Original subtitles

Ever since the earliest programmes flickered onto our screens,

film-makers, presenters and experts have all turned to television

to bring art out of museums and galleries

and into our living rooms.

Now, this may seem rather vulgar.

Quite right, it is.

As the great masters became available to millions

instead of hundreds, programme-makers found

new ways for us to appreciate them,

from the utterly daft...

GLASS SHATTERS

FummsbowotaazaaUu po.

..to the downright astonishing.

That's extraordinary!

With over 60 years of glorious BBC archive to explore, I'm going

to examine the life and legacy of a man who has become the very

embodiment of the tortured artist - Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh was 37 when he shot himself,

but in the last four years of his life,

he'd change the history of art.

Whether painting some of the world's

most beloved works...

It was as if he was looking at the sun itself

when he looked at the sunflowers.

..or using colour in ways that changed art forever...

A great ejaculation of emotional energy, not to mention paint.

..programme-makers have tried to pinpoint where

he found his inspiration...

Excuse me. Yes? Is this Paris?

It is, yes. Would you explain the principles of impressionism to me?

..and cast some of our greatest actors to help us

understand his complex psyche,

helping create the myth of the tortured artist

and giving us a unique window

into the mind of one of the world's most famous painters.

I wouldn't exactly have chosen madness,

but once one has something like that, one can't catch it any more.

I've selected what I think are the best moments to tell

the television history of a man completely overlooked

in his lifetime.

He's my favourite artist and he is someone who has touched

the lives of millions of people around the globe.

It's easy to be attracted to the story of Vincent van Gogh.

He only started painting at 27,

sold virtually nothing during his lifetime,

then tragically took his own life just ten years later.

But in that one decade, van Gogh produced a lifetime's work.

What also sets Vincent apart are the hundreds of letters he left behind.

They have allowed us to fall in love with van Gogh, the man,

as well as the artist.

I'm obsessive about studying

the life and work of Vincent van Gogh,

and I'm really interested to explore how programme-makers have treated

his story over the decades -

particularly how they've dealt with the idea of his mental health.

Before I get stuck in exploring Vincent's psyche,

let's just clear one thing up - how to pronounce his name.

I am Vincent van Goch.

You are Vincent van Goff.

Vincent van Go.

Goch. I like Goch. I know.

I always say van Goff.

The Americans say van Go.

And the Dutch say van Goch,

which I can't say.

He signed it Vincent.

I'm going with van Goff.

The first sighting of Vincent's work on the BBC was back in 1955.

These are his paintings arriving for an exhibition in Manchester.

Despite the terrifyingly casual handling,

the paintings survived intact, and the public flocked to see them.

Although the magic is a little bit lost in black-and-white.

Vincent's paintings really came alive on TV with

the arrival of colour.

But what's striking is how even the earliest films are already

preoccupied with his tortured life.

So, when we read of the great price that is paid for a van Gogh,

or hear how much they mean to people to go to see them

in the big exhibitions and galleries,

or perhaps a reproduction of the Sunflowers,

because it means much to them,

we should remember that the real price

of these paintings is the price of a life -

the life of a man who suffered much

and who, in his lifetime, sold only one painting.

He had so many things to say, and that we have those things.

It's the biography with the work.

The two go together,

and we can't separate the biography from the work.

Vincent was born in Holland in 1853, the son of a cleric,

and spent most of his career in France,

but he has become so famous that, over the decades,

BBC film-makers have wanted to remind us

of Britain's own claim to Vincent,

as a result of his time in London as a trainee art dealer.

Did you have a happy childhood?

No, I was a lonely child with bouts of melancholia

which nobody could fathom.

What a marvellous hat. Yes.

One really cannot be in London without one.

This 1975 documentary retraced the artist's first steps in England.

"It will be quite a different life for me in London,

"as I shall probably have to live alone in rooms.

"I shall have to take care of many things

"I don't have to worry about now.

"I am looking forward very much to seeing London."

The young man - not quite 20 -

who wrote those words to his brother in 1873

was Vincent van Gogh.

And this is where he lived - 87 Hackford Road, Brixton.

Though Vincent hadn't begun to paint,

I agree with the film's argument that his short stay in London

awakened a new creative and social conscience.

Each week, van Gogh would make an expedition to the offices

of The Illustrated London News

and The Graphic to admire the latest issue.

The outstanding social realist among the artists van Gogh admired

was Luke Fildes.

This engraving, Houseless And Hungry,

won Fildes a commission

to illustrate Dickens's last and unfinished novel,

Edwin Drood.

Fildes had visited Dickens at his home, Gads Hill,

on the day of his death in 1870.

And the outcome of that visit was a famous drawing -

The Empty Chair.

