Van Gogh Museum Journal 1995

[p. 48]

[Van Gogh studies]

fig. 1
George Henry Boughton, Cod speed! Pilgrims setting out for Canterbury. Time of Chaucer, 1874, oil on canvas, 122 × 184 cm, signed and dated 18 G.H. Boughton 74, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum

[p. 49]

George Henry Boughton and the ‘beautiful picture’ in Van Gogh's 1876 sermon
Ronald de Leeuw

‘Association [...] was certainly Van Gogh's most important instrument of thought, something that could be used creatively: his thoughts (or pictures) are thus intimately linked to one another.’¹

Long before Vincent van Gogh began drawing and painting he produced a sermon, as it were his first work of art. After delivering it in the small Methodist church in the town of Richmond, near London, in late October 1876,² he could hardly wait to break the news to his brother. ‘Theo,’ he wrote, ‘last Sunday your brother preached for the first time in God's house, of which it is written “In this place I shall give peace.” I'm enclosing a copy of what I said - may it be the first of many fruits’ [95/79].

For years Van Gogh had been preparing himself for that moment, fanatically studying the Bible and devouring all sorts of religious and semi-religious literature. So extensively did the preacher's son quote from these sources in his correspondence that when his sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger edited his Verzamelde Brieven in 1914, she shrank from publishing in full all the religious effusions of the young bigot.³ With some justification she feared that the zealotry of these early letters would stand in the way of the appreciation of the correspondence as a whole. Indeed, ever since the integral text of De brieven van Vincent van Gogh appeared in Dutch in 1990, we have finally been able to sympathise with her. Many letters - from the mid-1870s in particular - more than doubled in length, as all biblical excerpts, tracts, historical treatises, novel fragments, and poems were included without cuts. Thanks to the restoration of these pages, we can now form a much better idea of Van Gogh's reading and thinking.

Van Gogh's letters leave no doubt as to his literary gifts. From the moment the first selections from his letters were published in the 1890s they fascinated an international

1 Roland Dorn, Décoration: Vincent van Goghs Werkreihe für das Gelbe Haus in Arles, Hidesheim 1990, p. 16

2 The date on which the sermon was delivered has not been firmly established. De brieven van Vincent van Gogh, ed. Han van Crimpen and Monique Berends-Albert, 4 vols., The Hague 1990, vol. 1, p. 176 give ‘after 29 October 1876’ as the date. Most previous authors indicate 5 November 1876, but in exhib. cat. Van Gogh in England: portrait of the artist as a young man, London (Barbican Gallery) 1992, p. 69, fn. 1, Martin Bailey opts for 29 October 1876.

3 For a good introduction to Van Gogh and religion, see A. Verkade-Bruining, De God van Vincent, Amsterdam 1989 and Tsukasa Kodera, Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature, Amsterdam & Philadelphia 1990.

[p. 50]

fig. 2
Vincent van Gogh, first page of the sermon written out for Theo, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

[p. 51]

readership, among whom artists and art-lovers figured prominently. With the appearance of the collected letters in 1914 a much wider audience came to appreciate the letters as a kind of archetypal ‘painter's progress.’ As the son of a protestant preacher, Van Gogh had been raised on the Scriptures, and during the years he aspired to his father's profession he strove to improve his writing. The elaborate descriptions of landscapes and natural phenomena in many of his early letters clearly demonstrate a conscious effort to add a literary flavour to his prose. One example is his description of arriving in England in April 1876: ‘The following morning on the train from Harwich to London, it was lovely to see the black fields and green meadows with sheep and lambs and an occasional thornbush and a few large oaks with dark branches and mossy grey trunks in the early morning light. Still a few stars in the shimmering blue sky and a bank of grey clouds on the horizon. Even before the sun rose I heard a lark.’ [74/60]

The letter Vincent sent his brother about his sermon contains a similar passage about the harmony between Nature and Life: ‘It was a bright autumn day and a beautiful walk from here to Richmond along the Thames, which reflected the large chestnut trees laden with yellow leaves and the bright blue sky, and through the tops of those trees the part of Richmond that stands on the hill, the houses with their red roofs and uncurtained windows and green gardens and the grey spire above them, and down below the big grey bridge with tall poplars on either side, over which people were passing like small black figures. I felt like someone re-emerging from a dark underground vault into the friendly daylight when I stood in the pulpit [...]’ [95/79].

