Framing Art History’s Most Famous Friendships—and Fallouts
When Vincent van Gogh painted his glorious sunflowers in Arles, every single one of them was for Paul Gauguin, whom he’d befriended in Paris. He hung them like a welcoming bouquet in the Yellow House, where he had bold plans for the French painter to join him and start a new colony of modern artists.
Arriving in the south of France in 1888, Van Gogh found new inspiration in the region’s brilliant light and colors; having swapped city life for the warmer countryside, he began painting en plein air. But he was lonely, as the letters to his brother Theo reveal: “You know it’s always seemed idiotic to me that painters should live alone, one always loses when one is isolated.”
Soon after, he decided on the solution: “It would make an enormous difference to me if Gauguin comes here…there’ll be plenty of talk, plenty of ideas. And if we make up our minds not to quarrel, we shall help each other to increase our reputations.” In response to these prophetic words, Theo persuaded Gauguin to visit, to his brother’s delight.
The Yellow House (The Street), 1888, exhibited in “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” at The National Gallery, London, reflects the Dutchman’s excitement ahead of Gauguin’s arrival just weeks later. Beneath a cloudless blue sky his two-story house shimmers with yellow hues and the painter’s pride in this small corner of Arles where he hoped to host creative friends. Against yellow walls, vivid green shutters swing open in a welcoming gesture.
Inside, Van Gogh decorated the space with his intensely colored, thickly painted series of sunflowers, two of which hang in the museum’s show. Arriving in October, Gauguin was greeted by glowing symbols of friendship and suitably impressed by what he labeled “a perfect example of the style that was completely Vincent.”
But with ideas of his own, he was soon directing Van Gogh to work from his imagination and memory to achieve more compositional variety. Taking this advice, the younger artist painted Van Gogh’s Chair, 1888, which stands as a rustic portrait of its maker, who is represented by his trusty pipe and the crumpled papers that lie on the simple woven straw seat.
The painting is one of a pair. On an accompanying yet contrasting canvas, Van Gogh depicted Gauguin’s Chair, 1888, in warm reds and greens, with a cushion supporting modern novels and a glowing candle. These symbolic portraits clearly frame the duo’s differences—their almost-daily fights about painting, personal philosophies and ways of living were destroying all dreams for their “studio of the South.”
After nine weeks, on December 23, 1888, their collaboration in Arles ended when, following another argument, Van Gogh cut off his ear, and Gauguin fled. Although they continued to write to one another, demonstrating mutual respect and continued friendship (from afar), Van Gogh’s poor mental health, combined with loneliness, set him in a downward spiral. Just over six months later, he committed suicide.
Nearing the end of his life in 1901, Gauguin painted ‘Still Life with Sunflowers’, using a palette of moodier, yellow hues to depict Van Gogh’s signature bouquet, which he pictured on an armchair in a final, sorrowful nod to his late friend. Looking back at their time together, Gauguin reflected: “Two men accomplished in that period a colossal amount of work, useful to both of them. Perhaps to others as well? Some things bear fruit.”
For so many artists, friendship with creative peers has been an essential ingredient for their subject matter—and success. The National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective “Francis Bacon: Human Presence” highlights the extent to which the titan of modern British painting portrayed a close circle of artist friends: Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and Frank Auerbach emerge as ghoulish apparitions in their psychological portraits.
Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964, presents the pair of artists reclining against flat planes of bright colors, wearing matching white t-shirts and extending their bare, muscular legs as if fully at ease in one another’s presence. It’s a diptych that pays tribute to the companionship between the two who “spoke frequently” for “about 15 years,” as Auerbach remembered.
In Study for Self-portrait from the same year, Bacon developed the double image further, merging his head with the body of Freud in a twisted yet seamless manner to conflate their identities. The intimacy of this portrait points to the fact that, for decades, Freud and Bacon would meet daily (and nightly) in Soho bars and their studios to scrutinize one another’s work, drink, gossip, argue and paint one another.
The pair’s close bond is brushed into their canvases: Bacon’s distorted subjects inspired Freud to embrace more unconventional angles while, in turn, his ability to convey intimacy and depth influenced Bacon, who became reliant on muses he knew deeply. Fellow artists became a fertile ground for Bacon, given their shared understanding, memories and feelings about the reason for painting at a time when portraiture was falling out of fashion.
Over time, Bacon decided he was better off working from photographs because he didn’t want to upset his friends with their nightmarish portraits, in which they appear physically torn apart. “If I like them, I don’t want to do, to practise the injury that I do to them in my work before them. If I like them, I would rather practise the injury in private, by which I think I can record the fact of them more clearly,” he said.