Van Gogh found it deeply moving.

"Empty chairs.

"There are many of them.

"There will be even more."

It's extraordinary how much of the future van Gogh is

rooted in this early love of English literature and English illustration.

He wrote of Dickens,

"There is no writer who is more of a painter

"and a black-and-white artist.

"His figures are resurrections."

I mean, it's only natural that we would want to take Vincent to

be our own artist.

Was Vincent van Gogh, the artist, born in Britain? No,

but there were definitely some early stirrings here.

By 2006, programme-making could be grittier and darker.

Simon Schama explored the realities

of Vincent's life in London's underbelly.

It was in the Victorian gaslight that the real Vincent

started to emerge.

Amidst the grime and grit of Disraeli's London,

the starchy young Dutchman rediscovered Jesus.

It is an old faith, and it is a good faith that our life...

He appointed himself as a missionary to the destitute,

and as he wore out shoe leather tramping past the dispossessed,

the drunks and the whores,

Vincent grew to despise the pygmy world of the galleries.

What he wanted to be was a preacher.

So, St Vincent The Good abandon the plush red carpets

and set off in search of captives starved for light.

And who is Jesus?

He is the great man of sorrows who knows our ills.

Vincent headed to Belgium, getting a job preaching to coal miners.

And God wills that, in imitation of Christ,

man should live humbly and go on the journey of his life -

not reaching for the sky, but...

..but adapting himself to them Earth below.

HE COUGHS

The 1990s were a boom decade for BBC docudrama,

and Omniverse used Vincent's missionary days as a way to

dramatise the early signs of a troubled mind.

For... For He shall cover thee with his feathers.

Perhaps they were little too dramatic.

I'm sorry.

It was the one period in van Gogh's life when

he really appeared an obsessive to outsiders,

and he found it very difficult to

communicate with the miners, but I suspect he didn't behave like that.

He does talk in the letters about having visited a coal mine,

but it wasn't to preach,

so in fact I think that clip is good drama but not necessarily true.

Vincent's missionary work came to an end after

he was sacked in Belgium.

He moved back to Holland, where something monumental began -

Vincent started to paint.

As Andrew Graham Dixon discovered, the empathy towards the poor

and destitute that Vincent had found in England

was now translated into his art.

In Holland, he chose again to settle among the rural poor,

but this time not to preach to his subjects but to paint them.

It's a strange paradox that Vincent van Gogh,

who painted some of the most radiant,

light-filled paintings in the whole history of art, should have

begun - this is his first major ambitious figure painting -

with a work that is so...

..dark, so murky, so copper-coloured.

It's called The Potato Eaters, and what you first notice about it

is this pervasive drabness.

The picture was greatly criticised.

The hands were said to be too gnarled,

the arms too long,

the faces too caricatured,

the eyes too bulging,

the noses too much like potatoes.

But it was all intentional. Van Gogh wanted us

to feel that those hands, reaching into that plate of cubed

potatoes, had dug those potatoes up from the earth, those hands

had been shaped, misshapen, by all that manual labour.

This was really the culmination of his early

years as a painter of peasants and people who were suffering.

It was a work that couldn't easily be sold.

I mean, who wanted a picture of those peasants

in their miserable home, eating ghastly potatoes

and too much strong coffee?

Theo, Vincent's brother, knew this, and kept asking him in letters,

"Will you please lighten, lighten your palette?"

In Power Of Art,

Simon Schama focuses more intently on Vincent's artistic philosophy,

the narrowing gap between the painter and his subject matter.

The dark, thick colour was chosen not just for pictorial effect

but, you might say, philosophically to say something.

And that something isn't meant to be charmingly rustic.

I mean, how brown can you get?

This is manure brown, the grey-brown, as he explained,

of dusty spuds before they've been rinsed.

Lost in total identification, van Gogh paints like a clod,

the heavy, loaded brush doing its own manual labour.

The picture seems trowelled and dug rather than painted.

There's total union between painter and subject.

It's all in the hands.

I've tried to bring out the idea that these people eating

potatoes by the light of their lamp have dug the earth with

the self-same hands that they're putting into the dish.

Manual labour! A meal honestly earned.

Anyone who wants to paint peasants looking namby-pamby

had best suit himself.

Vincent had found his philosophy of art.

In the two years he spent in rural Holland,

he completed nearly 200 paintings. But, let's be honest,

they're not what we think of as vintage van Gogh.

Van Gogh is renowned for his thick, generous use of colour.

Think of those bright wheatfields, the heady sunflowers,

the blazing sunshine that emanates from his landscapes.

But just where he found the source of inspiration for his use

of colour has been debated for decades.

