1885

This Nuenen painting dates from the spring of 1885. The woman depicted is Gordina de Groot (1855-1927), who appears in several other works, including his early masterpiece, The Potato Eaters. As in most of his Dutch works, the colours are muted.

It was recorded in the De la Faille catalogue as having been bought in 1923 for £300 by ‘Mrs Fleming’, identified as Evelyn Fleming, the mother of the author and creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming. In 1950, Evelyn Fleming sold the painting, which was bought the following year for £4,000 by Sir Alexander Maitland. In 1960 he donated it to the National Gallery of Scotland.

• Material: Oil on canvas on cardboard
• Size: 48 x 36cm
• National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

1886-7

This landscape depicts the terrace of the Moulin de Blute-Fin, beneath the windmill. The raised wooden belvedere on the right gave a marvellous panoramic view of the city of Paris. It is a winter scene, probably dating from 1886-7. It was exhibited in December 1923 at the Leicester Galleries.

Director Oliver Brown later recalled that ‘a woman collector who lived in London bought a little painting called “On Montmartre” on the advice of Augustus John.’ The price was £300, and her name was recorded in the De la Faille catalogue as ‘Mrs Carstairs’. The woman was Elizabeth Carstairs, the wife of Charles Carstairs, a director of the Knoedeler Gallery. She sold the painting the following year and in 1926 it was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago.

• Material: Oil on canvas mounted on pressboard
• Size: 44 x 34cm
• The Art Institute of Chicago

1887

This painting, originally in the Van Gogh family collection, was once assumed to be a self-portrait. Contemporaries remarked that Van Gogh and Reid were so alike that they could have been taken for twins, and two portraits of Reid were catalogued by De la Faille in 1928 as self-portraits. When the catalogue was published McNeill Reid recognised the ‘self-portrait’ as a portrait of his father, Alexander Reid.

In July 1929, Van Gogh’s nephew, V. W. Van Gogh, sold the Portrait of Alexander Reid to McNeil Reid for £100. It was one of the last works to be sold by the family.

• Material: Oil on board
• Size: 42 x 34cm
• Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

1888

Painted in Arles at the end of August 1888, it depicts pink Oleander flowers in a majolica jug, resting on a table with two novels near the edge – the upper one is Emilie Zola’s La Joie de Vivre, which was published four years earlier.

The painting was exhibited at London’s Lefevre Gallery in October 1923 and was bought by the educationalist Michael Sadler, who kept it until 1925, when it was sold by the Lefevre Gallery to Elizabeth Workman, the wife of wealthy shipbroker, Robert Workman. In 1928, Elizabeth sold the painting back to the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery. It was offered to the Tate, which decided against the acquisition, and was eventually purchased by New York collector, Mrs William Clark and acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1962.

• Material: Oil on canvas
• Size: 60 x 74cm
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1889

Van Gogh’s magnificent St-Rémy landscape depicts a noonday scene, with billowing clouds echoing the contorted shapes of the hills, Les Alpilles. The site was close to the asylum where Van Gogh had come in May 1889. Van Gogh painted three versions of A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, of which this is his finest.

This painting was purchased by Samuel Courtauld, trustee of the Tate Gallery (1927-37) and the National Gallery (1931-47) and founder of the Courtauld Institute, London. It was the first Van Gogh painting to enter a British public collection.

• Material: Oil on canvas
• Size: 73 x 91cm
• National Gallery, London

1889

Painted in September 1889 in St-Rémy, five months after Van Gogh’s arrival at the asylum. The view is very loosely that from his room, seen through the barred window. The picture was bought by William Boyd, probably in the early 1920s. Boyd ran the Scottish jam company James Keiller & Son, which just over a century earlier had ‘invented’ marmalade. He lived at West Ferry, Dundee, and became an important collector of modern Scottish and French art. In 1936 Field with Ploughman passed through the Arthur Tooth Gallery in London and was bought by William Coolidge, an American who studied in Oxford. Coolidge bequeathed the painting to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1993.

• Material: Oil on canvas
• Size: 54 x 65cm
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

1889

Painted in early April 1889, this magnificent landscape shows a view of the Crau, a plain which starts a few kilometres east of Arles. It was one of the last paintings Van Gogh made before he left the town for the asylum at St-Rémy. It has recently been established that the work was bought by the Belgian artist Anna Boch, the only identified collector who purchased a Van Gogh painting during the artist's lifetime.

In 1906, she sold the painting, and it was eventually acquired (in 1927) by Samuel Courtauld. In March 1935, it was - most unusually - lent to a village hall in Essex for an exhibition entitled Art for the People. The village, Silver End (near Braintree) was a 'utopian' village which had been established by a steel window manufacturer for his workers. The display was organised by the Workers' Educational Association, and sixty pictures were shown, of which this Van Gogh landscape was the star attraction.

• Material: Oil on canvas
• Size: 65 x 81cm
• The Samuel Cortauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London

1889

This painting was probably done in the middle of January 1889, less than three weeks after Van Gogh had mutilated his ear. He had just left hospital, and wrote to his brother telling him that he wanted to get back in to the habit of painting.

It was the first Van Gogh painting to be bought by a British collector. William Robinson, the British consul for North Holland, acquired the painting in May 1893 from Jo van Gogh-Bonger, the widow of Vincent’s brother, Theo for 200 gilders (£17). In 1906 Robinson sold the painting at auction in Amsterdam, where it fetched just 100 gilders (£8), just half of what he had paid thirteen years earlier.

• Material: Oil on canvas
• Size: 47 x 61cm
• Private Collection, on loan to the National Gallery, London

1890

Painted in early May 1890 in the walled garden of the asylum at St-Rémy, just a few weeks before Van Gogh discharged himself. Van Gogh’s unusual composition has a claustrophobic feel, and only just included, in the upper left corner, is a path to the right of a row of tree trunks.

This painting probably belonged to the Van Gogh family and was probably sold at the end of 1925. After passing through the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in Paris it was sold in March 1926 by the London-based French Gallery, also known as Wallis & Son. It was purchased by Samuel Courtauld for £2,100 for the Tate, and was transferred to the National Gallery in 1961.

• Material: Oil on canvas
• Size: 65 x 81cm
• National Gallery, London

1890

Painted in July 1890, a few weeks before Van Gogh shot himself. The dramatic scene is the view towards the village, and features several hovering crows and pouring rain (the streaking rain effect being reminiscent of Japanese prints). The painting was acquired by Gwendoline Davies, who along with her sister, Margaret, collected works of art on the advice of the artist and dealer Hugh Blaker, with money they inherited from their grandfather David Davies, who made his fortune from railways and coal. Gwendoline purchased Rain – Auvers in April 1920 for 100,000 francs (£2,000) from Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, a gallery she and her sister had got to know during their stay in France in the First World War.

Gwendoline Davies bequeathed this painting to the National Museums & Galleries of Wales when she died in 1951.

• Material: Oil on canvas
• Size: 50 x 100cm
• National Museums & Galleries of Wales, Cardiff