The National Gallery's Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers is 'unmissable'

This "once in a century show" is singing from a different hymn sheet, said The Times ' Laura Freeman, but "what a chorus they [the paintings] sing of "a blisteringly original vision".

It's a show, said Time Out 's Eddy Frankel "full of themes: poets, lovers, gardens, peasants", but they all serve "a purpose greater than their own representation: Van Gogh was trying to paint meaning".

The 61 paintings gathered from private collections and museums around the world "ambush you and demand" that you look at them. Little wonder, considering they were painted during the "feverishly productive" months Van Gogh spent at Arles between February 1888 and May 1889 and then at the asylum at Saint-Rémy until May 1890. He died by suicide in July aged 37. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has also loaned its Sunflowers painting, the first time it has left the United States since it was acquired in 1935, to join The National Gallery's own painting.

The paintings are largely without "distracting" captions, save the year, though there is a separate leaflet. This leaves more space for looking at the painting and allows viewers to stand on their "own wits", said Freeman.

"You'll be looking at a painting and your heart will simply explode with joy," said The Independent 's Chris Harvey. One standout is the Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Rémy (1889), one of the first works Van Gogh painted after he started treatment there in May 1889 following months of poor mental health during which he sliced his ear off with a razor blade. Confined to his room and the hospital gardens, he found "delight in the overgrown sprawl of trees, shrubs, weeds and grasses", and this painting is both "restful and bursting with colour".

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".

The ubiquity of the artist's work may have blinded us to the "depth of his talent", noted Harvey, but "these works come to life with a vividness that is impossible to convey in book plates and reproductions". Indeed, the stars in Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888) twinkle above a sea so "dark and blue that the impasto layers might be fathoms deep". This exhibition is "a five-star firecracker".

The exhibition runs from 14 September to 19 January 2025, nationalgallery.org.uk