On The Road Again

This 48 X 44cm painting was called The Painter on the Road to Tarascon and it's been missing since April 1945. Vincent van Gogh painted it in 1988, the same year he completed his famous Sunflowers painting. 

Vincent van Gogh was born in The Netherlands in 1883. When Vincent was 20 (a year after the photo above was taken) he came to live in the  U.K. He stayed in Brixton in South London and then Ramsgate in Kent. In 1886 he tried living in Auvers-sur-Oise, just outside Paris, he produced one finished painting every day for 73 days. Vincent then moved to Arles where he wanted to set up an artist's colony with his friend Paul Gauguin. 

In 1957 Francis Bacon based a series of paintings on reproductions of Vincent's On The Road to Tarascon. Bacon said in an interview that the painting haunted him and also claimed to love a letter Vincent sent to his brother Theo that included the line "real painters don't paint things as they are - they paint them as they themselves feel them to be."

(Above: Kes Richardson and Harry Pye at Rose Wylie's studio in Kent in January, 2015.)

 Artist/curator Harry Pye had the idea for the "On The Road Again" project in 2014. Since that time several great artists have said they'd love to make a transcription of the painting to replace the missing Vincent one. Amongst the artists on board are Chantal Joffe, Phoebe Unwin, Billy Childish, Dominic Kennedy, Kes Richardson, and Rose Wylie.