Van Gogh stated in the opening lines of this letter that the theme of his sermon was ‘that our life is a pilgrims progress - that we are strangers in the earth, but that though this be so, yet we are not alone for our Father is with us. We are pilgrims, our life is a long walk or journey from earth to heaven’ [96] (fig. 2). Rife with quotations from the Bible and other religious texts, the homily revolved around two visual metaphors. The first was a storm at sea, the second a ‘very beautiful picture.’ The American art historian Hope B. Werness identified the painting God speed! Pilgrims setting out for Canterbury. Time of Chaucer (fig. 1), painted in 1874 by the Anglo-American artist George Henry Boughton, as the source of this second metaphor.⁴ Having belonged for many years to the Layton Collection (Milwaukee Art Center) in Wisconsin, the canvas was sold by that institution in 1960, at which point all trace of it was lost. Finally, in 1986, it reappeared on the London market. Thanks to a tip from the Van Gogh specialist Ronald Pickvance, the Van Gogh Museum was able to acquire it and then, in 1987, to organise a small exhibition around the work.⁵

Boughton's God speed! is a large canvas, measuring 123 × 184 cm. It was first exhibited as number 982 at London's Royal Academy in the summer of 1874. Two years later, in 1876, the painting formed a prominent part of the English submission to the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia. God speed! was, originally commissioned by the Duke of Buckingham. It remained in his possession until 1889 and was then sold at Christie's for 162 pounds. It was then returned to the United States, where it came into the hands of Angus Smith, who presented it to the Layton Collection.

As the somewhat cumbersome title indicates, the theme of the painting derives from Chaucer's Canterbury tales, which had previously inspired English artists such as William Blake and Thomas Stothard in the early 19th century.⁶ What is striking about Boughton's treatment of the subject, as contemporaries did not fail to notice, is that the procession of pilgrims is relegated to the background. The central motif is instead a young woman offering refreshment to two pilgrims. No less important is the artist's meticulous rendering of and emphasis upon the landscape.

George Henry Boughton (1835-1905) became one of Van Gogh's favourite artists shortly after he arrived in

4 On the identification of the painting see Hope B. Werness, ‘Vincent van Gogh and a lost painting by G.H. Boughton,’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts 106 (September 1985), p. 72. The author is quick to emphasise the differences between Van Gogh's text and what the painting actually represents: ‘His insistence on connecting the painting with Rossetti's poem, the implied association with Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress and with Biblical passages, indicates a conflation of literal and visual images which may partly explain the discrepancies.’ Based on several contemporary reviews of God speed!, Ronald Pickvance (English influences on Vincent van Gogh, London 1974, p. 23) also noted ‘that Vincent was confusing a spring evocation of Chaucer's pilgrims leaving a now distant London with an image of Bunyan's pilgrim striving towards the Holy City on an autumnal evening.’

5 Josefine Leistra, George Henry Boughton, God Speed! Pelgrims op weg naar Canterbury, Zwolle & Amsterdam 1987.

6 Ibid., pp. 38-39.

[p. 52]

fig. 3
George Henry Boughton, The heir presumptive, engraving, 16.7 × 10.1 cm, whereabouts unknown

London. He was apparently well acquainted with Boughton's work, which is not surprising as he was employed by the English artist's dealer Goupil. But Vincent's admiration for Boughton went well beyond mere loyalty to his employer. Though he generally took a dim view of English painting, he admitted to having seen ‘very beautiful works’ by Boughton as early as 1873. He had admired his painting The heir presumptive (fig. 3) at the Royal Academy and even made a sketch of it for a friend in Holland. In October of that same year Van Gogh called the artist ‘one of the best painters here’ and, in a frequently quoted letter of January 1874, listed dozens of his favourite artists, including Boughton [17/13]. Indeed he placed the Anglo-American artist on a par with Corot, Millet, Breton and Israëls, all of whom strove for ‘the truly simple.’ Van Gogh's admiration for the artist continued into the 1880s: one moment he extolled his journal illustrations, the next his use of perspective.

Vincent was thus already very favourably disposed toward Boughton when he visited the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1874 where God speed! was displayed. Later on he wrote his brother that he had enjoyed the exhibition very much, but did not single out Boughton by name [23/17]. The first, indirect, reference to the picture occurs in a letter he sent his parents after visiting them in Holland in April 1876. ‘We also passed Canterbury,’ he wrote, ‘a city that still has many medieval buildings, especially a splendid church surrounded by old elm trees. Often already I'd seen something concerning this town in paintings’ [76/62]. Boughton's was probably one of the pictures he had in mind.

Vincent explicitly referred to Boughton's God speed! for the first time on 26 August 1876. He apparently had not seen the canvas for quite some time, probably not since 1874. ‘Have I ever told you about that picture by Boughton, ‘The pilgrim's progress?’ he wrote his brother. ‘It is toward evening. A dirt road runs over the hills to a mountain on which one sees the holy city standing, illuminated by the red sun setting behind the grey evening clouds. On the road a pilgrim on his way to the city, already weary, asks a woman in black standing on the road, whose name is “sorrowful yet always rejoicing”: Does the road go uphill then all the way? “Yes to the very end.” And

[p. 53]

fig. 4
George Henry Boughton, Refreshment for the pilgrims, oil on canvas laid down on panel, 40.6 × 91.4 cm, signed, whereabouts unknown (photograph courtesy Sotheby's, New York)

will the journey take all day long? “From morn till night my friend.” The landscape the road runs through is so beautiful, brown moors with here and there birches and pines and patches of yellow sand, and in the distance, against the sun, mountains. It is really not a painting, but an inspiration’ [88/74].

What strikes the reader here is that several months before delivering his sermon Van Gogh had already dubbed Boughton's picture ‘Pilgrim's progress.’ Not only is the title different, but there are also visual discrepancies between the actual canvas and its evocation both in this letter of August 1876 and in the sermon of the following October. Some have taken this to mean that ‘Pilgrim's progress’ should not be identified with God speed!, while others simply blame the discrepancies on the artist's memory, which - understandable after two years - could well have failed him.⁷

Though common sense would seem to favour the second explanation, we shall see that it is flawed. In late November 1876, several weeks after he had preached, Van Gogh saw another work by Boughton at Goupil's London branch that likewise dealt with the subject of pilgrims. As he wrote his brother: ‘I saw the picture, or rather sketch, by Boughton, “The pilgrim's progress,” at Mr Obach's [manager of Goupil's]. If you ever manage to get a copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress, it's very worthwhile reading. As for

7 Xander van Eck, ‘Van Gogh and George Henry Boughton,’ The Burlington Magazine 133 (August 1990), pp. 539-40, challenges the identification of Boughton's God speed! with the ‘beautiful picture’ in the sermon. Without this, however, it is still easy to see that God speed! differs in a great many details from what Van Gogh described in his sermon. Werness, Pickvance, and Leistra, op. cit. (notes 4 and 5) all draw attention to this. However, I agree with Van Eck's objections in so far that in both Werness's and Leistra's articles, the desire to make Boughton's picture fit the text of the sermon - and to explain (away) the differences - has led to too much emphasis on Van Gogh's having either ‘forgotten’ or ‘confused’ aspects of the painting. What the artist-to-be used for his sermon was the very essence of Boughton's picture: the meeting of a pilgrim and a woman in a sublime landscape.

[p. 54]

myself, I love it dearly’ [99/82].⁸ This passage, in which Bunyan's book seems to interest the author more than the painting, has suggested to some that there was indeed another work besides God speed!, actually called ‘Pilgrim's progress.’ Yet no one has managed to bring such a work by Boughton to light, nor has any other mention of it been found. To be sure, in New York in February 1994 a painting closely related to God speed! was sold under the title Refreshment for the pilgrims (fig. 4).⁹ This could have been the ‘picture, or rather sketch’ Vincent referred to inasmuch as its subject and composition correspond to God speed! in broad outline. Measuring 40.6 × 91.4 cm, it is of a much smaller format than God speed!, which could have suggested to Van Gogh that it was the sketch for the larger painting.

It is fair to ask whether Van Gogh ever fully mastered or even knew the exact, awkward title of Boughton's God speed! of 1874. That he substituted the much more concise ‘Pilgrim's progress,’ after the influential book by John Bunyan of 1678, is not surprising. He was presumably reading the book at that time, though he did not actually own a copy of it until 1877.¹⁰ The extent to which the aspiring preacher's view of the ‘sketch’ was coloured by his reading can be inferred from the previously quoted qualification he wrote in a letter to Theo: ‘It is not really a painting, but an inspiration’ [88/74].

8 Leistra, op. cit. (note 5), already pointed out the possibility that the sketch of 1876 was not identical with the work displayed at the Royal Academy in 1874; this did not imply, however, that the representation involved was essentially different from the canvas purchased by the Van Gogh Museum.

9 Refreshment for the pilgrims, sale New York (Sotheby's) 16 February 1994, lot 90. Van Eck, op. cit. (note 7), claims that in 1876, Van Gogh described Boughton's so-called ‘Pilgrim's progress’ at Goupil's ‘quite precisely as a sketch.’ Rather the opposite is the case. Martin Bailey (Young Vincent: the story of Van Gogh's years in England, London 1990, p. 95) concluded, for instance, that it might even have been a print. In fact, the text shows that Van Gogh hesitated slightly: ‘het schilderij,’ he wrote, ‘of liever schets’ (‘the picture, or rather sketch’). Although I would characterise Refreshment for the pilgrims as a ‘smaller variant’ of God speed! rather than a sketch, is it not more likely that Van Gogh, who was not yet an artist in his own right, used ‘sketch’ to indicate a painting smaller than the one he had originally seen?

10 It was not until September 1877 that Van Gogh had his own copy of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress, given to him as a gift from his friend Harry Gladwell (letter 129/109). Earlier, on 30 May of that year (letter 117/98), Vincent sent Theo a summary of another passage from Bunyan.

The sermon

In Van Gogh's description of God speed! (‘Pilgrim's progress’) of 26 August 1876, the principal motifs of his late October sermon are already present, especially with regard to the landscape. In his own English the relevant passage in the sermon reads: ‘I once saw a very beautiful picture, it was a landscape at evening in the distance on the right hand side a row of hills appearing blue in the evening mist. Above those hills the splendour of the sunset, the grey clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple. the landscape is a plain or heath covered with grass and heather, here and there the white stem of a birch tree and its yellow leaves, for it was in Autumn. Through the landscape a road leads to a high mountain far, far away. On the road walks a pilgrim, staff in hand. He has been walking for a good long while already and he is very tired. And now he meets a woman, a figure in black that makes one think of St Paul's word: “As being sorrowful yet always rejoicing”’ [96].

Van Gogh seems to have had a transcription of the letter of 26 August on hand when he wrote his sermon, given the extent to which the two texts overlap. Indeed in this passage the sermon is simply a more elaborate version of the letter. We may therefore assume that by the time he took up his pen in October, the metaphor had long since crystallised in Vincent's mind.

What strikes one immediately about the description of the painting in the letter is that, far from being a straightforward exposition, it already has the tone of a sermon. This becomes especially evident when the author puts words in the pilgrim's mouth, words that have nothing to do with Boughton's painting or, for that matter, with Bunyan's text. The lines Van Gogh quotes in his description derive from sources he had already copied elsewhere. He transcribed Christina Rossetti's poem Up hill as early as October 1875, and quoted the famous phrase from St Paul's letter to the Corinthians - ‘sorrowful yet always rejoicing’ (2 Cor. 6:10) - for the first time explicitly on 19 June 1875 (but implicitly already on 9 February 1874). A year after delivering the sermon, on 30 October 1877, he combined Bunyan and Rossetti in precisely

[p. 55]

fig. 5
Portrait of de Genestet

the same way, without, however, mentioning the picture [132/122]. It would seem, therefore, that the interrelationship of these two texts interested the future artist more than the picture itself.

The discrepancies between Boughton's painting and Vincent's description of it in the sermon can easily be explained: in his sermon the Dutchman was intent upon ‘evoking’ a picture as opposed to describing one. He transformed a landscape, the central theme of which appealed to him, into a vision. After all, he was not addressing art historians in Richmond, or writing a catalogue entry. Since he did not identify the author of his ‘beautiful picture’ to his audience, he was free to elaborate, as he had already done in his August letter to Theo. Indeed, during this most religious period of his life Van Gogh frequently experimented with religious imagery in letters to his brother.

Metaphors

In Van Gogh's sermon of 1876 the theme of Psalm 119 - ‘I am a stranger in the earth’ - is elaborated in numerous texts borrowed from the Bible (which we will not go into here) and in two metaphors. The first metaphor is that of a ship tossed on the turbulent waves, the second that of a pilgrim. ‘The small boat on the stormy sea’ as a metaphor for ‘the storms of life’ derives from a text by Hugues de Lamennais.¹¹ On 7 October 1876, several weeks before the sermon, the lay preacher quoted Lamennais's text in French, inaccurately and without acknowledgement [92/76]. In the text of Van Gogh's sermon ‘Protect me o God, for my bark is so small and Thy sea is so great’ is his translation of Lammenais's ‘Protégez-nous, mon Dieu, car nos barques sont si petites et Ta mer est si grande.’¹² While writing his homily one can imagine Van Gogh's gaze occasionally resting on the prints hanging on the wall of his room, including ‘the small boat on the stormy sea’ [98/81].

Textual analysis shows that the pilgrim metaphor, including many elements in the description of the ‘very beautiful picture,’ likewise stems from a variety of sources, both literary and artistic, and from Vincent's own experience. Several examples, all derived from the mid-1870s - the period that concerns us here - will serve to illustrate this point.

11 Letter 120/101, 12 June 1877.

12 The mistake was ‘ma barque’ instead of ‘mes barques.’

The journey of life

The image of the pilgrim had long fascinated Van Gogh. In 1875 he copied four verses from Ludwig Uhland's poem Der Pilger in the poetry album he assembled for the artist Matthijs Maris.¹³ In preparing his sermon, he may have drawn inspiration from the Dutch poet Petrus de Genestet as well (fig. 5). While Vincent was living in Paris, his father, Reverend Theodorus van Gogh, had given him a volume of De Genestet's verses, which we know he read in the autumn of 1876. De pelgrimstogt (The Pilgrimage), one of the poems he may well have read, is about a pilgrim's search for the heavenly city which an angel had promised him. As in the painting described by Van Gogh in his homily, the pilgrim catches sight of the city for the first time at sunset. Vincent made no mention of the poem in late 1876,

13 See Fieke Pabst, Vincent van Gogh's poetry albums, Cahier Vincent no. 1, Zwolle 1988, p. 42.

[p. 56]

fig. 6
Théophile Chauvel, Landscape, 1879, etching,
14.3 × 19 cm, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

but did transcribe it in its entirety shortly thereafter, in a letter to Theo of 28 February 1877. He was probably familiar with it by the time he wrote his sermon, for only a few days before he preached in Richmond he quoted a similar poem by De Genestet which included related imagery: ‘steep path to nobler strife / steep path to better life’ [93/77].

‘... For it was in Autumn’

‘It seems remarkable,’ wrote Van Gogh in October 1873, ‘that the old masters almost never painted autumn whereas the modern ones have such a taste for it’ [14/11a]. Van Gogh shared his confrères' predilection, notwithstanding his claim that in fact every season was dear to him. From his Nuenen period it is the autumn landscapes which first come to mind and what best suited his tonal palette of that time. In the 1870s it was autumn landscapes, preferably at sunset, that stirred his emotions time and again. With evident affection he described examples of them by artists such as Adolf Schreyer, Louis Cabat and Jean-François Millet.¹⁴ Not far from the print with ‘the small bark on the stormy sea’ in Van Gogh's room at Isleworth hung an etching of an ‘autumn landscape [after Théophile Chauvel], view of the heath,’ which he had received as a birthday present from his friend Harry Gladwell (fig. 6) [98/81].

Van Gogh's literary interests in the 1870s also reflect his fascination with autumn. In August 1873 he devoured John Keats's Autumn [12/10a], for example, and in the summer of 1874 was completely absorbed in Jules Michelet's Les aspirations de l'automne: ‘that book was a revelation to me and immediately [became] a gospel,’ he wrote Theo on 31 July 1874 [27/20]. A number of contributions to the two poetry albums he made for his brother in 1875 were distinctly autumnal. Besides Michelet's texts he also transcribed three poems by Joseph Autran: La chanson d'octobre, Dernières feuilles and Les funérailles de l'année, as well as Sainte-Beuve's Pensée d'automne. It was, however, undoubtedly Michelet who had the greatest impact on the sermon. In the autumn of 1876 he inscribed Les aspirations de l'automne in Annie Slade-Jones's visitors book.¹⁵

When Vincent described Boughton's painting in his letter of 26 August 1876, he did not specify the season.

14 See letters 61/49, 15 December 1875, 65/51, January 1876; and 72/58; 28 March 1876 respectively.

15 All the texts are found in Pabst, op. cit. (note 13). With reference to a sermon by the Amsterdam preacher Laurillard, Vincent wrote Theo on 18 September 1877 (letter 130/110) that the clergyman had used a metaphor ‘in the spirit of Michelet or Rückert’: ‘He told how he had walked on a road where the leaves had already fallen from the trees [...] and how man, too, shall one day leave for a warmer country.’

[p. 57]

Understandably he chose autumn for the sermon - instead of spring, which is blatantly depicted in the picture - because of that season's traditional connotations: autumn corresponds to the evening or end of life, to which he was referring. Since he was to preach in autumn, moreover, that season best suited the mood of the congregation. After all, it is a time-honoured rhetorical technique to engage one's audience by addressing them in terms appropriate to the time of year, Christmas tales being an obvious example. As Van Gogh himself put it in his sermon, ‘the heart has its storms, has its seasons’ [96].

‘A landscape at evening’

In his correspondence with Theo, Vincent frequently declared his predilection for what he called (in Dickens's words) ‘blessed twilight.’ One of the painters he was most fond of was Charles Daubigny, who excelled in the depiction of atmospheric landscapes at dusk. In the second letter he sent from England, addressed to his friends Willem and Caroline van Stockum-Haanebeek in The Hague, Van Gogh transcribed the poem De Avondstond (The Evening) from Jan van Beers's De Bestedeling, which is filled with passages such as ‘the clock that proclaims the end of the day's work far and wide’ and ‘the deep red sun, sinking away in the West, unleashed the entire wealth of its colours and magical radiance’ [10/9a].¹⁶ And in 1876 he penned a cycle of four evening poems by Friedrich Rückert - Abendfeier, O wie mild der Abendrauch, Das Abendlied vom Turme and Abendstille - in Annie Slade-Jones's visitors book.¹⁷

Van Gogh's fascination with the setting of the sun is also reflected in two letters written shortly before the sermon. The first is dated 7 October (‘It was so beautiful when the sun set behind the grey clouds and when the shadows were long [...]’), while the second was written around 24 October (‘A couple of days ago I saw the sun go down there behind those elm trees with leaves now the colour of bronze’) [92/76 and 94/78]. Twilight, moreover, was Vincent's favourite moment for a walk, and the preeminent time for reflection. It was a sacred part of his day, especially ‘when two or three are gathered together in harmony.’¹⁸

To suit the gist of the sermon, and more especially the meaning of Christina Rossetti's poem, there was thus no choice but for the metaphorical picture to depict a landscape at dusk. The image of a wanderer finding a place to rest at the end of the day also occurs in the familiar hymn Nearer my God to Thee. The second verse of the hymn reads: ‘Though like a wanderer, / the sun gone down, / Darkness come over me / My rest a stone’ [53/41]. Significantly, Van Gogh included these lines in the same letter in which he quoted Christina Rossetti's poem Up hill for the first time.

16 Van Beers's poem was also copied by Theo van Gogh, at the front of the second poetry album that Vincent made for him in 1875. See Pabst, op. cit. (note 13), p. 21.

17 Ibid., p. 64.

18 See letters 119/100, 4 June 1877 and 130/110, 18 September 1877.

The woman in black

The central motif in Boughton's God speed! is an encounter between a pilgrim (‘staff in hand’) and a beautiful young woman who offers him a flask. In fact, Boughton's picture depicts two pilgrims, the one young, the other old, though the latter is partly obscured and therefore less conspicuous (fig. 7).

In his letter of 26 August 1876, Van Gogh already pictured the woman in black as he would in the sermon, but does not yet liken her to an angel. The same letter puts Christina Rossetti's words from Up hill in her mouth as well, and describes her with the words he loved so much from St Paul, ‘sorrowful yet always rejoicing.’

The most striking discrepancy between Boughton's God speed! and Van Gogh's text is that the woman who offers the flask to the pilgrim wears black, whereas Boughton dresses her colourfully after the fashion of the Pre-Raphaelites. One scholar has suggested that Van Gogh had conflated two different works by Boughton, and that the black figure in the Anglo-American's The heir presumptive (fig. 3) is actually the source of the woman in black in the sermon.¹⁹ The setting of The heir presumptive in an autumn

19 Leistra, op. cit. (note 5).

[p. 58]

fig. 7
George Henry Boughton, God speed! (detail)

landscape appears to strengthen the argument. Yet we would argue that Vincent deviated from Boughton's painting intentionally: in his private mythology there were at least two figures in black before he wrote his sermon; they could well have determined the colour of the woman's dress in his description of the ‘beautiful picture.’

First of all, there was the famous ‘malheureux vêtu de noir’ mentioned in the 18th couplet from Alfred de Musset's poem La nuit de décembre. Vincent quoted the couplet in a letter of 6 April 1875. It must have been etched on his memory because it occurred to him thirteen years later in Arles, in December 1888.²⁰ Though De Musset's poem is about an encounter with a man, the mood corresponds perfectly to the image of the weary pilgrim finding refreshment: ‘Partout où j'ai voulu m'asseoir / Partout où j'ai voulu pleurer / Partout où j'ai touché la terre / Un malheureux vêtu de noir / Auprès de moi venait s'asseoir / Et me regardait comme un frère.’ Could the comforting ‘figure in black’ in Van Gogh's sermon possibly have been inspired by De Musset's ‘malheureux vêtu de noir’?

Yet the principal model for Vincent's woman in black is undoubtedly an anonymous Portrait of a woman in the Louvre. In his day the likeness was attributed to the 17th-century French painter Philippe de Champaigne (fig. 8), but there is no longer any certainty about the artist or, for that matter, the sitter. Van Gogh hung a reproduction of the portrait in his room in Paris in July 1875 and a copy of it to his sister, Anna, in October of the same year. He was aware that the portrait had inspired one of the principal female characters in Jules Michelet's previously mentioned poem Les aspirations de l'automne, the first line of which reads ‘Je vois d'ici une dame.’ Vincent had transcribed the fragment as early as October 1873, when he wrote his friends Willem and Caroline van Stockum-Haanebeek from London. In the letter, he characterised the poem as ‘a picture of autumn,’ and described the woman who reminded Michelet of Champaigne's Portrait d'une dame amid ‘feuilles tombées,’ dressed in ‘la très-simple toilette de la dame, modeste, grave, ou la soie noire (ou grise) s'égaye à peine d'un simple ruban lilas [...]. Elégante pour son mari & simple pour les pauvres.’ Michelet had remembered the portrait for thirty years, ‘Mais comment se nommait-elle?’ [14/11a]. Van Gogh believed the sitter to be the mother of a nun in another portrait by Champaigne, likewise in the Louvre (fig. 9) [38/31].

Vincent apparently sent Theo his interpretation of Champaigne's portrait, but unfortunately the letter has not survived. Yet it is possible to infer from other correspondence

20 Letter 730/564, late December 1888. Evert van Uitert (‘A literary life, with a list of books and periodicals read by Van Gogh,’ in Evert van Uitert and Michael Hoyle [eds.], The Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam 1987, pp. 68-69) remarks: ‘De Musset's poem must have made a very deep impression on him, for more than 13 years later he quoted from it in a letter from Arles, associating it with Delacroix's Portrait of Alfred Bruyas in the museum at Montpellier [730/564]. The poet tells of a black-clad companion who so resembles him that he could be his brother. The mysterious figure turns out to be loneliness, who has been with him in moments of great sadness ever since he was a child. This is yet another example of the way in which Van Gogh fused ideas from literature and painting. At the same time it demonstrates that a poem which is only mentioned once in the letters might nevertheless have had a profound effect upon him.’

[p. 59]

that in his eyes she was the embodiment of St Paul's ‘sorrowful yet always rejoicing.’²¹ Significantly, in September 1876, just weeks before delivering his sermon, Vincent asked his brother not once but twice for ‘that page from Michelet which begins “Je vois d'ici une dame”’²² - the very passage which, as we have seen, he penned in Annie Slade-Jones's visitors book.

The extent to which art and reality coincided in Van Gogh's mind, and the manner in which he associated the two, is illustrated by the very letter he sent his brother along with the text of his sermon. The letter describes a deeply moving walk he took in Richmond the evening before he preached. The imagery with which he conjures up the experience of this stroll echoes that of the sermon, as though life were imitating art. As he beheld the town of Richmond bathed in the light of the setting sun, a woman appeared: ‘An old lady (dressed in black) with beautiful grey hair was walking under the trees.’²³

21 Champaigne's portrait did not have exclusive rights here. For instance, he also appears to have associated Bargue's print Anne de Bretagne, which hung in his room in England, with ‘sorrowful yet always rejoicing’ (letter 136/116, 9 December 1877).

22 Letters 89/82a-2 and 90/82a-l, both early September 1876. In the index of De brieven van Vincent van Gogh, op. cit. (note 2) these two mentions of Michelet's passage are erroneously grouped under L'amour instead of Les aspiration d'automne.

23 The sermon likewise includes the line ‘The hair turns grey.’ There are several references to grey hair in the letters in the context of ‘sorrowful yet always rejoicing.’ See the passage in letter 90/82a-l, early September 1876: ‘Wie heeft lust in grijze haren?’ (‘Who wants grey hair?’).

Fusion or confusion?

In summary, the composite origin of the imagery Van Gogh used in his sermon indicates that the texts chosen were, as in the case of the beloved poem by Michelet, very much ‘autumn inspirations.’ Van Gogh needed evening and autumn as symbols, and Boughton's picture, which so impressed him in the summer of 1874, provided the visual framework for his vision. It served as his point of departure, nothing more nor less, and was ideal for incorporating a stock of texts, ideas, and images drawn from the Bible, literature, art, and experience.

