George Eliot and Van Gogh: Radiant Realism

Abstract

Vincent Van Gogh had a deep and abiding interest in the fiction of George Eliot and her mode of depicting the ordinary matter of ‘provincial life’ in luminous detail. This article argues that Eliot’s influence on Van Gogh can be seen in the formal, and not just thematic, radicalism shared by both. How might we read Van Gogh’s works as an ekphrastic reworking of Eliot’s insistence on the full colour spectrum of aesthetic experience lurking within the apparently dull and everyday and the need for radical shifts in perspective in the journey of life; a shared quest for the sacred within a secularized world? This underacknowledged debt that crosses media, periods, and national boundaries brings into focus the radical experimentalism of Eliot’s works and the redemptive forms of provincial realism. Eliot’s use of settings in rural or provincial life in the recent ‘just’ past is often read as nostalgic and conceived of as part of a conservative aesthetics of her realism. We tend to think of Van Gogh’s work, conversely, as part of that broad shift towards a cosmopolitan and experimental modernism in the twentieth century, as writers and artists looked beyond Britain for new ways of seeing the world. The story of Van Gogh’s passion for Eliot’s art reminds us that the forms of nineteenth-century realist provincialism have within them a means of radically transforming the appreciation of the everyday and stimulating modernity at large.