A Fire in His Soul: Van Gogh, Paris, and the Making of an Artist

The fascinating story of Vincent van Gogh’s two groundbreaking years in Paris, where he transformed himself from a provincial unknown into one of the world’s great visionary artists.

Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the French capital on the last day of February 1886, a month short of his thirty-third birthday. He was a man beaten down by life, half-starved, and nearly broken psychologically. He was saved by his brother Theo, who provided him with room, board, and, most crucially, emotional support while he attempted to master the difficult craft of painting. Thus far, Vincent's crude scenes of peasant life rendered in murky shades of brown and gray were both hackneyed and amateurish. Theo, a successful art dealer at a prestigious Parisian firm, dismissed them as gloomy, unappealing, and, worst of all, unmarketable.

By the time Vincent left Paris, almost exactly two years later, he’d transformed himself into one of the most original artists of the age, turning out works of hallucinatory intensity in vivid hues and stamped with his own distinctive personality. A Fire in His Soul chronicles this remarkable transformation. It’s a tale filled with tragedy and triumph, personal anguish and creative fulfillment, as Vincent, through sheer force of will, reinvents himself as a painter of unparalleled expressive power.

Along the way, the reader will discover an unfamiliar Van Gogh: not the solitary genius of the popular imagination, shunned by an uncomprehending world and conjuring masterpieces from the depths of his lonely soul. In Paris, he was at the center of a community of like-minded seekers. Here, Van Gogh was able to engage in a lively dialogue with fellow artists almost as daring as he was, expanding his notion of what art could and should be.

It was in the cafes and studios of Montmartre and in the grand galleries of the Louvre and Luxembourg, that Van Gogh received his artistic education—a crash course that at first disoriented him but ultimately sparked his creative breakthrough. Working alongside such legendary figures as Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and Signac, Vincent perfected his technique and launched an artistic revolution.

Miles J. Unger writes on art, books, and culture for The Economist. Formerly the managing editor of Art New England, for many years he was a contributing writer to the New York Times. He is the author of Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World; The Watercolors of Winslow Homer; Magnifico: The Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de’ Medici; Machiavelli: A Biography; and Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces. Miles lives in Boston. To learn more about Miles’s books, please visit www.MilesJunger.com.