In 1886, Vincent moved to Paris,

hoping to learn more about his craft from other artists.

The most important Parisian painters of the day were

the Impressionists, famously obsessed with colour.

And their influence on Vincent has certainly not been

overlooked on screen.

Yes? Excuse me... Yes? Is this Paris? It is, yes.

Would you explain the principles of Impressionism to me?

Impressionism is essentially the capturing of light -

the ephemeral colours in the sky, for example,

a flash of sunlight on a river at dusk. Thank you.

And, erm, complementary colours? When mixed,

we discover that the most opposite of colours in the spectrum are in

fact the most complementary - red and green, for example,

blue and orange - and when placed side by side, both colours will

seem strengthened and intensified and even convey feelings.

So...the feelings of the painter can be expressed through the colours?

Perhaps one day...

..artists will only paint...

..colours!

Nothing but colour!

Thank you very much.

As well as featuring some pretty bad teeth,

the 1990 Omnibus was having some serious fun with dramatic form.

But it's still a pretty conventional take on the influence

of the Impressionists.

By 2006, Simon Schama was challenging that influence.

The usual story is the Dutch frog kissed by Impressionism

and turned into the prince of colour painting.

Vincent and his art at last lightened up.

Away with the northern murk, bring on the tubes of carmine,

cobalt and chrome yellow.

It's not all wrong. Vincent does get colour, becomes addicted to it,

consuming its brilliance, disgorging it onto the canvas.

And for a while, he does

what you're supposed to do as a trainee Impressionist.

Down by the river at Asnieres, trap the light and you've got the point.

So everything is speckled and freckled, dappled and mottled.

Right, then. It's Pissarro on Monday.

Look at the colour-coded dots in this restaurant

and you'll see him doing his pointillist homework.

Seurat on Tuesday.

Old Vincent could do it, all right,

but there was something altogether too decorative

about the Impressionists, marinading the meat of human existence

in the rinse of their luminescence.

There's a very slight, perhaps not pejorative,

look at Impressionist subject matter that they were just a bit pretty,

a bit decorative, they were not serious.

And in Vincent's case, he was trying not to do simply decorative

works, he was trying to do something more grand, more serious,

something with more gravitas.

The other thing about van Gogh's colour is that it provides

vibrant visual material.

In February 1888, he relocated to Arles in the South of France.

Not only is Provence great to visit for painters -

and, of course, programme makers -

but the artworks Vincent created there have become fan favourites.

POSH ACCENT: Now let us look at the "sunflahrs".

How often do we see a bunch of "flahrs"?

And do they seem just that - a bunch of "flahrs"?

Yellow is a cheerful colour, and to van Gogh it was

the colour of light and therefore of life and of love.

I think he means "flowers".

But to me, he's also missing something.

30 years later, Andrew Graham-Dixon takes Vincent's use of colour

beyond petals to the divine nature of light.

Van Gogh had left Holland simply because it was too gloomy

for an artist trying to find God,

trying to find some sense of transcendence in the natural world.

Too much rain, too much shadow, too much darkness.

That's why he went to the South of France.

In the South of France, he felt illuminated by the sun.

He said, "Suddenly, nature's colours sing to me."

He felt that he'd never seen the colours of nature before.

He felt that he'd found what he was looking for,

and I think the sunflower was so important to him because it was

a plant that seemed to him to have somehow taken into itself,

kept, preserved all that radiance, all that colour.

It was as if he was looking at the sun itself

when he looked at these blooms.

And he painted these pictures in a kind of storm of enthusiasm.

Simon Schama continues the study

of light in another of Vincent's paintings, The Sower,

and compares it with an earlier artist's version of the same subject

to reveal just how far he was pushing the boundaries of colour.

It's his take on an older painting by Jean-Francois Millet.

Vincent's version echoes Millet's lyrical anthem to noble toil.

But Millet's sower is rooted to the soil, while van Gogh's

floats on a carpet of brilliance,

like Jesus walking on water.

A scene of drudgery is dissolved into the fertility miracle

that's being enacted beneath a high-wattage sun.

Van Gogh described the paintings that really worked for him

as a "jouissance" - the French for "orgasm".

And he really did mean that -

a great ejaculation of emotional energy, not to mention paint.

It was actually in Provence, not Paris, that he

really made his breakthrough, when he was isolated from other artists.

Perhaps if he'd been in Paris, surrounded by everyone else,

he just would have been copying.

But he went off to Provence, and he was working by himself, and that's

the period when he really developed to be the van Gogh that we love.

The light in the South of France was at least as strong an influence

on Vincent's colour as the Impressionists.

But in 2013, Waldemar Januszczak flipped that thought on its head.

