top of page

29 The Tabernacle that Van Gogh Built

Writer's picture: Dave GobleDave Goble

Updated: Feb 25, 2024

Van Gogh first arrived in England at the age of 20 in 1873. Barely three years later, by the end of 1876, he had left never to return, and never having painted a stroke. But he had been busy.


Van Gogh’s sketch of his ‘Tin Tabernacle’ in 1876


Sent by his employers, Goupil art dealers in the Hague, he worked in their London branch. In 1876 Goupil sent him to Paris but then, for reasons unknown to me at least, dismissed him. Van Gogh returned to England having decided to earn his living here as a teacher.


His first post, in April 1876, was in Ramsgate, teaching at a boys’ school run by a Mr Stokes. Two months later Mr Stokes moved his school to Linkfield House, 183 Twickenham Road in Isleworth. Van Gogh moved with the school as Mr Stokes had promised him - on top of room and board - a salary at the end of his trial period of up to a maximum of £20 pa. In the latter, however, he was to be disappointed, as evidenced in a letter he wrote to his older brother Theo:


“Mr Stokes says that he definitely cannot give me any salary because he can get teachers enough for just board and lodging, and that is true. But will it be possible for me to continue in this way. I am afraid not; it will be decided soon enough.”

Fortunately for Van Gogh another boys’ school nearby was looking for a teacher, and offering a salary of £15 per year plus board and lodging. The school was run by Reverend Thomas Slade-Jones in his house Holme Court, built in 1715, at 158 Twickenham Road, Isleworth (it's still there). Van Gogh moved into a third-floor room at the back, overlooking the garden, on July 3rd 1876. He was kept busy, teaching the boys in the morning, and as often as not looking after the Slade-Jones’s own six children in the afternoon. In the evenings Van Gogh put the boarders to bed and read them stories. Another letter to Theo shows his concern relating to the boys often falling asleep before he was able to finish, which he assumed was down to his Dutch accent:


“I do not speak without difficulty; how it sounds to English ears, I do not know.”


Evidence suggests Van Gogh liked, and himself was popular with, the Slade-Jones family. In a letter to a friend he describes the Rev Slade-Jones as:


“A venerable man with a big grey beard” adding he had a “special knack of fascinating those boys from the London slums with his stories; in the evening, in the poor light of that schoolroom, all those different faces, and the picturesque figure of that old man, all made a deep impression on me.”


As well as being an Isleworth headmaster the Rev Thomas Slade-Jones was also a practising church minister in Turnham Green, and was behind the establishment of a Congregational community in Chiswick and the building of a ‘tabernacle’ there. In the summer of 1873, according to Slade-Jones, his attention had been drawn to the ‘spiritually destitute condition of Turnham Green’, and he decided to commence Sunday services after conferring with other ministers and lay brethren from the neighbourhood. Initially these were held in the so-called ‘Lecture Room’ at Turnham Green, aka an outbuilding of a large property on the western side of Turnham Green which later became known as The Chestnuts, but which had formerly been an asylum. Arlington Park Mansions stand there today.


By the time Van Gogh arrived in Isleworth, Slade-Jones and his fellow workers had raised the money to purchase a freehold site in the Brentford Road (Chiswick High Road) extending backwards towards Arlington Gardens. On the front of this site an iron church was built, being opened on September 21st 1875.


The son and grandson of ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, Van Gogh was going through a period of intense religious fervour in 1876, and was considering working for the church in some capacity. He regularly attended evening services in the Methodist church at Richmond and the small Methodist chapel at Petersham, and on October 29th that year, at the Richmond church, preached his first ever sermon. Van Gogh was truly ecumenical declaring that:


“In every church I see God, and it’s all the same to me whether a protestant pastor or a Roman Catholic priest preaches … “

Realising the extent of Van Gogh’s evangelical commitment, Slade-Jones suggested he might like to help out at the church Sunday School in Turnham Green. On October 7th Van Gogh wrote to Theo:


“I shall not have to teach so much in the future, but may work more in the parish, visiting the people, talking with them.”

Sketch by van Gogh in 1876 at the end of a letter to Theo: The Petersham Methodist Chapel; the Congregational Church in Turnham Green, (Chiswick)


Another sketch of the Methodist Chapel in Petersham, 1876


On November 10th he explains he is becoming more involved with the Chiswick Congregational Church now that a new assistant had joined the school. Two days later, on “a really English rainy day”, Van Gogh had taken Sunday school at Turnham Green and gone on for afternoon tea with the sexton.


The weather had apparently improved by the following Sunday when Van Gogh described this walk to the church to Theo:


“It was so beautiful on the road to Turnham Green - the chestnut trees and the clear blue skies and the morning sun mirrored in the water of the Thames. The grass was sparkling green and one heard the sound of church bells all around.”


Wish he'd painted that.


