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Good morning The 150th anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh’s death this week has produced exhibitions, lectures and tributes across the world. Like many great painters Van Gogh, who died at the early age of just 37, lived an unconventional life. His grandfather and father were both priests. In 1877 he wrote: “Someone in our family has always been a minister of the gospel…it is my prayer and innermost desire that the spirit of my father and grandfather may also rest upon me”. But the life of a minister was not for young Vincent. He went to Amsterdam to study theology, but found the Greek and Latin too much. Three months later he went to Brussels to prepare to be a missionary. That didn’t work either. So he set about being a lay preacher to a poor mining community in Borinage [which figures later in some of his finest paintings] but he was regarded as completely mad – living in a shack, giving all his possessions away and calling himself a peasant. As his desire to work in the church of his day waned and mental health issues increasingly affected him, he wrote to his brother: “when in a state of excitement my feelings lead me to the contemplation of eternity.” In her book At Eternity’s Gate, Kathleen Powers-Erickson suggests that religion remained a central driving force in Van Gogh’s life. Modern scholars, she writes, should never forget that in spite of his state of mind at times and his disappointing experiences with the church – his faith remained vital. More than 600 letters written between himself and his younger brother, of the same name, reveal a constant search for meaning. Both his letters and many of his paintings, faith – and the battle between good and evil, right and wrong – in a world full of inevitable and contradictory beauty and suffering-is never far away. The Sower – currently on display in the United States –is a rare classic Van Gough expression of the biblical parable in which raging skies don’t quite obliterate a dominant sun. The seeds of hope live on and may well flourish even as the birds of the air seek to consume them. But surely it’s his classic work, the Starry Night – which I suggest you take another look at on the internet this weekend. Here Van Gough’s own surmise that “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day” passionately reflects a very personal struggle to overcome darkness in all its manifestations – represented in the pattern and texture of the swirling greys where the light still manages to flicker despite it all.