Actually, night has turned out to be

one of art's most productive times of day.

Yes, you can't see as much in the dark, but what you can see

has extra drama to it, mystery, poetry and even madness.

# Here comes the night... #

Taking us to the painting of the Yellow House, where Vincent

lived in Arles, he reveals something rather surprising.

Vincent also painted the outside of it.

But if you look carefully at the road in front of the house,

you can see a big mound going down the middle.

Roadworks. Van Gogh is painting roadworks. Why?

Because these roadworks are special.

They're putting in the gas.

Just after he arrived in Arles, the town was connected to gas,

and gas lighting was put in for the first time.

# Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket... #

Suddenly, Arles was lit up at night. This twinkling cafe exterior shows

the new gas lighting in action, conquering the night.

# Save it for a rainy day... #

In 1980, the series One Hundred Great Paintings took a different

tack on the night-time masterpiece,

giving free rein to the dapper David Hockney,

an energetic look at an old master.

He began to be fascinated

by artificial light of a little town at night.

This particular picture, it's based on the idea of contrasting

two colours - yellow and blue.

And I don't know whether the colour-TV camera can pick up

all the yellows that are there, but there's quite a number.

I'll tell you, there must be certainly four or five

different yellows and then three or four different green-yellows.

If you begin to half-close your eyes, even from myself here,

he would, when he's painting the picture...

People tend to screw up their face like that to sometimes see clearly.

The effect is, I think, stunning, it is real.

And yet, when you step back and you look at all that paint,

it's luscious, delightful, marvellous, fresh.

Wonderful. It's fabulous, actually.

Here is an artist talking about an artist,

and it's different from what a critic might say.

An artist is looking at an artist's work in terms of his own practice

or her own practice, so is thinking in that kind of critical way.

And the way he talked about the painting was the way

that, certainly, van Gogh would understand.

He knew what he'd done with those paints, which,

normally speaking, you might not recognise.

But an artist understood that, and of course

he therefore understood the success of the painting.

Living in Arles, over the course of just eight months

Vincent completed over 100 paintings.

It was this period that would later make

the man, as well as his art, a television star.

Yes! Exactly like that.

Good evening! Does the name Vincent van Gogh ring a bell?

Don't mention that man to me! Excuse me!

But by October 1888, change was in the air.

Vincent was getting a flatmate in the Yellow House -

a fellow painter that he hugely admired...

Where's the Dutchman?

I'm here.

..the not-exactly-modest Paul Gauguin.

Paul Gauguin.

The collaboration, if we can even call it that, between van Gogh

and the French artist Paul Gauguin has become the stuff of legend.

Their encounter, which lasted for barely two months,

has given us some really dramatic TV moments.

Vincent first met Paul Gauguin in Paris.

Now he convinced the painter he so admired to come to the

South of France on his brother Theo's dime.

The BBC has spent decades portraying

this period from every possible angle.

And, as you might expect, 1990's Omnibus pumps up the drama.

As I see it, there's too much modelling.

Too much modelling? Too much facial modelling!

When Gauguin arrives in Arles, being five years senior

and having the experience that he's had, van Gogh

will be very slightly deferential towards him, as one might.

Look at this. Hm? Look at it!

How can you paint in this? Hm?

But then Gauguin says things to van Gogh like, "Look at your paintbox.

"What a mess! You haven't put the tops back on the tubes.

"You've squeezed from the middle, not from the bottom."

I think Paul Gauguin is immensely egotistical, but he's

not of the same sort of fragile mental state that Vincent is.

He's quite a strong character.

Ohhh! My God!

You cook like you paint. You bung it all in and hope for the best!

Well, I suppose on film people either have to be good guys

or bad guys, so it's quite tempting for film-makers to portray

those two men in those different ways.

And if one's trying to convey what happened in the Yellow House

in that confined space over that two-month period,

it's very tempting to make Gauguin into an ogre.

25 years later,

Jeremy Paxman travelled to Arles to revisit the relationship,

taking the time to set up Vincent's grand vision for the Yellow House.

The underdog painter becomes less of a victim.

They lived there in a sort of commune or a medieval guild -

or, as he put it, like a band of Japanese Buddhist monks.

And his art-dealer brother, Theo,

would feed them and clothe them

and give them canvases and paint,

and the artists would just create.

Vincent spent weeks writing to Gauguin, persuading him

to join him in his utopian idea.

The sunflowers were painted to decorate Gauguin's bedroom.

He bought 12 wicker chairs for the brother artists

and one ornate chair for Gauguin himself, whose age

and success meant he would be the Father Superior in their community.

But the real Gauguin couldn't have been more different to

Vincent's monkish ideal - a canny ex-banker,

self-publicist and serial adulterer.

