogh was meant to paint.

[00:10:17]All he needed now was a subject that spoke to and of him, common, prickly, standing alone.

[00:10:26]And it was when he [music] stumbled on an allotment during one of his frequent walks that he finally found it, the image that would come to define him.

[00:10:34]Here, Van Gogh made a painting of one lonely sunflower.

[00:10:40]Now, nothing against sunflowers, but they're not exactly the most sophisticated, beautiful, interesting flowers. They're not beautiful roses.

[00:10:49]They're not like those gorgeous multicolored tulips the Dutch enjoyed painting so much. They're not even hollyhocks. They are fairly basic [music] flowers.

[00:10:58]They're tough, but really quite earthy blooms, and something about their character clearly spoke to Van Gogh.

[00:11:08]>> He is, in a sense, an outsider in the art world. He's a maverick.

[00:11:14]>> [music] >> He doesn't fit in well.

[00:11:16]And the sunflower has that kind of rebellious quality that I think he identifies with.

[00:11:24]>> For whatever reason, his paintings were transformed. The dark, dull tones of [music] his first canvases disappeared for good. Instead, he embraced his palette, reaching for brighter shades, adding emphatic [music] dashes of yellow. He worked more urgently, using stronger, swifter strokes. Even the dying two cut sunflowers [music] feel full of vigor.

[00:11:49]Eventually, they caught the eye of a man who is to play a huge role in his life from this [music] moment on, the one who would inspire his most famous work. His name was Paul Gauguin, an older and more [music] established artist who'd seen some of Van Gogh's work hanging on a local cafe wall. He asked for two of the sunflower paintings.

[00:12:09]>> [music] >> And in return, Paul Gauguin gave Vincent one of his paintings. So, there's an early kind of mark of friendship in this exchange of paintings.

[00:12:23]>> His friends may have admired his work, but Van Gogh was struggling to find a wider audience. His paintings just weren't selling.

[00:12:32]>> You know, he's living [music] a very precarious life. It's very isolated.

[00:12:37]Um he [music] has no real profile in the art world of Paris.

[00:12:42]>> Worse still, >> [music] >> he wasn't getting on with his brother Theo.

[00:12:47]>> From the evidence we have, it seems that virtually nobody could stand living with Vincent van Gogh or indeed spending [music] extended periods in his company.

[00:12:56]You just couldn't stop him talking.

[00:12:58]>> He was incredibly intense. They were living in a very small flat, which was quite claustrophobic for the two of them. Theo was going to his job every day, and Vincent was staying at home [music] painting, making an awful lot of mess.

[00:13:10]>> Theo reports that after a hard day at work as an art dealer, he'd come home, [music] have supper, Vincent would start talking to him. Theo would say he was tired and thought he'd go to bed, would go to bed, and Vincent would follow him into the bedroom, pull up a chair, and carry on talking to him. He was he was very difficult company.

[00:13:30]>> Just 2 years after he'd arrived in Paris, Van Gogh [music] was now desperate to leave.

[00:13:37]>> He was suffering, as he often did, from [music] depression, low spirits, heavy drinking. He didn't like the [music] cold and dark of the Parisian winter. He wanted to experience the bright light and color of the south.

[00:13:52]And all these motivations prompted him, possibly quite on the spur of the moment, to climb on the express train to Provence.

[00:14:06]>> Vincent Van Gogh arrived in Arles, in the southeast [music] of France, towards the end of February 1888.

[00:14:13]For local expert [music] Philip Gondinet, there was an immediate connection between the artist and this quiet, ancient town.

[00:14:22]>> Van Gogh came to the south of France, uh looking for the color, for the light.

[00:14:29]Actually, he took the train to Marseille and just stopped in Arles for a a short period of time, really fell in love with the city, and the reason why he stayed.

[00:14:41]>> [music] >> He suddenly felt this desire to paint, and not just one or two pictures, but to keep painting. [music] He wanted to paint the sunshine.

[00:14:52]>> The next 15 months were astonishingly productive. Van Gogh's style began to transform once again, developing the bold expressiveness [music] that would play such an important part in the sunflowers.

[00:15:06]He filled [music] his canvases with blossoming trees and local workers, fishing boats he saw on a day trip to the coast.

[00:15:14]Many of the scenes he [music] painted look just the same today.

