Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, National Gallery, London This daring, dazzling exhibition gives us a thrilling sense of the artist’s transfiguring genius, showing how he remade the world around him with beauty, hope and searing colour Neither The Poet nor The Lover , whose portraits open the this heart-stopping Van Gogh exhibition, were quite what they seem. The Lover’s eyes gazes dreamily from a face of blue-green tints, wearing a red cap flaming against an emerald sky, in which a gold moon and star twinkle. In reality, he was an army officer called Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose affairs were less ethereal than the painting suggests. “He has all the Arles women he wants,” wrote Van Gogh enviously. The Poet’s face, meanwhile, is anxious and gaunt, its ugliness badly hidden by a thin beard, as the night around him bursts into starshine. He was a Belgian painter called Eugène Boch whose work Van Gogh thought so-so. But beggars can’t be choosers. They were among the few friends Van Gogh had in