Van Gogh and Britain
Tate Britain

“Enclosed is a little drawing of the view from the school window through which the boys follow their parents with their eyes as they go back to the station after a visit,” Vincent van Gogh wrote from Ramsgate to his brother Theo, in May 1876. A facsimile of that two-inch-square drawing is the smallest exhibit in Tate Britain’s new exhibition “Van Gogh and Britain” (until 11 August). It’s an amateurish effort, but it sprang from the deep well of human sympathy on which Van Gogh would later draw as an artist.

Disappointed in love, the 23-year-old Vincent had lost the job with French art dealer Goupil & Cie that had brought him to London with high hopes three years earlier, and had taken a teaching internship in Ramsgate. But he nursed an ambition to become a lay preacher, and after moving to a school in Isleworth run by a Congregationalist minister, he got his chance.