[00:15:21]>> So, I'm now standing in front of Terrace de Café la Nuit, one of the central bar in Arles that was painted by Van Gogh.

[00:15:28]And he would love to come in the evening. He had his wooden hat with little candles stuck on it in order to have a a little light in order to do the painting and see the painting he was doing.

[00:15:40]He's one of the first painter to paint [music] outside in the evening.

[00:15:47]>> But, this wasn't the only reason he stood out [music] in Arles.

[00:15:51]>> The locals used to call him le fou roux, the mad ginger guy, and they didn't really like him because A, he was an artist. B, he was drinking a lot a lot of absinthe at the time. He was sleeping with prostitutes. Plus, people that had seen him painting were a bit worried about him because he was painting like [music] frantic, manic, and very very quick and talking to himself.

[00:16:17]>> People found him strange, and a lot of Van Gogh's life was spent being [music] incredibly lonely. He was a person that people didn't really understand. If they did understand him, they often didn't like him or were scared of him. And this led to a great feeling of isolation.

[00:16:35]>> So, now I'm taking you to the rue du bout du monde, the end of the world street, that was the former name where the brothel Van Gogh used to go is located.

[00:16:48]One of those tiny houses where he would be coming to look for comfort and someone to talk to.

[00:16:59]>> Just 3 months after he arrived in Arles, Van Gogh confessed to Theo in a letter, "You know, I've always thought it's ridiculous [music] for painters to live alone. You always lose when you're isolated."

[00:17:13]And he knew he had to do something to make [music] make life happier.

[00:17:16]>> He conceived the idea that it would be very good to get other friends and associates from Paris to come and settle there to set up an artist colony.

[00:17:28]>> It would be a wonderful community of artists where they'd all live happily and they'd sell their work together.

[00:17:33]They're a collective.

[00:17:37]>> Van Gogh >> [music] >> looked around for a suitable location and in the scruffier part of town between the railway station and the brothels, he found it, the yellow house.

[00:17:48]>> He was really [music] happy and wrote very enthusiastically to two of his sisters and his brother about how he was going to [music] start this arts community um and he was looking forward [music] to the future.

[00:18:00]>> The first person he invited was Paul Gauguin, the artist he'd met in Paris to whom [music] he'd given his two early sunflower paintings.

[00:18:10]>> Gauguin didn't want to go.

[00:18:12]Gauguin came from a very different background. Before he was a painter, he was a stockbroker. He was used to living a very different type of life.

[00:18:21]But what encouraged him was Van Gogh's brother Theo who at the time sold Gauguin's paintings and he said to Gauguin, "I will pay you to go and stay with my brother."

[00:18:36]>> So that July, Gauguin finally agreed to come to Arles.

[00:18:40]Full of anticipation, Van Gogh wanted to make a dramatic gesture. He decided [music] to decorate Gauguin's bedroom and he turned to the one subject that had brought them together in the [music] first place, sunflowers.

[00:18:55]Van Gogh had dreamed of a set of 12 sunflower pictures. [music] This is one of four that he made in an extraordinary intense burst of energy over just a few days.

[00:19:07]Each canvas is slightly different. The first is a simple composition. Three huge blooms pop against a bright, bold background. [music] Then, he experiments with much more vivid shades. The sunflowers are rougher and more abstract, his loose strokes accentuating their spiky [music] petals.

[00:19:27]By the third painting, the composition had a calmer confidence. 14 sunflowers in every stage of life complemented by gentler, more even tones. He thought it would be his best.

[00:19:40]Until he started on the fourth.

[00:19:47]>> He's depicting 15 sunflowers with a very radical yellow-on-yellow [music] color scheme that he describes as light on light.

[00:19:58]>> Nobody had ever done anything quite that wild. Essentially, [music] all yellow, yellow on yellow, different kinds of yellow.

[00:20:07]A monochrome picture.

[00:20:09]>> Some of them just have the spikes left, so they're sort of at the end of their day, passing away.

[00:20:16]>> There's not this kind of >> [music] >> dishonesty of showing flowers in a sort of permanent state of bloom and of youthfulness.

[00:20:26]And that again is very characteristic of Van Gogh. He's looking at the natural world with his very kind of receptive eye. He's looking at all the detail, but also this kind of passage of time.

[00:20:43]>> When Van Gogh was painting sunflowers, [music] he was at his happiest. And he was happy because he thought his life was going to change now.