Paxman still sees the relationship as fundamentally unequal,

with Gauguin in the dominant role.

Simon Schama changes the angle,

seeing both men as artists first and housemates second.

And he's more concerned with how Gauguin's arrival

affected Vincent's painting.

Then Gauguin arrived, and the summer of visions was over.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

At first, Gauguin found the friendly competition amusing

and even creatively challenging.

But the result was just to point out the differences between them.

Here's what Vincent does with an excursion to

a vineyard at the time of the grape harvest -

a rush of energy through the painting,

lots of bending and picking under that great sun god,

the brush jiggling in what he called his "best spermatic manner".

And here's Paul's take on rural labour, called In The Heat -

a drowsy, heavy moment with two figures,

one of which is a pig, a half-naked woman,

her arms stained to the elbows with red grape juice,

the shadow of her big breasts outlined,

as though wanting the laziest of massages,

which the painter duly supplies with his brushes.

It wasn't just a matter of technique or subject matter.

Their philosophies of art were diametrically opposed.

For Gauguin, art was just a swim in pure sensation.

"Don't sweat it," he once crushingly said. "It's just a dream."

But for Vincent van Gogh, there was no joy without sweat.

The ride his art gave you was into the world, not away from it.

In the last decade, film-makers have increasingly

turned to personal primary sources.

In Painted With Words, Alan Yentob used the letters of both

van Gogh and Gauguin to conjure their voices...

..and, in an early TV role, cast Benedict Cumberbatch as Vincent.

In his steady hands,

the relationship looks very different, and not so one-sided.

Gauguin, in spite of himself...

HE CHUCKLES

..and in spite of me...

..has proved to me a little it was time to change things a bit.

I'm now working from memory.

And all my earlier studies will still be useful for that work,

as they will remind me of former things that I have seen.

And one of these was a subject he painted again and again -

the sower. Now the influence of Gauguin can clearly be seen.

An immense lemon-yellow disc for the sun.

Green-yellow sky with pink clouds.

The field is violet, the sower and the tree Prussian blue.

But it wasn't long before tensions developed between the two artists.

Gauguin's work was selling well in Paris.

Vincent still couldn't find buyers.

He started to drink heavily again.

His behaviour was becoming odder and odder.

And after just eight weeks, Gauguin became increasingly exasperated.

In general, Vincent and myself do not see eye to eye,

particularly on painting.

Ah, he likes my pictures very much, but when I'm painting them,

he criticises me for this and that.

Vincent and I can absolutely not live side by side without trouble.

A few days later, the two artists got into a heated argument.

It was so bizarre I couldn't take it.

He even asked me, "Are you going to leave?"

When I heard behind me a familiar step - short, quick, irregular -

I turned around in that instant, as Vincent rushed towards me,

an open razor in hand.

Of course, there's one episode that's become more famous

than any other in van Gogh's life.

A few days before Christmas, he took his razor and he sliced off his ear.

This has come to overshadow the rest of his life story,

and sometimes even his paintings.

And to a large extent, the blame for this lies with the 1956 Hollywood

classic Lust For Life,

with Kirk Douglas in the throes of impassioned rage.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

Well, Lust For Life, with all its terrific music,

really portrays van Gogh with full-blown Hollywood drama.

As for the ear-cutting scene, you couldn't get more melodramatic.

MUSIC CONTINUES

SILENCE

VAN GOGH SCREAMS

We don't actually see the ear being cut off,

but there's a sort of moment of silence.

And I think for subsequent film-makers it's always been

a challenge on how to portray that terrible moment.

Because Hollywood wanted to make this full-blown drama

and melodrama, I think it's responsible for an awful

lot of the myth of the tortured artist.

For decades, film-makers followed Lust For Life in obsessing

over the incident, a moment of drama directors could go wild with

and let loose their creative vision.

But in 2010, Painted With Words skipped the blood and gore

and went straight to the padded cell...

DOOR SLAMS SHUT

..finding drama in Vincent's reaction instead.

I wouldn't exactly have chosen madness, had there been a choice.

But once one has something like that, one can't catch it any more.

But while some programmes had a field day with the self-mutilation,

others weren't so sure.

SIMON SCHAMA: Ask anyone, "Who's your idea of the tortured artist,

"the mad genius?", chances are you'll get one answer and just one

answer - "Vincent van Gogh. Sliced his ear off, didn't he?"

Well, no, actually, he didn't.

What he did do was cut off a fleshy chunk of ear lobe.

Oh, I know, I know, that's enough to suggest he is barmy, isn't it?

And when he eventually did shoot himself,

there was bound to be a chorus of, "Well, yes, he would, wouldn't he?"

