The dating of an early drawing by Vincent van Gogh showing a Gothic church in London has long been subject to doubt. It was thought that the artist drew the building while living in England (1874–75 and 1876). Nuenen-based Van Gogh researcher Ton de Brouwer recently made an interesting discovery, however, suggesting that in all likelihood Vincent did not make the drawing before returning to the Netherlands, that is, after July 1877.
Early pen drawing
The drawing The Austin Friars Church, London, also designated juvenilia XXV in the Van Gogh literature, was done in pen in brown (or faded to brown) ink on a small sheet of wove paper (10.4 × 17.2 cm).
A three-line note below the picture provides information regarding the depicted church in handwriting identifiable as that of the young Vincent. Edward VI donated the church in 1550 to the Protestant community that had fled from the Low Countries.
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Austin Friars Church, London (juvenilia XXV), pen in brown ink on wove paper, 10.4 × 17.2 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (State of the Netherlands, gift of M. Nieweg, R. Nieweg, H. Nieweg)
Annotated recto:
‘Dit kerkje is een merkwaardig overblijfsel van eene oude Augustijner Stichting (Austin friars) minstens reeds dateerende / van het jaar 1354 zoo niet reeds een honderd jaren vroeger Reeds sedert 1550 ingevolge van eene vrijwillige / schenking van Eduard VI houdt de Nederduitsche gemeente hier hare Godsdienstige zamenkomsten.’
‘This little church is a noteworthy survival of an old Augustinian foundation (Austin Friars) dating / from at least the year 1354 if not a hundred years earlier. The Low German [Dutch] community has held its religious services here since 1550, thanks to a voluntary / donation of Edward VI.’
Annotated verso:
‘Vincent van Gogh / gekregen van zijn zuster Mevr. Van Houten 1914 / J. Nieweg’
‘Vincent van Gogh / received from his sister, Mrs van Houten 1914 / J. Nieweg’
Different Datings
The Austin Friars Church, London is mentioned only sporadically in the Van Gogh literature and different dates have been proposed for its origin, with one of the periods Vincent spent in England generally adopted as the starting point.
Given the London subject matter, it is understandable that the sheet has been linked to the artist’s British years. In his Van Gogh catalogue raisonné, for instance, J.-B. de la Faille dated the drawing to April–December 1876 – the period in which Vincent was employed as an assistant teacher at a boarding school, first in Ramsgate and later in Isleworth. J.G. van Gelder situated it in the same period.
The Van Gogh Museum’s collection catalogue posits a date of July 1874–May 1875, which seems more logical, as Vincent lived in London from 13 June 1873 to 8 May 1875 while working at the city’s branch of Goupil & Cie art dealers. Goupil was located a couple of miles away from the Austin Friars Church, and Van Gogh is thought to have been familiar with the church, and probably visited it a few times too.
Austin Friars Church, 1892
Compelling perspective
Martin Bailey, by contrast, suggested that he might actually have drawn the church from a photograph or a print rather than from life, arguing that its high degree of technical accomplishment is at odds with the other, less successful drawings from the period in question, which often lack convincing perspective.
In the Van Gogh Museum’s collection catalogue, meanwhile, Sjraar van Heugten notes that – unusually, – Vincent worked solely in pen and ink in this instance, whereas he customarily combined pen and pencil. He further suggests that if the drawing was done after an existing image, the latter is likely to have been a line-etching or engraving, given the numerous small lines that fill the surfaces.
Portrait of Anna Cornelia van Gogh, 1878, photo F. Rienks, Leiden, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Provenance
The drawing of the Austin Friars Church initially belonged to Vincent’s sister, Anna Cornelia van Gogh (1855–1930). Like her older brother, she spent time in the London area in 1874–76, and actually lived with him for part of that period. It was thought that Vincent possibly enclosed the drawing in a letter to her, although it is not clear precisely when this might have occurred, since no letters from Vincent to Anna have survived. He could equally well have given it to her in person.
Years later, the drawing came into the possession of the preacher and artist Jakob ‘Jaap’ Nieweg (1877–1955), who noted on the back of the sheet that in 1914, he had ‘received [it] from his [i.e. Van Gogh’s] sister Mrs van Houten’, Anna having previously married Joan Marinus van Houten (1850–1945).
