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Van Gogh's correspondence about famed Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta unearthed

Largely overlooked postscript suggests surprise friendship between the Van Gogh brothers and the young Belgian

a blog by Martin Bailey
17 May 2019
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Photograph of Victor Horta (about 1880) © Hortamuseum Archives, Saint-Gilles

Photograph of Victor Horta (about 1880) © Hortamuseum Archives, Saint-Gilles

Adventures with Van Gogh

Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries.

A tantalising and largely overlooked postscript in a letter suggests that Vincent van Gogh knew the young Victor Horta, who would eventually become the celebrated Art Nouveau and Art Deco architect. At the end of a published letter from Vincent to Theo, sent from Brussels in January 1881, he added a PS: “I hope to go to see Mr Horta one of these days.”

Theo had earlier got to know Horta after they were introduced through a work colleague at the Goupil Gallery in Paris. Soon afterwards Vincent and Horta each ended up in Brussels, where they were introduced by Theo through correspondence.

Vincent had arrived in Brussels in October 1880, to enrol at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Horta, who had just turned 20, moved to Brussels early the following year to study architecture at the academy.

It is highly likely that they met as fellow students. But since only one other letter from Vincent to Theo between January and April 1881 survives, there is no confirmation.

In Horta’s memoirs, written more than 60 years later, he mentions an early encounter with “a friend of the great and illustrious painter Van Gogh who came to pass some time in Ghent”. This presumably refers to a mutual friend who visited Ghent.

Van Gogh found studying in an institution difficult and only remained very briefly at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. He left Brussels in April 1881 to stay with his parents in the village of Etten. Horta remained in Brussels and went on to arguably become the most inventive architect of his generation. In 1893 he designed the Hôtel Tassel, which is now regarded as the earliest Art Nouveau building.

Among Horta’s most important later projects was the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, completed in 1928 and which still serves as the city’s major exhibition venue (and now known as Bozar). Fittingly, a few months before the architect’s death in 1947, the Palais hosted the first major Van Gogh retrospective in Belgium.

• Horta’s home and studio (built 1898-1901) in Brussels is now a museum.

Martin Bailey is the author of Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln, 2021, available in the UK and US ). He is a leading Van Gogh specialist and investigative reporter for The Art Newspaper. Bailey has curated Van Gogh exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery and Compton Verney/National Gallery of Scotland. He was a co-curator of Tate Britain’s The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain (27 March-11 August 2019).

Martin Bailey’s recent Van Gogh books

Bailey has written a number of other bestselling books, including The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh's Masterpiece (Frances Lincoln 2013, available in the UK and US), Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence(Frances Lincoln 2016, available in the UK and US), Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum (White Lion Publishing 2018, available in the UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln 2021, available in the UK and US). Bailey's Living with Vincent van Gogh: the Homes and Landscapes that Shaped the Artist (White Lion Publishing 2019, available in the UK and US) provides an overview of the artist’s life. The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh has been reissued (Batsford 2021, available in the UK and US).

To contact Martin Bailey, please email vangogh@theartnewspaper.com. Please note that he does not undertake authentications.

Read more from Martin's Adventures with Van Gogh blog here.

Adventures with Van GoghArchitectureVincent Van GoghPaintingArt Nouveau
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