[00:20:51]>> [music] >> Gauguin was coming. All his past demons would disappear through Gauguin. They would paint together, they would live together. This was Van Gogh who was used to solitude. He thought it was going to be a whole new beginning for him.

[00:21:06]And of course, it wasn't to be.

[00:21:13]>> Van Gogh poured all of himself [music] into these paintings. Like all his great paintings, I believe that these are fundamentally lively, passionate, colorful [music] pictures about human loneliness. In the midst of movement and color and life and beauty, we are in the end by ourselves. These [music] are the final testament of a lonely man, which is perhaps why we respond to them so strongly.

[00:21:43]Only 4 months after he finished them, he had a full [music] mental breakdown. And 2 years later, he was dead.

[00:21:55]In the [music] summer of 1888, Van Gogh painted a series of sunflowers culminating [music] in these 15 magnificent blooms.

[00:22:05]Even now, more than 100 years on, his [music] flowers seem as vivid as the day he painted them.

[00:22:13]So, what [music] techniques did Van Gogh use on his canvas to capture the spirit of the subject he loved so [music] much?

[00:22:21]Classically in painting, you're taught to make the brush work vanish. You can't see it. It's so smooth that you have the illusion that you're looking at a real flower or a real pot or whatever it might be. Here, Van Gogh has done exactly the opposite. You can see every single flicker and mark that his thumb and forefinger and the brush have made.

[00:22:43]He uses impasto, great big gobs of paint slammed onto the canvas. You can see he's taken a brush and filled it up with really thick paint and then kind of stabbed it into the canvas and then he's pulled the brush straight out again. So, it's almost three-dimensional. The strokes of the petals and the leaves are again great wedges of paint. It's not a picture of a dead sunflower, it's pretty close to being the thing itself.

[00:23:12]And the sunflowers aren't the only place where you can see Van Gogh's ingenuity on this canvas. [music] If you look at the back of the painting, the wall is a kind of [music] buttery slab of paint. You can actually see not just the thickness of the brushes he was using, you could actually [music] see the individual bristles of the brush still captured in reverse on the oil paint.

[00:23:36]He's saying, [music] "Remember that I, Van Gogh, made this with my hands. Think about [music] my thick fingers. Think about my brushes. Think about the oil and the goo [music] and the slap and the sweat that went into this." All of that is still bleeding [music] and dripping off the canvas all these years afterwards.

[00:24:00]>> For the very first time as he painted [music] his sunflowers, Van Gogh was full of hope for his community at the Yellow House, for his friendship with Paul Gauguin, and for his own future as an artist. All of this he funneled directly into the radiant blooms.

[00:24:18]>> [music] >> It took Van Gogh just a week to complete the four sunflower paintings and when he had, he put the last two, the two that he liked best, onto the walls of Gauguin's bedroom. And they must have blazed from the walls of the bedroom of this tiny French townhouse, [music] a shout, a scream almost, for companionship.

[00:24:42]>> The effect of Gauguin's bedroom must [music] have been quite extraordinary, overwhelming. He must have got quite a shock when he [music] arrived.

[00:24:50]>> He was bowled over. He loved them. Of all the things that Van Gogh [music] did, Gauguin loved the sunflowers the most.

[00:24:59]>> Quickly, the two men settled into an intense partnership.

[00:25:06]>> To start off with, they set out working together, and it actually goes surprisingly well. Van Gogh settles down. They start producing quite a lot of good work.

[00:25:17]>> Van Gogh was very quick, very immediate, painting a picture a day, attacking the canvas almost as if he's dancing with it. Gauguin, on the other hand, was much more methodical, much slower, much more considered. Van Gogh liked to paint from life. Gauguin liked to paint from his imagination and from his memory.

[00:25:42]>> In November 1888, Van Gogh painted portraits of the two men's [music] chairs, wittily capturing their different natures.

[00:25:51]>> The two chairs [music] are a symbol of his and Gauguin's friendship, and they seem, just through these simple chairs, [music] to encapsulate the two very different personalities of the artists.

[00:26:02]>> Vincent's chair shows his simplicity.

[00:26:05]>> [music] >> He didn't need much to be happy in life, whereas Gauguin was a bit more worldly.

[00:26:10]Gauguin would be reading modern novels and keeping up to date with what was fashionable.

