The two vivid portraits — the poet and the lover — hang together in the first room of the exhibition, as they did above van Gogh’s bed in the so-called Yellow House in a working-class neighborhood of Arles, France.

It was there, roughly two years before his death by suicide in July 1890, that he dreamed of creating a “Studio of the South” — an artist commune that would produce avant-garde art bathed in the golden light of southern France. (“I know that it will do certain people good to find poetic subjects — THE STARRY SKY — THE VINE BRANCHES — THE FURROWS — the poet’s garden,” he wrote to his brother, Theo.)

Van Gogh’s friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, came to stay for two months in late 1888 (ending with the dispute in which the Dutchman famously lopped off part of his own ear), but van Gogh was otherwise alone in Provence. It was a prolific period during which — despite emotional turmoil, mental breakdowns and periodic institutionalization — the artist produced some of his most famous, inventive and moving works.

“Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers,” which runs through Jan. 19, 2025, at the National Gallery, in London, brings together over 50 works (some of them rarely on loan) to present a fresh and tender vision of the well-known artist. The show is a centerpiece of the museum’s 200th anniversary celebrations.

The exhibition’s focus is on the painter’s two final years, when his distinctive writhing line, hallucinatory palette, impastoed surfaces and romantic visions reached new heights. It also highlights how he displayed his works in the Yellow House, carefully arranging them to create an environment of images in conversation, and his desire to make paintings that transformed what he observed in ordinary life into a kind of poetry.

In portraits, such as “The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet)” and “The Poet (Portrait of Eugène Boch)” (both 1888), this impulse translated into images of acquaintances cast in archetypal roles. Milliet, a local soldier lothario, is shown from the shoulders up, wearing a pristine black uniform of the Zouave regiment (an infantry unit active in Northern Africa) with shiny gold buttons, a silver medal and a rakishly tilted red cap. The lover’s soft eyes look dreamily into the distance, and he appears to float in a teal green ether of angled brushstrokes, the air vibrating with longing. At the upper right corner, like an enigmatic hieroglyph, floats a crescent moon curved around a single star.

The poet, too, appears against a stellar background. Van Gogh described Boch, a fellow painter, in Keatsian terms as “an artist friend who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings.” He would paint him faithfully to begin with, van Gogh wrote to his brother, but that would not be the end of the matter. “To finish it,” he added, “I’m now going to be an arbitrary colorist.” Boch’s upper body, clad in a brown coat, is plain and flattened, but his face is detailed and expressive, touched with highlights of yellow, green, white, red, gold and a sea-foam shine here and there that picks up the color of his striped shirt. The contours of his cropped blonde hair glow like a halo against a dark blue background speckled with stars, as if he brings news from the firmament.

In a display dedicated to the Yellow House, “The Bedroom” (1889) offers a vertiginous perspective of the painter’s bed in a cramped corner with his own paintings hung on the surrounding blue walls. One of them might be “Self-Portrait” (1889), a three-quarter view of the artist, wearing a blue smock and with a palette in hand, that hangs nearby; another could be a portrait of Marie Ginoux, a local cafe owner whom he painted five times as “L’Arlésienne” — a famed and elusive Provençal beauty. In a version of “The Bedroom” from the year earlier, however, the two works above the bed, looking down on the crumpled sheets like sentries, are the lover and the poet.