I associate Van Gogh mostly with amorous disappointment and vegetable oil: the former on account of a misadventure at the Tate Britain a few years back; the latter because of that yellow gloop that slides across his canvases like the residue of a fried egg. The hype for the big show at the National was hardly endearing. The Guardian’s art critic described it as “heart-stopping” — death-by-adjective seems to be the likelier culprit — and introduced us to a shady, presumably illicit act known as undergrowth-snuffling. Oh, and we have to call him Vincent and we have to love him, you see. After all, he’s coming for tea at Claridges with Piers and Jeremy, you see. It’s only polite. I too have a Paisley shirt.

Anyway I’m here, in the first room, popping my tourist-cancelling headphones into my ears, thinking about the cruel and unusual punishments that would be meted out to people who take selfies in front of works of art hanging in public galleries — punishments that would give new meaning to the terms “picture rail” and “Japanese wood block”. Vincent. Vincent. Paint your flowers blue and grey. My mother saw Don McLean at Newcastle City Hall in the early-70s: his rendition of Wor Geordie’s Lost His Penka was the memorable bit of that evening (true story).

We don’t need to go a-snuffling too deep in the undergrowth to see that VG was a tortured soul. It’s there in every olive grove and nut farm: impasto with the consistency of brain matter, pulled-apart and clagged on the canvas (perhaps explaining the acephalgic migraine that struck me when I left the building); hollow outlines of people, the land boring straight through them; the spirit world spiralling out of treetops as the Netherlandish hedgerows and Rembrandt clouds loosen; horizons of yellow hope. In one painting a man and a woman face each other across a whirlpool of lava. The anodyne guide tells us the woman is an invention: women weren’t allowed in that part of the asylum. Women aren’t that easily escaped.

Acclaim shafts the best of us, especially when it turns obsessive and sycophantic. We get the idea quickly enough, and anyone who is still short of breath on the third olive tree is missing a stone or two. Let’s drop the charade. Sixty-odd paintings made over just two years: even one of the real masters would get same-y after all that. Most of these pictures just aren’t interesting enough: the brushstrokes, every one of them about an inch long and curled off a no. 4 filbert, are too unvaried; the subjects are too repetitive. In some, there’s an unpleasant premonition of Lowry’s ghastly ant-farms. 

Artists don’t paint sixty breath-takers in two years: painting doesn’t work like that, and anyone who tells you it does, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Leonardo relied on “happy little accidents” just as much as Bob Ross. But sometimes the gods smiled on VG.

And on those rare occasions, Vincent was really rather good. 

I’ve seen Starry Night over the Rhone before, but it looks new amidst all these pot-boilers and interior decorations (to prove the point, facsimiles of the Sunflowers vase, replete with “Vincent” signature, are available in the exhibition gift shop, probably in exchange for an awful lot of money). It’s a cold picture — Kelvin cold. And it’s all the more bitter for the nearness of warmth: for the lights of Arles splashing across the water, the way the lamps of a public house splash on to the pavement on a wet November night. We can almost hear the laughter — inside, across the bay. In the sky, the plough — so often the plough — mocks the earth: light punctures the night — cobalts dredged from the transneptunian sea and colder blues I can scarcely name, slate ceruleans mined in the Oort Cloud. Lovers stand on the headland, but the painter stands aloof — and alone.

The Sower I had not seen before: I can’t claim to have been breath-taken or (Lord Help Us) “dazzled”, but I might have been shellacked. In the first place, it’s a picture of a peace I hope we’ve all experienced at least once: a slow-slipping sun, alabaster light in a late summer evening, irradiating cool, long purple shadows pulled over long fields. Not a drop of sunflower oil in that star: it’s pure light, a halo without an angel. But it’s the sower himself who’s the point. Remember this was done during the death-rattle of the old style of figurative painting and sculpting. And in France, that rattle was choiring shout. Go to the hall of sculpture in the Petit Palais and look at the workman with the head of Augustus. VG’s style is different, but the robustness is the same: a solidity of limb and being and doing — a man existent.

The acclaim is overblown, but it’s not an annoying exhibition. True, the guide can’t resist telling us that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is now controversial — controversial, perhaps, in a way that it was uncontroversial when it was published in 1852, when American slavery was a social reality? I digress. But I can’t slough-off the feeling that VG might have been chosen for top billing in this bicentenary precisely because he’s a parochial painter who barely marked the world while he was in it: not much colonialism on show; not much chance of a Gauguin retrospective going down so well… 

More to the point, I can’t slough-off the feeling that our troubled friend Vincent is not being acclaimed for his painting, so much as for the troubles themselves. We spend an awful lot of time peering into bushes, although mercifully we are spared the Freudian reading. There are times when the art dissolves into biography, and Vincent is just a patient with a pastime. This is a failing.

Van Gogh was not a great painter: the arc of Western painting bends little to his presence; next to a Monet he is a footnote. But Van Gogh was a painter, far more than the silly Fauvists who claimed to find him inspirational. He was a painter reminiscent of that other jobbing painter of solid, life-living things given an excellent exhibition this year, the “pitman painter” Norman Cornish. There’s no shame in that. VG was more than a mental patient just as Cornish was more than a proletarian curiosity. They laboured in their craft. Every now and then, both men touched brilliance. As in life, so in death, they need saving from the critics — only now the problem is acclaim, not obscurity.

Late afternoon when I left, on a Sunday: outside, the Square was drowned in yellow light, pulled-pork people and purple shadows stretched across the open ground, glistening under an aura of stars.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers is on display at the National Gallery until 19.01.25.