H ow much I love London,” wrote Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo. Between the spring of 1873 and end of 1876, the Dutchman lived in the UK – mostly in the capital, but also for a while in Ramsgate. It’s not an especially well-known period of his life, but a major Tate exhibition, Van Gogh and Britain, looks set to change that.

The show will include 50 works by van Gogh, as well as others by 19th century British artists he admired (such as John Constable) and 20th century British artists he inspired (such as Francis Bacon). Probably the most important point to make, though, is that, in the mid-1870s, he wasn’t even an artist yet.

He moved to London from The Hague, aged 20, as an employee of the eminent art dealership Goupil & Cie. It was opening a branch on Southampton Street, near Covent Garden, and Van Gogh was sent over to work there as a clerk. It wasn’t until the turn of the 1880s – long after he’d left the UK – that he started painting. Which is to say, not a single canvas was created by the banks of the Thames or in his rented lodgings in Brixton.

20 best Van Gogh paintings Show all 20 1 /20 20 best Van Gogh paintings 20 best Van Gogh paintings Sunflowers 1886, oil on canvas. The mysterious, so-called 'Lausanne' Sunflowers – the first Arles Sunflowers painting – with turquoise background. It was created in the summer of 1886 at Van Gogh's studio at Arles, north of Marseille in Provence. It has not been show to the public since 1948. Public domain 20 best Van Gogh paintings The Starry Night 1889, oil on canvas. This painting depicts the view from the window of Van Gogh's asylum room of Saint-Remy-de-Provence. It is one of the most recognised paintings in the history of Western culture. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Irises 1889, oil on canvas. The most recognised of several iris paintings made by Van Gogh at the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum, in the last year before his death in 1890. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Self-Portrait 1889, oil on canvas. Van Gogh painted over 43 self-portraits, paintings and drawings over a period of 10 years. He wrote to his sister: 'I am looking for a deeper likeness than that obtained by a photographer' and to his brother: 'People say, and I am willing to believe it, that it is hard to know yourself. But it is not easy to paint yourself either. The portraits painted by Rembrandt are more like a revelation.' 20 best Van Gogh paintings At Eternity’s Gate Oil on canvas, 1890. This painting was completed in early May, when Van Gogh was suffering a severe relapse of poor health – two months before his death. It is based on a pencil drawing, 'Worn Out', from a series of studies he made of a war veteran in 1882. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Cafe Terrace at Night Oil on canvas, 1888. This work was the first in a trilogy of paintings that featured starlit skies, completed over two years. Van Gogh was enthusiastic about the painting and wrote to his sister: 'Here you have a night picture without any black in it, done with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square acquires a pale sulphur and greenish citron-yellow colour. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot... I find satisfaction in painting things immediately.' 20 best Van Gogh paintings The Night Cafe 1888, oil on canvas. The five customers in the scene have described as 'three drunks and derelicts in a large public room... huddled down in sleep or stupor.' Van Gogh told his brother that the cafe owner, Ginoux, had taken so much money it was time to take his revenge by painting the place. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Bedroom in Arles Oil on canvas, 1888. Three authentic versions of this painting were made, easily discernible from the different paintings on the right wall. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Van Gogh's Chair Oil on canvas, 1888. This painting is currently at the National Gallery in London. It was completed after Van Gogh moved from the Hotel Carrel to the Cafe de la Gare at Arles, south France. 20 best Van Gogh paintings The Potato Eaters 1885, oil on canvas. Van Gogh chose this deliberately tricky composition to prove himself as a figure painter, wanting to show the way 'they have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish... that they have thus honestly earned their food'. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Road with Cypress and Star 1890, oil on canvas. Also known as Country Road, this was the last painting Van Gogh made in Saint Remy, It is part of the large Van Gogh collection at the Kroller-Muller Museum at Otterlo in the Netherlands. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Starry Night Over the Rhone 1888, oil on canvas. Another of Van Gogh's paintings of Arles at nighttime – painted at a spot on the bank of the Rhone a few minutes walk from the Yellow House, which he was renting at the time. 20 best Van Gogh paintings The Pink Peach Tree 1888, oil on canvas. In a short space of time during his first weeks at Arles, Van Gogh painted some fifteen orchards, hoping they would sell well because his subject, the glorious blossoms of the flowering trees, had the power to 'cheer everyone up'. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Self Portrait with a Grey Felt Hat 1887, oil on canvas. This self portrait is slightly unusual because Van Gogh's face is angled to face straight towards the observer. Most of them depicted the face as it appeared in the mirror he used, so the right side seen in the image was actually the left side of his face. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Almond Blossoms 1888 - 1890, oil on canvas. Van Gogh loved flowering trees, which to him symbolised hope and new life. This painting was created to celebrate the birth of his nephew and namesake, the son of his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Woman Sewing This was part of Van Gogh's preparation for The Potato Eaters, where he attempted to paint a figure against the light. He struggled, telling his brother Theo: 'It's a difficult effect', yet he succeeded in a strong contrast with the almost-black head of the woman and the use of white for the window, which focuses the gaze mainly on the woman's hands. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat Oil on canvas, 1890. This painting, one of several versions by Van Gogh, has exchanged hands several times and was bought by Stephen Wynn in 1997 for $47.5 million. Seven years later, it was sold to American investor Steven A Cohen for more than $100 million. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Two Cypresses Oil on canvas, 1889. In the cypress trees of Saint Remy, Van Gogh found beauty "as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk". He was enraptured but also challenged: 'It's the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape, but it's one of the most interesting dark notes, the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine'. 20 best Van Gogh paintings The Red Vineyard 1888, oil on canvas. Art historians believe this is the only Van Gogh painting he managed to sell during his lifetime, and has been listed among his major works. It was sold in Brussels for 400 francs (about £3,000) to Anna Boch, an impressionist painter and art collector from Belgium, who was the sister of Van Gogh's friend Eugene Boch. 20 best Van Gogh paintings Wheatfield with Crows 1890, oil on canvas.Commonly regarded as Van Gogh's final painting (with some doubt from art historians due to lack of historical records). Around 10 July Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo and wife Jo Bonger to say he had painted another three large canvases since visiting them in Paris the week before. Two of them, he said, expressed sadness and what he called 'extreme loneliness', but he also believed them to show the healthy and fortifying nature of the countryside.

