Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery review – a wonderful show of a wonderful artist - 5/5 This is a chance to see the best works from the last years of the great artist’s life

Poets and Lovers” seems designed to entice the casual Van Gogh fan, but there are lesser-known works on view, too.

The National Gallery in London is celebrating its 200th anniversary with a landmark exhibition of Vincent van Gogh's

Poets & Lovers includes many of his best known pictures and, amazingly, it is the first exhibition the National Gallery has devoted to this much loved artist. Focusing mainly on paintings and drawings made in the two years he lived in Provence (1888-1890),

Every painting is a "gamble, an experiment, a chucking of artistic caution and convention to the mistral wind". You can feel the "churn" of his brush strokes; indeed, in parts, the impasto is as thick as a bead or a button. The colours are "perverse" with fields alight with "cobalt and saffron".

Exhibition at London's National Gallery features a 'stunning array' of paintings from the last two years of the artist's life

Visitors will be ‘blown away’ by the masterpieces—but there are intriguing and little-known stories behind many of the loans