Vincent Van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherland, the son of a Protestant clergyman and into a family with close ties to the art world. Initially he struggled to find direction, working in various roles in his homeland, in England and France, at one time settling as preacher among Belgian coal miners.
But increasingly he dedicated himself to painting, mixing in Paris with leading impressionists and post-impressionists and eventually moving to Arles in the south of France where he achieved a distinct and striking style. Financially reliant on his generous brother Theo, his mental health deteriorated, with him first cutting off his ear and eventually killing himself in 1890, aged just 37.
Repute came shortly after his death and today he is one of the world's most popular artists, his works of art attracting some of the highest prices in the art world. Martin Gayford is a distinguished art critic who has written about Van Gogh's period in Arles living with Gaugin.
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The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature.
It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna.
An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen.
This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon.
The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience.
Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack.
Paul Morland is an expert in demographics, and the author of several books.
In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon:
E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon
E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini
E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam
E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett
E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill
E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes
E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford