Van Gogh and Britain: Pioneer Collectors
Until September 24; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh

When sentry boxes appear outside the Dean Gallery, you know the Festival can’t be far away. The installation of these pale blue ticket booths suggests that Van Gogh’s name is fully expected to work its crowd-pulling magic on Edinburgh’s summer-time population.

It wasn’t always that way. It took decades before audiences in Scotland, Wales and England were prepared to consider Van Gogh’s paintings as anything but the visual ramblings of a lunatic. Critics and cartoonists guffawed at the groundbreaking Post-Impressionist exhibition in London in 1910, branding it the work of “practical jokers and madmen”.

At the time, artist and dealer Hugh Blaker despaired that Van Gogh’s importance “will not percolate into official craniums until about the year 2000”. Fortunately, he was only half-right. By the 1920s, public galleries had started to take an interest, and Van Gogh’s paintings gradually started to find their way into public collections. The National Gallery of Scotland bought its first Van Gogh in 1934, for the princely sum of £1,600.

That vibrant painting is today joined by 29 others, all brought into Britain at some time before the Second World War. There are few angles not already covered by the eager field of Van Gogh studies, but this is one of them. Guest curator, Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey, has spent years tracing the movements of Van Gogh paintings into Britain during those early decades, piecing together the story of his posthumous rise to fame.

It’s a specialist angle, focussing on the individual collectors, dealers and gallery directors rather than the paintings themselves. The story of Van Gogh’s introduction to Britain isn’t Hollywood material – with a few exceptions, it’s a relatively dry stock-take of purchases and sales made 100 years ago.

Alexander Reid is chief among the exceptions. The Glasgow dealer was Van Gogh’s flatmate in Paris. The two men, with their red hair and beards, looked so alike that apparently they could be mistaken for twins. When Van Gogh one day suggested that they should form a suicide pact, Reid, understandably, left in a hurry.

To his father’s disgust, Reid brought back with him two gifts from Van Gogh; his portrait, and a still life of a bowl of apples. Embarrassed that his son was dealing in such “atrocities”, James Reid promptly sold the pair for £10 to a French dealer. Though both of paintings are now in American museums, a further vibrant portrait of Alexander Reid was bought direct from the painter’s nephew, in 1929, by the dealer’s son, and since 1974 has belonged to the Kelvingrove.

Though accepted wisdom is that Britain was slow to warm to Van Gogh, there were collectors in Scotland whose appetite was ready-whetted by the bold palette of the Colourists and the shimmering brushwork of William McTaggart. A cluster of collectors in Dundee included William Boyd, whose fortune was built on marmalade, and on the West Coast enthusiasts included Elizabeth Workman, wife of a shipbroker, who bought three Van Goghs in the 1920s.

Though collectors such as Reid, Boyd and Workman were lucky enough to own Van Gogh paintings early on, many of the works have since slipped out of the country. Of the two paintings in the show owned by Boyd, one belongs to Scotland, and the other to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The writhing vase of Oleanders once owned by Workman is now on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Without Bailey’s new scholarly angle, the National Galleries of Scotland would never have succeeded in persuading museums across the globe to part with their precious Van Goghs. But if the cabinets full of receipts and exhibition catalogues aren’t what you came for, it’s possible to see this show simply as a mini-retrospective.

The mix of works is slightly odd, dictated not by the usual stylistic or didactic criteria, but by the individual tastes and opportunities of connoisseurs a century ago. There are some real beauties, particularly from Van Gogh’s last years in France. Wheatfield With Cypresses, from the National Gallery in London, commands a whole room with its stately presence, and from the same gallery, the intense energy of Two Crabs almost bites you. One word I certainly wouldn’t expect to hear, from official craniums or otherwise, is “atrocities”.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.07.06