[00:26:15]>> When you look at them, you feel as [music] if they've perhaps only just been vacated. They're a wonderful symbol of this community that Van Gogh had so wanted to build.

[00:26:27]>> But as days [music] turned to weeks, this dream became less and less a reality, and with only each other for company, the [music] two men's differences became more and more pronounced.

[00:26:39]>> Gauguin found living with Van Gogh very, very [music] difficult.

[00:26:43]The two artists were very, very different people.

[00:26:48]>> Gauguin hated living in Arles. [music] He said it was the filthiest hole in the south. He really disliked it. And they were beginning to get on each other's nerves.

[00:27:02]>> Then the weather deteriorates. Wind starts [music] blowing. It starts getting cold and rainy. They have to work indoors, which means they're working in one small room. Van Gogh is probably talking quite a lot of time and pacing up and down as another of his habits when working. Gauguin is trying to concentrate, [music] and after a while things get more and more tense.

[00:27:27]>> They would argue about art. They would argue about cooking. The best way to cook tomatoes even.

[00:27:35]They argued about everything.

[00:27:39]Van Gogh scared Gauguin. [music] It's been said that Gauguin recalled how he would be asleep in his bed and he'd wake up and Van Gogh would be standing over him staring at him as while he was in bed asleep.

[00:27:55]>> It didn't take long for everything to come to a head.

[00:28:00]>> Something on December the 23rd pushed him over the edge.

[00:28:06]What Gauguin said afterwards [music] is he was just so bizarre I couldn't stand it anymore.

[00:28:11]>> Gauguin said that's it. I've had enough.

[00:28:13][music] I'm leaving. I'm going back to Paris and I'm going. I won't be coming back. Van Gogh has such a volatile temper. It just escalated. [music] It went crazy.

[00:28:23]Gauguin ran out into the [music] street, and Van Gogh followed him with his razor.

[00:28:30]>> The two men [music] continued to scream at each other until Gauguin took refuge in a hotel. Van Gogh stormed back to the yellow house, and still holding his razor, sliced off a chunk of an ear.

[00:28:45]>> He wrapped up his ear in newspaper, [music] put a beret on to disguise his wound, and took it off to the brothel where he left it at the door for a certain employee who who went under the name [music] of uh Rachel, uh went back to his house, uh got into bed, and passed out.

[00:29:06]>> Really, it was self-harm.

[00:29:09]He was desperate.

[00:29:12]All his hopes and his dreams and his future with Gauguin had disappeared.

[00:29:17]They'd evaporated over this row.

[00:29:21]And he felt as though he had no future.

[00:29:26]>> By the time the police arrived the next morning, it's said the walls of the Yellow House were stained with blood.

[00:29:33]Van Gogh was rushed to hospital, the doctors questioning if he would survive.

[00:29:38]>> And it was really then that his family, I think, started to realize that he genuinely was, as his brother put it, mad.

[00:29:48]>> [music] >> He was obviously getting hallucinations.

[00:29:50]He was behaving very strangely. There were complaints from the neighbors about odd behavior.

[00:29:57]From that point on, he [music] actually seems to have lost confidence in himself. And finally, he [music] tells his brother that he doesn't think at this stage he's really up to living on his own.

[00:30:13]>> [music] >> Five months after he severed his ear, Van Gogh was committed to this asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

[00:30:20]It's an old monastery which still serves as a psychiatric hospital today.

[00:30:26]>> Van Gogh came by himself and signed a registry by himself asking him to be at the hospital, uh looking for a refuge, really. He knew he needed some help and he needed some peace uh for a while.

[00:30:43]>> Nowadays, he would be classed as being bipolar, but then they would lock you up. Um, >> [music] >> he'd be surrounded by people in straightjackets, uh, people wailing, [music] people crying. It was very traumatic.

[00:30:58]Uh, behind locked doors, bars in front of windows, um, cold rooms. It was a very difficult time for him.

[00:31:09]>> In his letters, he wrote of [music] being kept awake by terrible howls as of animals in a menagerie.

[00:31:17]>> [music] >> And he described the other men as my companions in misfortune.

[00:31:22]>> The main treatment was uh, cold baths.

[00:31:26]For Van Gogh, I think it was twice a week, a 2-hour bath.

[00:31:31]The treatment were basically useless.

[00:31:33]Uh, proof is that uh, most of the patient that were staying while Van Gogh was here, spent all their life and died at the hospital.