And so films began trying to separate fact from fiction.

In 2016, the aptly named Mystery Of Van Gogh's Ear continued

the trend towards seeking out primary sources,

with Jeremy Paxman looking to set the record straight.

The mystery all turns on events two nights before Christmas 1888.

The bare facts are reported in local press accounts.

At 11:30, a man named Monsieur Vincent

appeared at the door of a brothel on Rue du Bout d'Arles.

He asked there for a girl named Rachel.

When she arrived, he handed her his own severed ear.

But can the reports really be trusted?

More than one account gives his nationality not as Dutch,

but as Polish.

Three versions say the ear was in a package.

Another says he was holding it in place on his head.

Most say this girl Rachel was a prostitute.

But one says she was just a girl who worked at a cafe.

The film then follows lead investigator Bernadette Murphy,

who brings the whole story back to Kirk Douglas and Lust For Life.

"When Irving Stone, the author of Lust For Life, was in Arles,

"he visited Dr Felix Rey. Dr Rey was the only man still alive

"who had seen Vincent van Gogh without his ear.

"Dr Rey drew a medical diagram for Irving Stone which he later

"signed and which Mr Stone now has in his possession."

It's dated 1955. So what I need to know is,

is Felix Rey's medical diagram still somewhere?

Felix Rey was the doctor who treated Vincent's injury

throughout his time in the hospital.

More than that, the two became friends, and Vincent painted him.

There could be no better witness

to what happened to Vincent van Gogh's ear.

And somewhere there's a document he gave to Hollywood writer

Irving Stone answering exactly that question.

To find that document, Bernadette Murphy travelled to

San Francisco to dig around in Irving Stone's personal archive.

One of the things I've finally found was a little

document in the first folder which demonstrates what you've been

looking for, I think, which is what happened with the ear.

And if you go through here,

eventually you find this tiny little document here.

Oh, my godfathers! And it's from Dr Rey - Felix.

It's just a thin, little, tiny piece of paper here,

and so much is so eloquent in its own way.

This is from Dr Felix Rey. I can definitely say that's his signature.

It's dated the 18th of August 1930.

And it's unbelievable. It's a before-and-after drawing,

and basically it's a drawing of an ear, and there's a dotted line,

and it says, "The ear was cut with a razor following the dotted line,"

and the aspect that is left of the lobe of the ear.

That's what it looked like afterwards.

So it really documents that he removed his whole ear.

It must have been an incredibly painful thing to do.

And what was going through his mind at that time must be remarkable.

Well, I've been working, I think, as you know, on this for some time,

and when you finally get to...

SHE SOBS

..see something...

..you realise what...

what a really gruesome thing happened.

It brings home the violence of the act.

In this case, television's helping to lead the research,

but does this discovery really matter in the grand

scheme of the study of Vincent's life?

It's quite interesting.

In fact, it's not really terribly interesting about how

much of the ear came off. I wonder if anyone does think so.

The more of the ear that was cut off,

the more determined he was to really injure himself.

So if it is correct that he cut off nearly all his ear,

I think it IS significant and it shows, if you like, the depths,

the despair which he'd fallen into at that particular moment.

Van Gogh's mind fascinates us. For decades, we've considered him

an artist that walks the fine line between executing

your passion to the fullest

and crossing over into that dangerous area of self-destruction.

I think he's been considered a bit of a madman, but I think now

we understand him in the much more nuanced terms of mental illness.

After recovering from self-mutilation,

Vincent voluntarily entered psychiatric treatment.

It's a period programme-makers have often sought to portray on screen.

Good afternoon. My name is Vincent van Gogh.

I just wanted to let you know that I've recently been

released from the Saint-Paul mental institute.

It's just possible that I could

have an attack on the journey to Paris, but I'd like...

But it goes beyond just telling the story.

Vincent's been diagnosed with dozens of disorders over the decades,

and it seems television has become THE place

to explore each new theory.

He suffered, as they say, from manic depression, which is

an opaque way of skirting an issue that we still don't understand.

From the letters, it's clear that he was suffering from bipolar disorder.

"Patient has had several attacks during his stay

"in the establishment, lasting two weeks to one month.

"During these attacks, patient's subjected to frightful terrors

"and tried several times to poison himself

"with kerosene or oil paints."

Whatever it was, Vincent's mental illness has become central

to our efforts to understand his tortured life as an artist.

And it's the reason why, in 1980, Robert Hughes travelled to

France for his landmark series The Shock Of The New.

This is the lunatic asylum at Saint-Remy de Provence

in the South of France, near Arles.

For a year and eight days - from May 1889 to May 1890 -

Vincent van Gogh was under treatment here.

