Van Gogh’s English years gave him not only a technique but a sensibility: literary, visionary, symbol-haunted, always aware—unlike some of his more formalistic disciples—of the written word as an ally, not an enemy, to the drawn or painted line. As for the bold, dynamic strokes that pack tension and action into illustrations from the social-reformer Victorian papers, Van Gogh never abandoned this “English line.” It helped to build up the crow-haunted skies, the wind-scoured wheatfields, the spookily tangled tree-roots, in late paintings of Provence and his final home at Auvers-sur-Oise.
Source : From Writer to Painter: Van Gogh’s London Pilgrimage