[00:31:41]>> But for Van Gogh, there was only one [music] therapy that was ever really going to help.

[00:31:47]>> He painted a lot.

[00:31:49]He did 150 paintings that are known of.

[00:31:52]The landscapes, [music] the color, the sky was something that would [music] give him peace every day.

[00:32:01]>> Interestingly and very sadly, some of his best [music] work was done when he checked himself into the asylum. And perhaps that's because he was surrounded by people all the time, and people were caring for him.

[00:32:15]>> And it was while he was here in the asylum that Van Gogh [music] faced his biggest public test as an artist. In January 1890, he was invited to show his work at [music] an exhibition in Brussels alongside old friends like Toulouse-Lautrec. Still too ill to attend himself, the painting he chose to send was The Sunflowers.

[00:32:35]>> Vincent was so proud that he'd been selected [music] out of 20 foreign artists to be exhibited in this exhibition. Not all the artists liked his work. They just didn't respect them.

[00:32:46]There was one artist called Henri de Groux and he said, [music] "I will not be put by that abominable pot of sunflowers by Vincent." And it caused a fight.

[00:32:58]Toulouse-Lautrec stood up in honor of his friend and said, "Retract that." And they were all They were all my stag as a dawn.

[00:33:07]This is the first [music] time the sunflowers has been seen by the general public. They didn't understand why he was painting with such thick [music] paint, such bright colors, so unrealistic.

[00:33:18]>> Perhaps it was for the best that Van Gogh [music] didn't make it there himself.

[00:33:27]A few months later, wanting to be closer to Theo, he checked himself out of the asylum and took a room above a restaurant in Auvers, a small town just outside Paris.

[00:33:40]But he was never to recover.

[00:33:42]On July the 27th, 1890, he packed up his easel and his paints and he went [music] out into the countryside.

[00:33:52]And in the wheat fields outside the town, in circumstances >> [music] >> that remain mysterious, he shot himself.

[00:34:05]>> As soon as Theo knew, straight to his brother. And apparently he was chatting, they were chatting. Theo [music] and Vincent smoked a pipe together and they were talking and then he gradually became delirious.

[00:34:20]>> As he lay there, he whispered to his brother, "The sadness will last forever."

[00:34:27]>> [music] >> He died within a day and a half of shooting himself in Theo's arms.

[00:34:40]>> This painting of [music] farms around Auvers is one of the last that Van Gogh made, and full disclosure, my own favorite. In it, you can just make out four solitary sunflowers, an echo perhaps of happier times. Had Van Gogh survived, had he been able [music] to cope with his mental illness, who knows what extraordinary unpainted masterpieces the world would have today?

[00:35:05]He was only 37 when he died, and artists often live for a long time, so we might have had another 50 years of Van Gogh as a painter. Who knows what he'd have done next? And yet, had Van Gogh not been self-tortured, had he not been mentally ill, he wouldn't have been Van Gogh. And so, we wouldn't have what we do have.

[00:35:28]>> [music] >> I've always thought that one of the great paradoxes of tragic paradoxes of Van Gogh's life is that while he was alive, really nobody could stand him.

[00:35:38]And [music] that changes actually almost from the moment when he shot himself.

[00:35:45]>> His brother Theo arranged the funeral [music] and invited all the artists to come, and they did do. They took the paintings off of the walls [music] and placed them around his coffin, and they also covered his coffin with flowers, mainly sunflowers. It was much admired. I mean, he truly suffered for his art. [music] He agonized for the art world.

[00:36:10]>> Ever afterwards, he's been a figure that people identify [music] with emotionally, perhaps more than any other artist who's ever lived.

[00:36:22]>> But while Vincent [music] had no success during his life, his family were not prepared for that to go on after his death, and there were people alive who understood quite how extraordinary and beautiful these pictures were. A small [music] platoon determined the whole world would know the name Vincent van Gogh.

[00:36:44]Less [music] than 2 years before he died at the painfully young age of 37, Vincent van Gogh [music] created one of the most famous works of art the world has seen, his iconic 15 Sunflowers.

[00:36:56][music] I think there's few people who've heard of the name van Gogh who aren't aware of his short and tragic life. [music] All around the world, he's known as that artist who cut off his own ear, an act almost as famous as his paintings.

