Most unusually among major painters, Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) was also
an accomplished writer. His letters provide both a unique self-portrait
and a vivid picture of the contemporary cultural scene. Van Gogh emerges
as a complex but captivating personality, struggling with utter
integrity to fulfil his artistic destiny. This major new edition, which
is based on an entirely new translation, reinstating a large number of
passages omitted from earlier editions, is expressly designed to reveal
his inner journey as much as the outward facts of his life. It includes
complete letters wherever possible, linked with brief passages of
connecting narrative and showing all the pen-and-ink sketches that
originally went with them. Despite the familiar image of Van Gogh as an
antisocial madman who died a martyr to his art, his troubled life was
rich in friendships and generous passions. In his letters we discover
the humanitarian and religious causes he embraced, his fascination with
the French Revolution, his striving for God and for ethical ideals, his
desperate courtship of his cousin, Kee Vos, and his largely unsuccessful
search for love. All of this, suggests De Leeuw, demolishes some of the
myths surrounding Van Gogh and his career but brings hint before us as a
flesh-and-blood human being, an individual of immense pathos and
spiritual depth. Perhaps even more moving, these letters illuminate his
constant conflicts as a painter, torn between realism, symbolism and
abstraction; between landscape and portraiture; between his desire to
depict peasant life and the exciting diversions of the city; between his
uncanny versatility as a sketcher and his ideal of the full-scale
finished tableau. SinceVan Gogh received little feedback from the
public, he wrote at length to friends, fellow artists and his family,
above all to his brother Theo, the Parisian art dealer, who was his
confidant and mainstay. Along with his intense powers of visual
imagination, Vincent brought to the
