Van Gogh’s London: How the artist fell in love with the UK capital | The Independent

Van Gogh’s London: How the artist fell in love with the UK capital | The Independent
... A narrow wooden staircase (such as you might see in a Van Gogh interior) leads up to the second floor where Vincent lived in the front room. The rest of the house was occupied by his landlady, a little school she ran, and her 19-year-old daughter with whom Vincent seems to have fallen unfortunately in love. She was engaged to the previous lodger, and this disappointment may well have been the reason he eventually moved to a nearby boarding house in Kennington Road.  ...
... “With the Oval on his doorstep, it’s almost inconceivable that he never went – if only to see what English cricket was like,” says Martin Bailey, Van Gogh biographer and co-curator of the Tate exhibition. He may also have seen the game played across the road in Kennington Park as he walked on. Van Gogh loved London’s “splendid parks, with a wealth of flowers such as I’ve seen nowhere else”, and he regularly visited Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, where he watched the upper-classes parading along Rotten Row.   ...