He suffered from agonising fits of paranoia

and a kind of paralysis of the will accompanied by hallucinations,

during which he couldn't work at all.

And these were separated by long, clear months

during which he could and did,

which were in turn punctuated by the most extraordinary

moments of visionary insight.

At such moments, everything he saw was swept up in a current of energy.

Everything he sees is made from the same plasma.

The moon comes out of eclipse, the stars blaze,

the sky heaves like the ocean and the cypresses move with it.

Today, the doctors would give him lithium and tranquillisers,

and we wouldn't have the paintings, perhaps. We don't know.

By 1980, naturally, Hughes was critical of how Vincent was treated.

But what I find interesting is the link

he makes between Vincent's state of mind and his painting.

Hughes believes the illness is inspiring his art.

Six years later, Sir David Piper strengthened that link

by examining Vincent's self-portraits...

If you didn't know van Gogh, you might wonder why

he didn't choose a subject he liked, rather than this.

..using psychology and some pretty dodgy lighting.

And yet this is not an isolated phenomenon.

It's the climax, rather, of a whole series of self-portraits,

and it's a series which in its richness, its vividness,

has hardly any parallels in the history of art.

Obviously, these portraits are experimental in style,

building up a vibrant colour structure

and strokes of pure colour laid side by side.

But also, I think, most people agree, cumulatively,

they convey the impression of a man haunted -

a man hunted, even.

Years ago, when I was first considering the self-portraits as a

sequence, they called to my mind forcibly the feeling that police

photographs give.

The self-portraits, above all,

had charted his attempt to live with himself.

He failed.

Actually, I think Piper's too caught up in Vincent's life

to see his work clearly.

It's extraordinary, like, the narrative that people put on these

paintings when they really want to make their point about kind of doom

and gloom and death and tragedy.

For me, they're about honesty, about what it feels like to be alive.

I just don't read them like that at all.

But interpreting Vincent's mind through his work has become

a TV pastime.

In 1994, Sister Wendy examined one of Vincent's most famous

paintings, dramatically projecting onto it what she believed

she knew of his mental state.

Now, this is his picture of his bedroom,

the centre of the little house he so loved -

his own heart, as it were.

And it's such a frightening picture. It's so claustrophobic.

The walls all seem to be closing in on us.

There are two doors, but notice they're both shut.

We can't get through them. We can't see through the window.

There's such loneliness here - the double bed with the two pillows...

..and over the bed, that weird, tumultuous landscape that seems to

be a kind of picture of what van Gogh's mind

might have been like when he was disturbed.

Van Gogh here is expressing intense anxiety and frustration,

held in a vigorous, trembling tension.

It need not have such criticism, I don't think,

but I think she's bringing to it the biography

and all she knows about poor van Gogh

in the Yellow House, and so she sees it as being frightening.

Separating Vincent's biography and state of mind from his work

is almost impossible. What is fascinating is how the portrayal of

his illness has changed over the decades.

One of the more famous moments from Vincent's life is of him

eating his paints - a scene included in nearly every programme.

In 1990, Linus Roache plays Vincent caught up in a frenzied state,

externalising his rage.

Get off me! Get off me!

They're murdering me! They're murdering me!

They're murdering me! Leave me alone!

Leave me alone! Leave me alone!

16 years later, Andy Serkis's Vincent has internalised this

emotion, which, to me, is more haunting.

In 2010, Benedict Cumberbatch's performance incorporates

van Gogh's letters, giving the artist a stronger voice -

an addition that brings out the complexity of a man

suffering from mental illness.

I'm losing the vague dread, the fear, the thing that...

..little by little, can come to consider madness

as being an illness like any other.

As far as I know, the doctor here is inclined to consider what

I've had as an attack of an epileptic nature.

It's quite odd, perhaps, that the result of this terrible attack is

that in my mind there's hardly any really clear desire or hope left.

I'm thinking of squarely accepting my profession as a madman.

This particular clip does show him being quiet and being pensive,

and I think that's the great thing about it.

It shows him as a thoughtful human being,

and certainly that comes through in the letters.

He's somebody who's very sensitive,

and it's worth seeing a kind of portrayal of him

that's going to be more fair, that's going to be more understanding

of what it's like to have that particular mental disorder.

It's interesting to see the way that the portrayal of, say,

mental illnesses have been portrayed at different times,

which obviously reflects changing attitudes.

Tragically, Vincent's mental illness would lead to his death

on the 29th of July 1890.

In Lust For Life, Kirk Douglas portrays him on that very day.

The scene captures Vincent furiously working on what would become

one of his most famous paintings - Wheatfield With Crows.

