Trail of the Unexpected

An artist's impression of south London: 'it is very beautiful here,' wrote Van Gogh

Tomorrow sees the 150th anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh's birth. The year is being marked in the Netherlands, where he was born, and in France, where his troubled creativity blossomed. But who will be putting out the flags in Britain? Over a period of four years, the young Vincent lived and worked in south London's Brixton, Ramsgate on the Kent coast, and then Isleworth on the western edge of the capital.

These were formative years; he was only 20 when he arrived, and though there's no evidence that he painted, he certainly sketched: houses, churches, the characteristic rows of trees. He also read, walked and underwent some life-changing experiences, far from the sunflowers, starry skies and bright colours of the Mediterranean.

The first stop on the UK stretch of the Van Gogh trail is Hackford Road on the Stockwell-Brixton border. This is a tranquil oasis between two traffic-clogged main roads fringed by car-accessory shops and tower blocks. On the wall of No 87, a flat-fronted Georgian house, a blue plaque confirms that Van Gogh stayed here from 1873-74. He had come to London to work as a trainee art dealer, and lodged here with the Loyers, a widowed teacher and her daughter.

If last year's acclaimed West End play, Vincent in Brixton, is to be taken at face value, this is where the seeds of some of the artist's great later works were sown, as he feverishly courted first the daughter of the house, then her mother. Although the plot depends on a little dramatic licence, Van Gogh's own letters reveal that he did fall in love, for the first time in his life, with his landlady's daughter, Eugenie. Her rejection of him (she was secretly engaged to another lodger) was a traumatic blow to his fragile self-esteem. He made a sketch of No 87 as a present for Eugenie. You can see it in Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, smudged and a bit torn, or, more easily, on the Van Gogh website. It also features three adjoining houses that were destroyed by a Second World War bomb.

Van Gogh walked to his office in the Strand every day, a good hour's hike. In his spare time, he visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and was quite taken with south London's parks, commons and gardens. "It is very beautiful here," he writes to his beloved brother Theo in 1874. "Lilac hawthorns and laburnums flower in all the gardens; the chestnut trees are splendid."

In fact, he wasn't the first continental artist to fall for the charms of south London. A couple of years earlier, Monet and Pissarro had left France, which was in the grip of a war with Prussia. Monet's painting, The Thames below Westminster, dates from this period, and Pissarro, who lived near Crystal Palace, painted suburban scenes, including Penge Railway Station (now Lordship Lane Station) and The Avenue, Sydenham, which hangs in the National Gallery.

Van Gogh's own stay with the Loyer family in Brixton soon turned sour, a result, perhaps, of his unrequited love, but also connected with the arrival of his sister Anna. Together, they moved to 395 Kennington New Road, "a house quite covered in ivy"; it has since been replaced by an office block, and the road has lost its "New".

Van Gogh was then transferred to his firm's Paris office, where he spent a year, until his increasingly awkward and rebellious attitude led to an ignominious sacking. Van Gogh decided on a change of career. After answering a newspaper advert, he returned to England to take up the post of assistant teacher in a boy's boarding school in Ramsgate on the Kent coast. He sketched the view down to the sea from the school in Royal Road, and in his letters he described walks along the coast and a memorable storm at sea.

There's even a mention of a starry night – more of a one-star night, really: "That same night, I looked out of the window of my room at the roofs of the houses you can see from here, and at the tops of the elms dark against the night sky. Above the roofs, a single star, but a beautiful big friendly one."

When the school moved from Ramsgate to Isleworth, west of London, Van Gogh went, too, and at this time he turned seriously to religion, combining his school duties with those of a lay preacher in churches in Turnham Green and Richmond. He sketched Turnham Green and Petersham churches, which were later demolished, and Austin Friars church in the City, which was bombed in the Second World War but has since been rebuilt. He also moved to another school in Isleworth, based in an imposing 18th-century house called Holme Court, which is still there (at 158, Twickenham Road).

Apart from preaching and teaching, Van Gogh walked a great deal through the Thames-side fields and trees. He shunned the train and instead chose to walk the 80 miles from Ramsgate to London, and then another 20 to Welwyn, to which his sister had moved. He described it to Theo as "quite a stroll".

Van Gogh returned to the family home in the Netherlands at the end of 1876, obsessed with religion, lovelorn and depressed. Despite talking of returning to London, he never did. But in Young Vincent: the Story of Van Gogh's years in England, Martin Bailey demonstrates that the interest he had in Dickens was to trigger some of his later great works, such as Vincent's Chair, inspired by a scene in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Van Gogh's drawings can be viewed at www.vangogh-gallery.com. Martin Bailey's book is currently out of print