Like Anna, Nieweg lived in the municipality of Dieren at the time. Under the tutelage of the art educator H.P. Bremmer, he had developed into an independent painter who, like his teacher, was a great admirer of Van Gogh. This appealed to Anna, who gave him the sheet together with the drawing Head of a Woman from Vincent’s time in Brabant (1884, F 1193/JH 566, private collection). The London sheet remained in the possession of his heirs for many years, until they decided to donate it to the Van Gogh Museum on its opening in 1973.
Eigen Haard
My desire to learn as much as possible from the same sources that Vincent drew on himself led me to acquire several old issues of the illustrated magazine Eigen Haard (Home and Hearth), the content of which Van Gogh mentions in some of his letters. On 30 April 1877, for instance, he wrote from Dordrecht to his brother Theo: ‘The cemetery looks a little like that drawing by Apol in “Eigen Haard”’ [113].
The illustration in question – an engraving after Louis Apol’s drawing Fallen Greatness – appeared in Eigen Haard’s first annual run and was already two years old, but Van Gogh remembered it clearly. He appears to have been familiar with the magazine from the outset and he referred to it again in a letter to Theo dated 21 March 1883:
To mention just one of many — at the entrance to the Lombard or pawnshop I saw a bill with the following words in big letters / Prospectus / Eigen Haard / NB. As you probably know, Eigen Haard is a magazine. I thought this one rather good [...]’ [331]
A year previously, Vincent had drawn a picture of the location, in which the walls by the gateway to the pawnshop are covered with posters. According to the drawing, one of them was an advertisement for Eigen Haard.
Vincent van Gogh, The Entrance to the Pawn Bank, The Hague, March 1882, pencil, pen and brush in ink, watercolour, on paper, 23.9 × 33.7 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
The Entrance to the Pawn Bank, detail of poster on the wall far right: ‘Prospectus / EIGEN / HAARD / Geïllustreerd / Tijdschrift’
Eigen Haard, Geïllustreerd Volkstijdschrift (Home and Hearth, Illustrated Magazine for the People), 1877
Penchant for graphic art
Eigen Haard was by no means the only magazine in which Van Gogh was interested. He began at an early stage to collect pictures, which he clipped from the illustrated magazines that circulated widely at the time.
His penchant for graphic art dated back to his first job at the Hague branch of Goupil & Cie, where he worked from 1869 surrounded by a substantial stock of photographs and prints – mostly reproductions of famous works of art.
Van Gogh’s interest took off in earnest when he moved to London, where the printing works of the immensely popular magazines The Graphic and The Illustrated London News were located a stone’s throw from Goupil’s premises, along with a variety of art dealers, bookshops and kiosks. Vincent was able to feast his eyes there on a wide range of prints and illustrations.
What’s more, for well-to-do middle-class families like the Van Goghs it was customary to subscribe to a variety of magazines and also to exchange prints. Over the years, Vincent and his brother Theo built up an extensive collection of prints and magazines, which has been preserved and now forms part of the Van Gogh Museum collection.
Page 216 of Eigen Haard 1877.
The discovery
In the bound collection of issues published in 1877 (volume 3), I came across an article titled ‘De Ned. Herv. Kerk in Londen’ (‘The Dutch Reformed Church in London’). The piece, which appeared in issue 27, dated Saturday 7 July, was illustrated with two engravings showing the inside and outside of the church. It struck me immediately that the exterior view was connected to Van Gogh’s drawing The Austin Friars Church, London.
Seeing the article in the magazine must have prompted Vincent to make a drawing after the illustration, which will obviously have reminded him straight away of his time in London. This idea is supported by the fact that the note he placed below his drawing to identify the depicted church is a near-verbatim copy of the first seven sentences of the article.
The Example
The engravings in question, along with the cover illustration, were the work of the duo Joseph Burn Smeeton (1815/7–1890) and Auguste Tilly (1840–1898), whose reputation was very high at that time. Vincent hung a portrait of the artist Jean-Baptiste Corot (1796–1875) – likewise engraved by Smeeton and Tilly – on the wall of his room in London, and he also mentioned them in several of his letters [30, 165, 221]. The model on which the duo based their engravings of the Austin Friars Church dates back to before 1877. The London Archives have photographs of two drawings, dated around 1865, which clearly served as the basis for Smeeton and Tilly’s wood engravings.
