Sjraar van Heugten has spent decades working with the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, yet they still astonish him with their emotional power.
The art historian, who has curated the National Gallery of Victoria's 2017 Winter Masterpieces blockbuster Van Gogh and the Seasons which includes loans from institutions including the Musee D'Orsay and Britain's National Gallery, says his favourite work by the painter only really revealed its power recently.
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Dr Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, discusses the unique style and groundbreaking brush strokes of the visionary artist ahead of the NGV's upcoming exhibition.
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Van Gogh and the Seasons
Dr Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, discusses the unique style and groundbreaking brush strokes of the visionary artist ahead of the NGV's upcoming exhibition.
After a good clean of The garden of the asylum at Saint Remy, a luminous varnish emerged that helped the colours pop in a way they perhaps hadn't since the oil on canvas was first painted in 1889, a year before van Gogh's death.
"With the varnish cleaned it was spectacular," says van Heugten of the work, one of 49 by the artist on show in the biggest display of van Gogh's work ever mounted in Australia.
"I'm really really pleased with this painting, nature leaps out of you," he says. "This is really about nature, this is really about beauty of nature that you see.
"It's moving. There's an emotional experience."
Those words echo what van Gogh (which van Heugten pronounces van-gok) set out to achieve.
"I want people to say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly," van Gogh wrote in one of his many letters to his younger brother Theo, an art dealer who sold works by then emerging painters such as Monet and Gauguin, and who supported Vincent financially for much of his adult life.
"In spite of my so-called coarseness ... perhaps even because of it ... I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, had in his heart."
The NGV exhibition tracks van Gogh's 10-year art career, during which he painted hundreds of works in a much more subdued palette than he became famed for after his death.
For much of his time as an artist his favourite colours were, well, shades of dun – browns and greys – or simply black and white.
Forget the swirling kaleidoscope of Starry Night, so luminous it inspires song. No burst of golden Sunflowers, reflecting the rays of a Provencal summer. For all but the last few years of his life van Gogh's stock in trade were dark and – frankly – often depressing tableaux of poor people hard at work.
It wasn't until he left Paris in the late 1880s and moved to Arles, among spectacular sunshine, the orchards, wheat fields and vineyards, that it finally clicked.
"In the course of time they will become more beautiful and they will undoubtedly be appreciated some day," Theo wrote to Vincent of some of his last works, damning with faint praise pieces that would go on to to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars and make his brother one of the most recognisable names in art history.
Van Gogh and the Seasons is at NGV International until July 9.