Earnest Duffer to Genius: Vincent Van Gogh

Did ever an artist have a less promising start than Vincent van Gogh? People love to imagine that if only they had had the chance to see Vincent's early work, they would have recognised his talent, coddled it, saved him from neglect and his famous suicide. His genius would have been - well, just obvious.

But if one thing seems apparent from the big show of Van Gogh's drawings that opened last week at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, it's that anyone could have been forgiven for looking at his early work and passing it by. Perhaps no artist who got as good as Vincent has ever started out so bad. Not just bad, but worthy bad, which is (if anything) worse. Even today, you'd hardly want one as a present, unless it was from someone you didn't want to offend. Those dogged, I-share-your-suffering images of ground-down peasant women and Dutch cloggies grouped around the sacramental potato, done in glum, awkward homage to Jean-François Millet and English social-consciousness painters such as Luke Fildes, all testify that sincerity, on its own, is not an artistic virtue

Fascinating article on Vincent Van Gogh- the myths and the sheer terribleness of his artistic start