In an article published in the Burlington Magazine in August 1990, Xander van Eck argues that Boughton's Amsterdam canvas did not inspire Van Gogh's sermon. Those who claim it did, he asserts, anticipate Van Gogh's mental illness by thirteen years. In his opinion, the reasoning ‘required to connect painting (God speed!) and sermon, tends to distort our view of Vincent's personality and the way he perceived art.’²⁴ Though he has no new evidence to

fig. 8
Anonymous, French 17th century (formerly attributed to Philippe de Champaigne), Portrait of a lady, oil on canvas, 61 × 51 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre

24 See notes 7 and 9.

[p. 60]

fig. 9
Philippe de Champaigne, L'ex-voto, 1662, oil on canvas, 165 × 229 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre

stand on, Van Eck believes there was indeed another picture by Boughton called Pilgrim's progress, and that Van Gogh saw a sketch for the unknown work in December 1876.

We cannot be certain that Boughton's Refreshment for the pilgrims, sold recently in New York (fig. 4), is in fact the work Van Gogh saw in December 1876, but if it was, its composition obviously corresponds to Boughton's God speed.! Despite the lack of certainty, it seems clear that confusion or loss of memory is not the central issue here. Simply dismissing God speed! as the inspiration for the picture in Van Gogh's sermon, without offering any substantiated alternative, is to ignore Van Gogh's penchant for association. In her book De God van Vincent, A. Verkade-Bruining writes that ‘Vincent's first sermon [...] demonstrates his thinking at the time, which proceeds subjectively, associatively and instinctively.’²⁵ As we know from many similar instances, Vincent was not so much inclined to confuse things as to amalgamate them. Admittedly, he mistakenly referred to a painting about pilgrims as ‘Pilgrim's progress,’ but that was because he had just been reading Bunyan's book by the same title. Nor is this by any means the only example of the artist's ‘confusion’ that comes to mind. One could point to other cases of fusion (as opposed to confusion) during this period as well. On one occasion, for instance, he credited his favourite artist, Millais, with The light of the world, which was of course painted by William Holman Hunt.²⁶

There is one other example that resembles ‘the Boughton case’ still more closely. On 15 July 1875 Vincent recommended that Theo read Thomas à Kempis's L'imitation de Jésus Christ. ‘This was probably the favourite book of that woman painted by Ph. de Champaigne; the Louvre has the portrait of her daughter, a nun, also by Ph. de Ch. [fig. 9]; she has L'imitation lying on a chair next to her’ [38/31]. The fact is, there is no title on the book in Champaigne's picture - which actually depicts two nuns - and yet there can be no doubt which painting Vincent had in mind.

25 Verkade-Bruining, op. cit. (note 3), p. 28.

26 Letter 822/614, 17 November 1889. For another instance of (con)fusion, see the article by Anita Vriend in this issue of The Van Gogh Museum Journal.

[p. 61]

A number of metaphors in Van Gogh's 1876 sermon are thus based on an amalgamation of ideas derived from texts, both religious and secular, he had long been familiar with. The Dutchman associated this range of ideas with a picture by Boughton and a book by Bunyan. We have seen that, in view of Van Gogh's purpose, the discrepancies between Godspeed! and the painting ‘described’ in his sermon do not disqualify Boughton's picture as a major source of inspiration. Rather, they indicate that Vincent simply used the work as a backdrop for his religious imagery; their complex, manifold origins are not limited to Boughton's 1874 Godspeed!

It seems highly improbable that the picture Van Gogh conjured in his sermon actually existed. Even if the Boughton ‘sketch’ mentioned in his letter of late November 1876 had nothing to do with that artist's Godspeed! or, for that matter, the Refreshment for the pilgrims recently sold in New York, it is highly unlikely that it corresponded to the ‘beautiful picture’ Vincent had in mind. In October 1876 he called Boughton's picture of pilgrims ‘an inspiration,’ which is exactly the purpose it served as he prepared to address the congregation in Richmond. If we are to believe Van Gogh, then references to works of art were not at all uncommon in the sermons of his day. As he later wrote to Theo: ‘Clergymen often introduce “things of beauty” into a sermon, but its dismal stuff and dreadfully stodgy’ [233/204].²⁷

27 1 or 2 June 1882; translated by Arnold Pomerans.