Evidently Van Gogh enjoyed a long walk. In another letter to Theo he describes returning from London one evening having taken a bus to Chiswick and then walking to Isleworth:


“I passed Mr Jones’s little church and saw another in the distance with the light still burning at that hour; I entered and found it to be a very beautiful little Catholic church where a few women were praying.”


This was presumably St John’s church in Boston Park Road, Brentford, (built in 1866), since this is the only Catholic church known at that time between Chiswick High Road and Isleworth.

Van Gogh’s work for the Chiswick church is recorded in the Sunday School Minutes of the church (these and other early records only came to light in 1963, when cupboards had to be cleared because of burst water pipes). On November 19th 1876 the Turnham Green Teachers’ Meeting records that “Mr Vincent Van Gof’ [stet] was accepted as a ‘co-worker’.” The same meeting also decided that services for the young should be held “so that the influence gained by the teachers on the scholars might be strengthened.” Van Gogh writes to Theo about this:


“There are children enough but the difficulty is to get them together regularly.”


A fortnight later, on December 4th., van Gogh seconded a motion that a children’s service be held every Thursday evening. Another motion decided that “it be optional with teachers whether they visit their own scholars or Mr Vincent visit them.” Finally it was agreed that “Mr Vincent be supplied with all the names and addresses of the scholars in the school and that he go round to each class for particulars of those who require visiting.” (Van Gogh preferred to be known by his Christian name because foreigners so frequently misspelt or mispronounced his surname.)


This, though, was to be the extent of Van Gogh’s activity in Chiswick. On December 20th 1876 he returned home to Holland for the Christmas holidays. He was not in great shape. To his parents he appeared unwell, depressed, lonely and obsessed by religion. They advised him not to return to England and he agreed. On January 21st 1877 he wrote to Slade-Jones and his wife, telling them he was not coming back, and as he tells Theo:


“… unintentionally the letter became rather long – out of the fullness of my heart – I wished them to remember me and asked them to wrap my recollection in the cloak of charity.”


The last mention of Van Gogh in the Chiswick church records is on February 5th 1877 when the Teachers Meeting “resolved that Mr Vincent be written to be asked for his resignation as he had left the country.”


With regard to the Congregational Church at Turnham Green, the Reverend Slade-Jones raised funds to build a stone church with seats for 500 on the site in 1881, with Van Gogh’s ‘tin tabernacle’ serving as a Sunday School until it was demolished in 1909. This church became the Chiswick United Reformed Church, being closed in 1974 and demolished in the early 1980s to make way for an office block known as Bond House.

347-353 Chiswick High Road, aka Bond House, on the site where once stood the Congregational Church and Van Gogh's tin tabernacle, and the Chiswick Reformed Church after that.


It was not until the early 1880s, with his religious faith on the wane, that Van Gogh realised his true vocation as an artist. Indeed, it was 1881 - five years after leaving Isleworth, and England, for good - before he lifted a paintbrush. He was just 27 years old and living with his parents at the time. From that moment he didn’t hang about. In just over a decade the Post-Impressionist created about 2,100 artworks, including about 860 oil paintings, most of which astonishingly date from the last two years of his life.


Holme Court - Standing outside, taking this photo, gave me the heebie-jeebies


If he'd lived here 50 years earlier in 1826 Van Gogh would have caught the tail-end J. M. W. Turner’s tenure of his Twickenham home, and they would have been neighbours for about six months, with Turner selling up and leaving that year (see Post 27 for more).


I’ve walked Chiswick High Road many times, unaware of the links with Van Gogh. All I knew, to my surprise at the time some years ago, was that he’d lived as a 23 year old for a short while in nearby Isleworth, when religion as opposed to painting was his primary focus. I recall rubbing my eyes in doubt the day I saw his name encircled in a blue plaque on the front wall of Holme Court. Of all the local “Little Histories” this, for me, was (is) the most moving, despite the fact he only lived in the area for six months, this brief period pre-dating his first painting, (in The Hague), by about five years.


As well as showing the location of Van Gogh’s home in Isleworth, I wanted to show where he worked and spent time during his six months in S.W. London in the second half of 1876.


Red arrow: Home, at Holme Court at 183 Twickenham Road

Orange arrow: The Chestnuts would have been located here, on the west edge of Turnham Green,

thereby serving the “spiritually destitute condition of Turnham Green”, as Rev

Slade-Jones put it. Arlington Park Mansions stand there today

Purple arrow: Van Gogh’s ‘tin tabernacle’

Blue arrow: Petersham, where Van Gogh worked in the Methodist Chapel


Fond of long walks, as we’ve discovered, Van Gogh had plenty of opportunity to indulge in that pastime as he went about his business. From Holme Court to Turnham Green in Chiswick is about four miles, and it's roughly the same distance from Holme Court to Petersham.

58 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

コメント


bottom of page