The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

I came to this book knowing the legend and almost nothing else: the sunflowers, the severed ear, the pistol in a wheat field. What I did not expect to find was a writer. Vincent van Gogh wrote hundreds of letters, most of them to his younger brother Theo, and the strongest of them stand beside anything in nineteenth century prose. The Penguin Classics selection, edited by Ronald de Leeuw and translated by Arnold Pomerans, runs 560 pages, and it is the edition I have been living inside. It looks like an art history book. It reads like a novel about one man's stubborn, expensive, heartbreaking attempt to become a painter, told in his own voice, in real time, with no idea how the story ends.

The collection has its own history. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo's widow, found a drawer full of letters when she entered their Paris flat, and after both brothers died within a year of each other she spent decades sorting, translating, and defending them. The first collected edition appeared in January 1914, in three volumes, and it is that publication, not the Penguin paperback, that gives this book its year: 1914. The Penguin volume is a selection rather than the complete correspondence, drawn from a later and more scholarly effort, with the letters linked by short biographical passages. That word "selection" is worth keeping in mind. What you are holding is somebody's idea of Van Gogh, assembled by an editor who had read everything and chose the parts that told the clearest story.

A young man looking for a vocation

The earliest letters come from a nineteen year old who signs off "My dear Theo" and has not yet become interesting. He works for an art dealing firm, first in The Hague and then in London, and his letters are factual, a little stiff, full of weather, purchases, and the prices of prints. Then London goes wrong. He falls for his landlady's daughter, is rejected, and something in him closes or opens, depending on how you read it. He is dismissed from the firm, drifts into teaching, then into a period of religious fervor so intense that it alarms everyone around him. He wants to be a preacher. He studies for it, fails at it, and takes a post as a lay preacher in the Borinage, a coal mining district in Belgium, where he gives away most of what he owns and sleeps on straw.

Those Borinage letters are hard to read, not because they are badly written but because you can watch a young man setting himself on fire for an idea. He wants to live like the miners, to earn the right to speak to them, and the church authorities find him excessive and decline to renew him. The failure pushes him toward drawing. He starts sending Theo sketches of miners and of the flat gray landscape, and a new tone enters the correspondence. He is no longer a failed preacher describing his failures. He is a beginner describing what he sees, and the difference in confidence is immediate.

This is where the book becomes addictive. From the moment Vincent decides he is an artist, the letters stop being a record of moods and become a record of work. He writes about perspective, about the cost of paint, about which drawing masters are worth copying, about models who will not sit still, about the paper that buckles when it is too wet. He asks Theo for money constantly, and the requests are painful to read because he knows exactly how painful they are. The two brothers had an arrangement, unusual for its time and strange even now: Theo, an art dealer, supported Vincent almost completely for a decade, and Vincent paid him back in letters, in sketches, and in the promise of paintings he believed would one day sell. Most of the letters are that promise, repeated and revised hundreds of times.

The Hague, Sien, and the long road to Drenthe

In The Hague, around 1882, Vincent tries to build a life. He takes up with a woman named Sien Hoornik, a former prostitute, pregnant when they meet, and he decides that rescuing her and her child is both a moral duty and a chance to paint the kind of poor, honest subjects he cares about. His family is appalled. Theo is torn between loyalty and embarrassment. The letters from this period swing between tenderness toward Sien and her children, and a growing awareness that the relationship is not going to survive his poverty or his temperament. It does not. They separate, and Vincent is left alone again, with a studio he cannot afford and a stack of unpaid bills.

What saves the book at this point is his eye. He writes about the Dutch landscape the way a carpenter talks about wood. He describes the dunes at Scheveningen, a public soup kitchen, rows of pollarded willows, a woman sorting potatoes. He is trying to learn drawing from the ground up, and he tells Theo about his tools: a perspective frame he has made with adjustable legs, so that he can get the proportions of a road or a field honest. That detail, a homemade wooden frame, recurs in the letters, and it is a good emblem of the man. He is a self taught artist who trusts instruments and effort more than inspiration, and he keeps returning to the frame because it is the one thing in his life he can actually control.

Briefly, he goes north to Drenthe, a remote province of peat bogs and poverty, hoping to find the primitive subjects he idealizes. Margaret Drabble later called these letters heartbreaking, and she was right. He is alone, the weather is against him, the locals are suspicious, and he writes about the darkness of the place with an attraction that is also a kind of fear. He does not stay long. The Drenthe letters are short, restless, and full of the sound of a man talking himself into patience he does not feel.

Nuenen and The Potato Eaters

He moves back in with his parents in Nuenen, and this is the period that produced The Potato Eaters, the painting he considered his first real work. The letters leading up to it are the most workmanlike in the book. He sketches the composition, describes the peasants eating by lamplight, worries that the faces are too crude, and then defends the crudeness on purpose. He wants the picture to smell of bacon and steam and manual labor, not to be pretty. He tells Theo that a peasant painting should carry the soil of the field in it, and he would rather fail honestly than succeed at something decorative.

The letters also carry his father's death, a scandal involving a young woman in the village, and a growing estrangement from the art world he is trying to enter. His friend Anton van Rappard, himself a painter, disliked The Potato Eaters, and the disagreement ended their friendship. Vincent's response, a long, wounded, stubborn letter, is one of the most revealing things in the collection. He cannot understand how anyone could look at the picture and not see what he was after, and the fact that a friend could not see it makes him doubt either the man or the work, but never the work. It is the first clear sign of the pattern that runs through the rest of the book: he will lose people, and he will keep painting.