[00:37:12]>> [music] >> It's possible that the drama of his life and the manner in which he left it explain [music] some of the popularity and the mystique surrounding van Gogh's Sunflowers today.

[00:37:26]>> [music] >> But that is only part of the story.

[00:37:31]So what was it that first brought the Sunflowers to the attention of the world?

[00:37:36]It should have fallen to Theo, [music] van Gogh's art dealer brother, to make sure he was never forgotten. But he died just 6 months after Vincent, and it was left to Theo's widow, Jo, to carry on van Gogh's legacy.

[00:37:50]>> She could see [music] what he had, and she knew from Theo that Vincent was a very special artist, and she [music] was very clever at managing the legacy of his work. She was encouraged by fellow artists to actually show van Gogh's [music] work, and that's exactly what she did, and she made it her life's [music] mission to show what a great artist he was, even though he was a thorn in her side at times.

[00:38:22]>> Slowly, with Jo's help, Van Gogh's paintings began to win [music] attention. In 1910, just 20 years after his death, Sunflowers was included [music] in a huge exhibition in London.

[00:38:35]25,000 people queued to see it, and the British fell in love.

[00:38:41]The National Gallery couldn't let this painting [music] go, and eventually paid 1,300 pounds to buy it from Van Gogh's sister-in-law.

[00:38:50]More people than ever before finally had access to this [music] extraordinary canvas, and Van Gogh's popularity skyrocketed.

[00:39:00]>> On March the 30th, 1987, which would have been Vincent's 134th birthday, one of the Sunflowers was sold at auction, the largest sum ever received for a painting.

[00:39:15]Practically 40 [music] million dollars.

[00:39:19]>> The reserve price had been 12 million, and that in itself was seen to be quite ludicrous.

[00:39:24]It was suddenly an explosion of interest in [music] Van Gogh.

[00:39:28]And there, from that moment onwards, he became the painter that he'd always known he could be.

[00:39:34]He's become one of the world's most highly paid [music] artists. What I find frustrating is that in his own time, he was intensely poor and often on the breadline.

[00:39:42]>> Vincent was so [music] poor, he had to choose at one point between smoking his pipe or eating.

[00:39:48]>> [music] >> And then, 134 years after his birth, that um a painting of his should sell for 40 million dollars. [music] It It's really It's just heartbreaking.

[00:40:02]>> Although it wasn't this Sunflowers that went under the hammer, it was the third in the series, the auction sent people flooding back to the National Gallery to see what all the fuss was about. And ever since then, this slightly mysterious pot of flowers painted by a Dutchman for a Frenchman in France has been the single most popular thing in Britain's National Gallery.

[00:40:33]>> He never painted when he was having any kind of mania or any illness. [music] He painted when he was happy and he did have hope. And most of the time he was very hopeful [music] and they portray hope. They portray that hope and that happiness.

[00:40:47]>> It's an ecstatic painting, isn't it?

[00:40:50]Really.

[00:40:51]It's very joyful and Van Gogh said that he painted it out of gratitude but also to provide solace to other people who are suffering loneliness and isolation like himself.

[00:41:04][music] He's saying really find a connection with the natural [music] world around you. Find this wonder, this beauty that is available in a humble flower.

[00:41:18]>> The explanation [music] behind the popularity of sunflowers is hard to put into words. Ecstatic, joyful, yes.

[00:41:26]But there's a curious [music] loneliness here as well.

[00:41:29]Some thrust up.

[00:41:32]Others wilt and crumple.

[00:41:36]Some stare back at us [music] almost like self-portraits.

[00:41:41]We're instinctively attracted to their beauty but we are also [music] all of us in the end alone.

[00:41:50]>> Van Gogh once said, "I'd like to paint in such a way that everyone who has eyes could understand it." I've used a lot of words in telling this story but the truth is we don't really need words. We just need our eyes and our hearts.

[00:42:06]>> [music] >> This is a painting for all people and all time.

[00:42:15]>> Next time on the [music] world's greatest paintings, a canvas so famous it's been printed on our bank notes.

[00:42:23]>> This is by [music] far the most loved image that Turner ever made. We follow one artist's mission >> explodes onto the British [music] art scene >> to be remembered long after his death.

[00:42:37]>> It's Turner's gift to you from all of those years ago. He painted it for us.

[00:42:43]>> It's J.M.W. Turner's [music] Fighting Temeraire.