The format of Van Gogh’s drawing is horizontal rather than vertical like the engraving, creating additional space on the right, which he filled as he saw fit with a small tree and a lamppost. He omitted the small figures in the foreground and, rather than allowing the wall of the church to run to the edge of the paper on the left, he cut his composition off just past the second window, in accordance with his example. He replaced the dramatic sky in the wood engraving with a few loose clouds and a flight of birds.
Anonymous, View of Austin Friars from the Northwest, c. 1865, photograph of a drawing, 30 × 26 cm, The London Archives cat. v9030600
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Austin Friars Church, London (juvenilia XXV), pen in brown ink on wove paper, 10.4 × 17.2 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (State of the Netherlands, gift of M. Nieweg, R. Nieweg, H. Nieweg)
English memento for Anna
Around the time that the issue containing the article about the Austin Friars Church was published in early July 1877, Vincent was lodging with his uncle Johannes ‘Jan’ van Gogh (1817–1885) in Amsterdam, cramming for the theology entrance exam. In an upwelling of religious faith, he had decided to become a minister like his father. That same July, his sister Anna announced that she had received a marriage proposal from Joan van Houten. Vincent was delighted and might thus have made his drawing after the engraving especially for her, as a memento of the time they had spent together in London a few years earlier, possibly including shared visits to the church. He would then have presented her with it, either in person or mailed from Amsterdam.
While there are no surviving letters from Vincent to Anna, we know from one he sent to Theo on 9 July 1877 that he had written to her from Amsterdam with his congratulations: ‘On this occasion I congratulate you [Theo], too, as I have Anna and Pa and Ma’ [121]. Perhaps he enclosed the little drawing in his letter to her, or else handed it over in person at a later date.
Anna and Joan visited their relatives in Amsterdam at the beginning of August, including Vincent in his study. ‘It seems to me that that face and those eyes of Van Houten speak of heart and character’, he wrote to Theo shortly afterwards, concluding with the edifying words: ‘may she have made a good choice and may time turn that into the love that never faileth, but brings our dear sister through life, covering and forbearing everything and making whole hope and faith’ [126]. The relationship between Vincent and his oldest sister would later cool considerably.
It may be concluded, therefore, that Van Gogh made the drawing after the first week of July 1877 rather than during one of the years he spent in England, as previously assumed. The discovery also confirms Bailey and Van Heugten’s suggestion that the drawing was done after a print.
The church today
As for the church itself, it was destroyed during the London Blitz in 1940. A new church was later built on the same site, where services in Dutch can still be attended to this day. The first stone for its reconstruction was laid in 1950 by HRH Princess Irene of the Netherlands.
The church today (19 April 2011). Foto: Duncan Harris, CC BY 2.0
First stone on reconstruction.
Ton de Brouwer
Ton de Brouwer (1943) has spent more than sixty years studying the work and life of Vincent van Gogh. In 1976, he founded the Van Gogh Documentation Centre in Nuenen, which has since grown into the present Van Gogh Village Museum. De Brouwer has published several books on the artist, including his first study Van Gogh en Nuenen (1984), De oude toren en Van Gogh in Nuenen (2002) and Vincent raakte goed ingeburgerd: archiefvondst over Van Gogh in Nuenen (2021).
Literature
- J.B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam 1970, p. 606, juv. XXV; in the first edition of this catalogue raisonné, J.-B. de la Faille, L’œuvre de Vincent van Gogh: Catalogue Raisonné, Paris and Brussels 1928, vol. III, p. 1, no. 826, ‘L’église d’Austin-Friars’, the author dated the drawing more generally to 1876.
- J.G. van Gelder and A.M. Hammacher (foreword), A detailed catalogue of 272 works by Vincent van Gogh, belonging to the collection of the State Museum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo 1959, p. XIX, note 1.
- S. van Heugten, Vincent van Gogh Drawings I: The Early Years, 1880-1883, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 1996, pp. 54–56.
- M. Bailey and D. Silverman, Van Gogh in England: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London 1992, p. 8, 122 (no. 14).
- P.J.H. van den Berg, Welkom in ’t leven: een beschrijving van het geïllustreerde tijdschrift Eigen Haard 1875–1941, Amsterdam 2003.
- Eigen Haard, vol. 1 (1875) no. 30, p. 253.
- Eigen Haard, vol. 3, no. 27, 7 July 1877, p. 216.