What the exhibition offers is a portrait of the future artist as a young man. One who used to walk to and from work each day, his route taking in Westminster Bridge and the newly constructed Thames Embankment. At lunchtimes, the National Gallery was a haunt, while at weekends he wandered London’s “charming parks”. In a letter to Theo, he said: “I walk as much as I can… it’s absolutely beautiful here.”

He also had a liking for local fashion, specifically the top hat, insisting “you can’t be in London without one”.

Van Gogh’s ‘At Eternity’s Gate’, 1890, oil paint on canvas (Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo)

Boasting a population of 4.5 million, the British capital was, in 1873, the largest city in the world: more than twice the size of Paris and almost 50 times bigger than The Hague. The American writer Henry James, who’d moved to London himself four years earlier, spoke of its “inconceivable immensity”. Victorian London has become synonymous today with soot, squalour and stench, yet that seemed to make little impact on Van Gogh, whose letters focus on his house with a “lovely garden in front” where he grew poppies and sweet peas.

If all this sounds strangely positive for a figure we’ve come to associate with mental anguish, it’s perhaps no surprise to learn that the good times for Van Gogh didn’t last. In early 1876 he was fired by Goupil & Cie, following a series of tactless interactions with clients. There was upheaval, too, when he quit his south London lodgings in heartache, after the landlady’s daughter – with whom he’d fallen in love – married another tenant. (This domestic drama was the subject of an Olivier Award-winning play from 2002, Vincent in Brixton.)

Bouts of depression ensued, as did the occasional night sleeping rough and the painful search for a new profession. He’d go on to find work as an assistant teacher in Ramsgate and then Isleworth, but his heart was never in it.

Within a few months, he’d decided to become a preacher instead – influenced in part by the “extremely poor areas” he’d seen visiting London’s East End. His approach was ecumenical, rooted in comfort and consolation rather than Church dogma. He lapped up the writings of social reformers such as Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens became a favourite author. (A love of Dickens would remain for the rest of Van Gogh’s life. His famous portraits of the café owner in Arles, Madame Ginoux, painted from 1888 to 1890, feature a copy of the Englishman’s Christmas Tales on the table before her.)

‘Prisoners Exercising’, 1890, oil paint on canvas (The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow)

On 29 October 1876, Van Gogh stepped into the pulpit of Richmond Methodist Church and gave his first sermon. He deemed it a success and was soon writing to Theo that “if my lot is not to preach… then, truly, misery is my lot”.

As it happens, it was in Belgium – in the poor, coalmining district of Borinage – that his career as a pastor would, in the late 1870s, briefly take off. In December 1876, he took the boat to spend Christmas with his family in the Netherlands and chose never to return to the UK.

“The trend of recent exhibitions,” says Van Gogh and Britain curator Carol Jacobi, “has been to move away from the perception of the artist as a tormented genius and outsider, towards appreciating his engagement with the people and ideas of his time.” The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, for example, last year staged a show on the influence of Japanese prints on the artist.

Van Gogh was a worldly man, who “spoke French, German and English as well as Dutch”, says Jacobi. And “during his stay in Britain, he developed an interest in its culture born out of intellectual curiosity”.

What’s perhaps surprising is that it was the literary, rather than artistic, culture that excited van Gogh most. His letters make 100 (usually very positive) mentions of British novels and poems – by Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and others.

As for this country’s art, there’s a sense he never drastically changed the opinion he gave upon seeing 1873’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy: that it was, “with a few exceptions, feeble”. One notable set of exceptions were the print illustrations he saw in popular, current affairs magazines such as The Graphic and The Illustrated London News.

He said he liked their “virile” lines. Beyond style, however, it was their treatment of issues of social injustice (such as alcohol poisoning and unemployment) that appealed most. “The illustrations have the same sentiment as Dickens”, he said: “noble, healthy, and one always returns to them.”

Humility of subject matter would be mirrored in Van Gogh’s many future paintings of peasants and labourers. It’s probably best to avoid claiming the direct influence of London on the artist he’d become, though. Better instead to see those years in Britain as formative ones for Van Gogh the man, as the early twenties are for so many of us.

He experienced extreme highs and lows, the like of which would mark his entire adult life – and, as Jacobi points out, “London played a key role in forging his whole worldview”: one of sympathy for the downtrodden and dispossessed.