Tate’s 1926 Van Gogh Loan Show Reveals How British Collectors Shaped the Artist’s Early Reputation
When Tate Gallery opened its first rooms for “modern foreign” art in June 1926, the occasion was framed as a civic milestone. King George V and Queen Mary attended the ceremony in London, where the institution unveiled a new chapter beyond its British holdings and mounted a loan exhibition of more than 250 works. Among them were five works by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), all borrowed from British collectors — a small group that now reads like a map of the artist’s early market in Britain.
The Van Gogh section consisted of four paintings and one drawing, installed in the northwest corner room of the gallery’s extension on the former site of Millbank prison. Tate’s own international collection was still too slight to fill the walls, which made the loans essential to the display. A century later, the works have been redated, retitled, reassigned, and in one case exposed as a fake, offering a compact history of how scholarship has altered the artist’s legacy.
One of the most revealing lenders was Elizabeth Workman, an early collector whose role has only recently received fuller attention. Tate records show that she first intended to lend “Au bord de la Rhône,” now known as “The Trinquetaille Bridge” (June 1888), but substituted “Les Lauriers rose,” now titled “Oleanders” (August 1888). After her husband’s financial troubles in 1928, she sold the painting; Tate declined to buy it, and it later entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1962 as a gift from John Loeb and his wife.
Other loans followed similarly winding paths. Esther Sutro lent “Café at Arles,” now “Interior of a Restaurant,” one of the earliest Van Goghs acquired by a UK-based collector. Herbert Coleman, a Manchester shipping magnate, lent “Village at Arles,” now “Stairway at Auvers (June 1890),” which later went to the Saint Louis Art Museum. The exhibition’s lone drawing, “Landscape near The Hague,” lent by the otherwise obscure Frank Wilson, has since been retitled “The Hut (early 1881).”
The most cautionary case was “Still life with Daisies and Poppies,” lent by James Murray of Aberdeen. It was later identified as an early Van Gogh fake from the Wacker Gallery in Berlin and is now owned by Laurence Philipps’s descendants at Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Tate also showed “Landscape: Arles,” now “Peach Trees in Blossom (April 1889),” which had been bought by Samuel Courtauld. In 1933, the museum’s Van Gogh holdings expanded again when Frank Stoop bequeathed three works on paper and “Farms near Auvers.”
Taken together, the 1926 loans show a museum, a market, and a scholarship still in formation. They also show how Van Gogh’s British story was built not only through acquisition, but through correction — a process that continues to reshape the artist’s place in public collections.
