Boyd Tonkin

Turner, Critic of the Anthropocene

A new show at Tate Britain foregrounds the painter’s tragic, if beguilingly beautiful vision of a world marred by cruel industrial might.

Van Gogh’s London Pilgrimage

As an ardent young preacher and social reformer in London in the 1870s, Vincent van Gogh had by then made no more art than a few crude sketches. Yet, from his teenage years, he had painted in words, with all the rhapsodic power of a voracious reader steeped in the fiction and poetry of three languages: Dutch, English, and French.