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Good morning. This week marks the birthday of the artist Vincent Van Gogh. By coincidence, I've just returned from a few days in Amsterdam, where I popped into the Van Gogh museum. I entered as a sceptic. I associate Van Gogh with that moment in history when the focus shifts from the art to the artist, an impression reinforced by the first display - a ring of self-portraits, iconic images made familiar by a billion tea towels and fridge magnets. It evokes the unhealthy cult of genius, the myth that greatness is born, not made. Well, my ignorance was quickly corrected. Painting himself was a necessity because he couldn't afford a model, and seeing Van Gogh's art develop chronologically, one realises that he grew by error, hard work and studying others. No, he did not cut his ear off because he couldn't paint it; he had a psychotic episode after a row with his friend, Paul Gaugin. Van Gogh died at the age of 37, probably by his own hand. One picture leapt out at me: painted during his stay at an asylum in Provence, it is a copy of a pieta by Delacroix, depicting the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Jesus has red hair and a red beard. At first I thought, "here he goes again - making himself the subject." But what I did not appreciate was that Vincent's father was a minister and that Vincent had tried to become a missionary in his youth. His faith could probably be described as non-dogmatic but deep. He had a "passion for reality", a desire to capture and articulate the divine essence in everything and everybody. You can see that in his use of colour: not the colours of a flower as they appear to the eye, but bright, contrasting colours that when put together give the subject an inner light of such intensity that his sunflowers seem to glow. It is my goal, he once told his brother, "to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise." To look at the world through the eyes of Van Gogh is to see not just its substance but its spirit. I suspect that when he painted Jesus to look like himself, he was expressing the comfort that he took from the story of the crucifixion. This is holy week, when Christians believe that Jesus suffered not only physically, but perhaps with mental anguish, too: for at the point of death, he asks God, "why have you forsaken me?" Jesus is later resurrected, proving - to the faithful - that death is not an end. Flowers and artists wilt and pass away, but we will have new life and beauty in the spring.