Antwerp, Paris, and the color that changes everything

He goes to Antwerp to study, then to Paris, where Theo is working, and the Paris years create a gap in the correspondence, because the brothers were living together and had no need to write. The book acknowledges this hole, and you feel it as a silence. Then Vincent moves south, to Arles, chasing light, and the letters resume with a new energy. He has seen the Impressionists, he has absorbed the lessons of Japanese prints, and he is determined to make color do what he wants. The Arles letters are the famous ones, and they earn their fame. He writes about yellow, about blue, about the difference between painting a thing and painting the sensation of a thing. He talks about wanting to put the sun on canvas, and he means it literally enough that you believe him.

He rents the yellow house and begins to imagine a community of artists, a studio where painters could live and work together and stop being poor alone. He writes to Paul Gauguin, whom he admires enormously, and persuades him to come. He writes to Theo about furniture, about beds, about which chairs to paint and how to hang the pictures. There is something unbearably hopeful in these letters, because you know what is coming and he does not. He is furnishing a future that will not arrive.

The sunflower paintings belong to this stretch, made partly to decorate Gauguin's room, and Vincent describes the project with the enthusiasm of a host preparing for a guest he wants to impress. He is lonely, he is drinking too much, he is not sleeping, and he is also producing at a rate that seems to frighten even him. The letters swing from elation to dread and back within a single page, which is part of why reading them in sequence feels less like browsing a museum than like standing in a room while someone talks.

Gauguin, the ear, and the breaking point

Gauguin arrives in late 1888, and for a few weeks the dream works. The two painters argue about art and money, share a studio, and correspond jointly with friends. Vincent's letters about Gauguin combine admiration with a fear of being abandoned, a fear that turns out to be justified. The tension builds through December, and the two men become a bad match in a small house with no privacy and not enough heat.

On 23 December 1888, after a quarrel, Vincent mutilates his own ear and is taken to the hospital in Arles, and the correspondence for that period is fragmentary, filtered through Theo's accounts and the records of the institution. The book handles this part honestly and quietly. It does not turn the ear into a set piece, which I appreciated, because the incident has been turned into a set piece by everyone else for more than a century.

Vincent asks to be committed. He enters the asylum at Saint-Remy-de-Provence in May 1889, and the letters from there are among the calmest in the book, which sounds strange until you read them. He has a room, a window, a view of an enclosed wheat field, and he paints it again and again, in different weather and different moods. He writes about his illness in the third person sometimes, as if it belonged to someone else, and he worries most about whether his mind will hold long enough to finish the work. He is not sentimental about his own suffering. He is practical, almost clinical, and that is part of what makes it painful to read. He talks about cypresses, about the stars, about the specific difficulty of painting night, and he sounds less like a patient than like a craftsman with a deadline.

Auvers and the last letters

In May 1890 he leaves the asylum and goes to Auvers-sur-Oise, under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet, and the final sequence of letters reads like a man running out of time without knowing it. He paints wheat fields, portraits, the church, the town hall. He visits Theo and his wife and their baby, and there is a flash of ordinary happiness, a meal, a walk, a conversation about a picture. Then his mood darkens again. The last letter Theo received, written around 23 July, is unfinished in a way that has troubled readers for a century, and on 27 July Vincent shot himself, dying two days later.

The book then ends the way it has to, with Theo's grief and the beginning of the long labor that made Vincent famous after he was gone. There is a final irony worth naming, though I will name it plainly rather than dress it up: the letters that failed to sell paintings during his lifetime became, eventually, one of the most widely read documents in the history of art, and Theo, who died months after his brother, never saw a single page of them in print.

The other correspondents, and what the book cannot do

The collection is not only Vincent and Theo. There are letters to his sister Wil, whose relationship with him is gentler and more relaxed, and there are the letters to fellow painters, above all Emile Bernard and Anton van Rappard. The Bernard letters are the most technical in the book, full of theories about color and composition, and they show another side of Vincent: the man who wanted to be taken seriously as a thinker about art, and who wrote to a younger painter with real generosity rather than condescension. The Rappard letters are more combative, and their falling out over The Potato Eaters still reads as a small tragedy, two stubborn men who could not find a way past a single disagreement.

Now for the honest part. This is not a book for everyone, and three things get in the way. The first is repetition. Vincent writes about money, about his health, about Theo's loyalty, and about the same handful of paintings across hundreds of pages, and a reader who wants variety will find the middle sections exhausting. The letters were not written to be read in sequence, and reading them in sequence can feel like being copied on a very long argument. The second is the translation. Pomerans is careful and readable, but the originals were written in Dutch and French, full of slang, biblical phrasing, and odd punctuation, and any English version flattens some of that texture. If you can read the originals, the originals are better. The third is the myth. The legend of the mad genius is so loud that it can drown out the man, and part of the work of reading this book is resisting it. Vincent was not a saint and he was not simply a lunatic. He was difficult, needy, sometimes cruel to the people who helped him, and also one of the most serious and clear eyed writers on the subject of work I have ever encountered.

The edition itself deserves a note. The Penguin selection is convenient, affordable, and well annotated, but it is a selection, and it shapes the story by what it leaves out. If you want the whole correspondence, with both directions of the conversation, you go to the Van Gogh Museum's complete edition, which is a much larger and more scholarly project. As a first encounter with the letters, the de Leeuw volume is the right one, and as a portrait of a mind at work it is hard to beat. What surprised me most was how little of the book is about art as a mystery. It is about art as labor, done daily, badly at first and then better, by a man who believed the labor itself was a form of devotion. The letters are the record of that devotion, written by someone who never got to see how it ended. I finished the book with more respect for the work and less appetite for the legend, which I suspect is exactly what Vincent would have wanted.