They have a lot to be responsible for

with the crows over the wheatfield,

with those Hitchcock-like crows attacking

Kirk Douglas at the end. I wish they hadn't done that ending.

That film was a seminal film for our understanding of what

Vincent was all about. When that film was made,

when you think about what was happening in New York -

the deaths by their own hand of Mark Rothko, of Jackson Pollock - I think

it fed into an imagination of what people wanted of their artists.

They wanted them to be driven, they wanted them to be troubled.

Lust For Life comes out of that kind of wish

of what people want an artist to be.

SHOT

Lust For Life infused Vincent's artistic endeavour

with his mental illness,

establishing the paintings as crazed expressions of a suicidal madman.

Decades later, Simon Schama took a far more nuanced route

to explore how his illness related to his art.

His sickness was both the destroyer and the midwife of his masterpieces,

for it was precisely between the spasms of craziness that Vincent

saw the world most intensely, was suddenly possessed of his vision

that Heaven could exist here on Earth.

His mission had never been clearer.

I am absorbed in this immense plain

with wheatfields against the hills...

..boundless as the sea.

Schama then continues his quest

to cut through the tortured-artist stereotype,

reinterpreting Wheatfield With Crows.

Schama believes - and I agree with him - that while Vincent did have

episodes of madness, that while he was painting, the artist was sane.

So, while the landscapes ARE mindscapes...

..they're anything but deranged.

They're unflinching,

tumultuous,

heroic...

..and completely new.

And here's the most startling of them all, Wheatfield With Crows.

Not for what it's supposed to say about van Gogh's frailty -

because I don't think the artist who painted this was frail at all -

but for what it says about the conventions of art.

It shows Vincent in total command, never fiercer in his contempt for

the rules, in his headlong rush to junk the entire

history of landscape painting.

I don't think there's the slightest possibility that accomplishing

this revolution could have been a moment of suicidal despair

for Vincent van Gogh.

In his art, he'd never been more visionary, never more brilliant.

But not in his life.

In the years since van Gogh's death,

the story of his life has become entwined with his art.

We really feel for the troubled Vincent.

I think somehow that that vitality, that energy,

that exquisite colour in the painting

redeems the tragedy of his life.

He lives on powerfully in his art.

Vincent's legacy has been recognised on television for decades.

Van Gogh was 37 when he shot himself, but in the last four years

of his life, he'd changed the history of art.

The freedom of Modernist colour, the way that emotions are

worked upon directly by optical means was one of his legacies -

as it was Gauguin's, too.

But van Gogh had taken this even further than Gauguin, because he had

opened up the Modernist syntax to pity and terror

as well as to formal research and pleasure.

He was the hinge upon which 19th-century romanticism

turned into 20th-century expressionism.

25 years later, Simon Schama preferred to focus

on the emotional impact of van Gogh's work.

But there's something about van Gogh's legacy which is

much more important than his fathering this or that

ism of modern art.

Vincent's passionate belief was that people wouldn't just

see his pictures, but feel the rush of life in them -

that by the force of his brush and the dazzlement of his colour

they'd experience those fields, those faces, those flowers in ways

nothing more polite or literal could ever possibly convey.

His art would reclaim what had once belonged to religion -

consolation for our mortality

through the relish of the gift of life.

It wasn't the art crowd he was after.

What he wanted was to open the eyes

and the hearts of everyone who saw his paintings.

Well, he got what he wanted.

This was an artist who wasn't taught in any academy,

who is painting from the heart,

which I think in our age we feel is something that we admire

and something that we ourselves want to do

and follow in some ways through his footsteps.

With a cheerier end, of course.

This was a disturbed man

who created something extraordinary throughout his life.

His legacy, then, is the fact that

an unstable mind can produce something marvellous.

While we may say he was tortured in life,

he took that experience and expressed it through colour...

Nothing but colour!

..and through his written words.

Yours truly...

..Vincent.

He may have sold just one painting in his lifetime,

but over a century later his work has touched countless lives.

Vincent van Gogh is so much more than the tortured artist.

He wasn't a failure. His paintings are so successful

at telling us what he felt when he was alive.

He's a wonder, and his painting lives on for us all today.

So, who better to have the last word on the wonder of van Gogh

than television's time traveller Doctor Who?

We're so lucky we're still alive to see this beautiful world.

Look at the sky. It's not dark and black and without character.

The black is, in fact, deep blue. And over there, lighter blue.

And blowing through the blueness and the blackness, the wind's

swirling through the air and then shining, burning, bursting through.

The stars. Can you see how they roar their light?

Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature

blazes before our eyes.

I've seen many things, my friend

but, you're right...

..nothing quite as wonderful as the things you see.