Among the artist-friends he had pose for photographs, many taken by John Deakin, was the British painter Isabel Rawsthorne. She, too, was pushing figuration in new directions; working from degraded photographs, again taken by Deakin, she animated portraits with sweeping, gestural marks, pulling out her sitters’ animalistic qualities.
Sharing Bacon’s photographer and approach to painting, she appears in the frame of Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1965. Twisting traditions of the sleepy female muse, she appears alert and three times across the triptych, her trio of heads turning as if engaged in dialogue with Bacon and herself.
While Rawsthorne exhibited alongside Bacon and Freud, she has been eclipsed by the men in her bohemian social circle. Countless other women artists have been cursed by the very same fate—among them is Tirzah Garwood, whose name has been overshadowed by that of her husband, Eric Ravilious.
In 2015, he was given a major retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery, but now, a decade on, it’s her turn with a major exhibition, “Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious,” taking over the same space. Although shining a light on her creativity, the show proves that it’s impossible to simply separate Garwood from her male partner and their shared circle of artistic friends.
As a young artist, Garwood met Ravilious while studying at Eastbourne School of Art, where he taught her wood engraving. Rather than simply emulating his rural subject matter, she took ordinary scenes and added her own quirky elements, proving both an inventive mind and her technical prowess, which equaled, if not surpassed, that of her husband-to-be.
In her wood engraving Brick House Kitchen, 1932, she leads viewers inside an old-fashioned kitchen, patterned black and white with decorative dots and lines, where a kettle boils above a fire. Four cats creep into the domestic scene, which is both heartwarming and slightly surreal, thanks to the inclusion of an oversized nesting hen depicted with deliberate naivety, a Garwood trademark.
She took inspiration from the real kitchen of her home in Great Bardfield, Essex, where she not only lived with Ravilious but also a couple of their artist friends, Charlotte and Edward Bawden. It was in this shared country home and studio (the sort of which Van Gogh had once dreamed of) that Garwood enjoyed lively discussions and her first creative collaboration.
“With Charlotte, I was learning how to marble by a new method of using petrol which Charlotte and Edward [Bawden] had discovered. It had been suggested to Edward that he should try marbling for wallpaper designs but he did not carry out this plan. Charlotte and I used his new method of marbling to produce pattern papers.”
Using a technique that the men had overlooked, the women worked in the upstairs bathtub to print exquisite, delicately layered patterns composed of abstracted natural forms: feathers, leaves, flowers and ripples. During the 1930s, Garwood sold her mesmerizing marbled wallpapers to London design shops, publishers and private clients, achieving commercial success. The same flowing shapes emerged in her husband’s designs for glassware and ceramics.
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This setup might sound like a bohemian paradise, and Ravilious certainly portrayed it in these terms. In his well-known watercolor Two Women Sitting in a Garden, 1932, Charlotte reads, reclining in a deckchair, while Garwood shells peas in the shade of a walnut tree. Yet unsurprisingly, given the gendered expectations of domestic labor and then childcare, Garwoood struggled to lead an artistic life.
In Untitled (Vegetable Garden), 1933, she used needlework wool embroidery to weave another side to Ravilious’ story. Within a walled garden, a young woman, most likely Charlotte, springs to dynamic action, picking up a garden hose to spray the vegetables with vigor. Infusing traditional crafts with humor, Garwood challenged conventional contemporary representations of femininity; although happily married, she picked apart her husband’s more idealized views.
A magical realist approach also defines Garwood’s works, which span miniature paper houses, collages, paintings and prints that transport viewers through doorways to imaginary worlds where giant insects hover and wooden trains run through verdant forests. One unexpected highlight of the exhibition is her ledger-like scrapbook, which looks like a giant tome of fairy tales, revealing Garwood’s interest in natural history, toy theaters and Victoriana.
One page has been filled with a circle of paper
She also incorporated artworks by her circle of friends, including the Bawdens, to create an ongoing collage of their overlapping ideas. This heavy scrapbook, which Garwood treasured, stands as an important record of the significant creative connections that informed her work. Like Garwood, the exhibition’s curators have recognized the power of friendships, honoring them in the narrative of these illustrated pages which are open.
While art history typically frames great artists as individual geniuses, creativity is often a collaborative rather than a solo pursuit. Where would artists be without their friends to support them—not to mention the wives who run the house, pose for portraits and share and scrutinize ideas? But among the most fertile relationships are those that allowed inspiration to flow both ways between artists whose relationships, easy or not, were immortalized in the frame and are now being increasingly studied.