It is 1882. Vincent Van Gogh is twenty-seven years old and living in the Hague. He has been pursuing a career as an artist for two years, after various well meant but abortive attempts to establish himself as an evangelical preacher ministering to the poor in rural Holland. Too  excitable, too volatile, not cut out for the job, the church fathers had said. He had been asked to leave. He is calmer now, less prone to the wild mood-swings that have plagued him in the past. But life as an art student has not been going altogether smoothly.

There is tension in the family. His father, the Reverend Theodorus Van Gogh, is bitterly disappointed with him for leaving the priesthood. And now young Vincent has scandalised his friends and family by moving his pregnant model, a prostitute named Sien Hoornik, into his house. There have been ramifications. His teacher, the Hague school painter Anthon Mauve, wants nothing to do with him any more.

 

Despite the difficulties, Van Gogh is convinced that he is on the right path. If Mauve is going to be such a prude, he will teach himself the rudiments of art. He makes his own perspective frame from four pieces of wood and a mesh of strings, and draws a picture of it in a letter to his beloved brother Theo. “I’ve found my work,” he writes, “ something which I live for heart and soul ... I have a certain faith in art, a certain trust that it’s a powerful current that drives a person.”

Coming from almost anyone else in his position, it would be pretentious guff. But what wonderful art he has indeed been creating: darkly atmospheric landscapes, capturing the lonely feel of the marshlands surrounding the city; men and horses ploughing under pewter skies; lonely canals and lonely towpaths, spearing back to the flat horizon; whole sheafs of drawings done in meshed nets of eloquent line that already hold the promise of another Rembrandt in the making.

Van Gogh has only been studying art for two years – two years! – but everything he touches is touched by magic. He is one of those rare artists who do more than just draw and paint pictures. The things he creates are like pieces of raw and actual life, fragments of human sensibility perpetuated, miraculously, on bits of canvas and scraps of paper. He knows this, feels it, sees it. He really has found his vocation.

Early in the morning on Sunday, 23 July, 1882, as Sien sleeps downstairs with her young daughter, he is up in the roof of the house, looking out of his attic window. He has just finished a watercolour that delights him with its perfect capturing of this moment, this early morning mood. As always, at times like this, he wants to share the feeling with his brother. He paints the watercolour again, this time in the words of a letter:

“So you must imagine me sitting at my attic window as early as 4 o’ clock, studying the meadows and the carpenter’s yard with my perspective frame – as the fires are lit in the court to make coffee, and the first worker ambles into the yard. Over the red tiled roofs comes a flock of white pigeons flying between the black smoking chimneys. But behind this an infinity of delicate, gentle green, miles and miles of flat meadow, and a grey sky as still, as peaceful as Corot or Van Goyen. That view over the ridges of the roof and the gutters in which the grass grows, very early in the morning and the first signs of life and awakening – the bird on the wing, the chimney smoking, the figure far below ambling along – this is the subject of my watercolour. I hope you’ll like it.”

Then he drew an ink sketch of the same scene and popped it into the envelope along with the letter.

The great thing about “The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters”, the Royal Academy’s truly wonderful new exhibition, is the way it plunges you straight into the artist’s life. Throughout, Van Gogh’s letters are exhibited with his paintings. That brilliant, beautiful watercolour of 1882, privately owned and rarely seen, hangs in the very first gallery, right next to that brilliant, beautiful letter in which Van Gogh described it to his brother. Through countless carefully chosen juxtapositions of this kind, the painter’s life is revealed in all its nakedness and vulnerability.

It is hard to believe, but this is the first major Van Gogh exhibition in London for more than forty years. The idea behind it, both simple and brilliant, goes back a quarter of a century. Twenty five years ago, the late Bruce Bernard, together with his favourite designer, Derek Birdsall, created a book entitled Vincent by Himself – just Van Gogh’s paintings together with Van Gogh’s words, no other distractions. The Royal Academy’s show is essentially the same concept turned into an exhibition. Over the course of eight galleries, it uses this most straightforward of methods to tell the story of the artist’s remarkable life and his sadly premature end.

It is a familiar tale. The journeys to Paris and then to the South, the joyful embrace of Provencal heat and colour and light, the exuberance of discovery, the sad succumbing to depression – a career like the path of a comet, flaring across the sky, all compressed to just ten years of astounding creativity. But it is utterly refreshed in the sharpness of this retelling, removed from the realms of cliche to which Van Gogh has so often been consigned. The result is a deeply moving and continually fascinating show. What shines through it all is not so much the artist’s famous tendency to depression – although that is there, of course, dark and unavoidable – but his boundless love of life and the world, and his unique generosity of spirit.