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‘Something unromantic as Monday morning’: Van Gogh and Charlotte Brontë

Vincent van Gogh had a lifelong fascination with British literature. He admired Charlotte Brontë, among other writers, and was particularly attached to Shirley, her most topical novel. Shirley dramatizes contentious social issues during the Industrial Revolution, which also preoccupied Van Gogh while living in the Borinage, the foremost industrial district of Belgium, in 1878–80. In this context, this article considers some possible parallels between Charlotte Brontë’s text and Van Gogh’s image in terms of aesthetics, subject matter and themes, focusing on Shirley and the body of works that the painter produced in the late 1870s and early 1880s. An interdisciplinary inquiry into the affinities between the two eminent contemporary artists would illuminate their shared attempts to clarify and reformulate the condition of nineteenth-century Europe in their own medium.