Letters of Vincent van Gogh - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416580867 ISBN 13: 9781416580867

Publisher: Touchstone, 2008

Synopsis

A literary classic, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Captures the voice of one of the most beloved and important artists of all time.

Though Vincent van Gogh is often thought of as a mad genius, in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh the thoughtful, effervescent, and sensitive man is revealed to readers through his own voice.

This collection of letters, arranged in chronological order and written to Vincent's closest confidant, his brother and art dealer, Theo, provide a riveting narrative of van Gogh's life. The letters expose Vincent's creative process; his joy and inspiration derived from literature, Japanese art, and nature; as well as his many romantic disappointments and constant poverty. Also documented are Vincent's close relationships with fellow artists, especially Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh's tender and often ebullient letters provide a sharp contrast to the devastating and frequently violent mental breakdowns that plagued and eventually destroyed him.

Collected and edited by art historian Mark Roskill, this volume also includes a chronology, a short memoir by van Gogh's sister-in-law that fills in many of the blanks of Vincent's early years, and reproductions of selected artwork discussed in van Gogh's letters.

An epistolary classic, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh is not just an important historical collection but also a captivating treasure.

About this title

Review:

This thorough collection of van Gogh's letters has been assembled with an artful eye and sensitivity to the artist's thinking. The result is an atypical take on Vincent van Gogh that avoids putting too much stress on his troubled mental state and too much straining by the editor to shape a narrative out of van Gogh's epistolary clues. Instead, we see the thoughtful and contemplative side of this creative genius, as well as his concern for the impact his art and life had on those people closest to him.

About the Author:

Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890) was born in Holland. He became an assistant with an international firm of art-dealers and in 1881 he went to Brussels to study art. After an unsuccessful love affair with his cousin he returned to Holland and in 1885 he painted his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, a haunting scene of domestic poverty. A year later his brother Theo, an art dealer, enabled him to study in Paris, where he met Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat, who became very important influences on his work.

In 1888 he left Paris for the Provençal landscape at Arles, the subject of many of his best works, including "Sunflowers" and "The Chair and the Pipe." It was here Van Gogh cut off his ear, in remorse for threatening Gauguin with a razor during a quarrel, and he was placed in an asylum for a year. On July 7, 1890 Van Gogh shot himself at the scene of his last painting, the foreboding "Cornfields with Flight of Birds," and he died two days later.

Ronald de Leeuw has been the director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam since 1986. He trained as an art historian at the universities of Los Angeles, California, and of Leiden, The Netherlands. As a specialist in nineteenth-century painting, he has been responsible for numerous exhibitions in The Netherlands and abroad, including the 1990 Vincent Van Gogh Centennial retrospective in Amsterdam. Since 1990 Ronald de Leeuw has also directed the Museum Mesdag in The Hague, known for its fine Barbizon and Hague School holdings. In 1994 he was appointed professor extraordinary in the history of collecting at the Free University of Amsterdam.

Arnold Pomerans was born in 1920 and was educated in South Africa. He emigrated to England in 1948, and from 1948 to 1955 taught physics in London. In 1955 he became a full-time translator and has had just under two hundred major works issued by leading British and US publishers. Among the authors translated by him are Louis de Broglie, Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud, George Grosz, Jan Huizinga, Jean Piaget and Jules Romain.

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1416580867
• ISBN 13: 9781416580867
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Roskill Mark