Van Gogh: Letters from Provence [Hardcover]

Van Gogh is the archetype of the artist as tortured genius; films, biographies and anecdotes have shaped the way we see his work and even our views of what it is to be an artist. Vincent himself, of course, had no such perspective. A troubled, shiftless oldest son from a middle class background, he must have driven his family to distraction. Falling in love with unsuitable women, giving away all his posessions and setting to out to be a letter-day St Francis preaching to the Belgian coal-miners, getting sacked from every job and dismissed from every academic course; how did they cope? When he announced he wanted to become an artist it must have seemed like just another doomed fad.

Most enthusiasts for his work know that his brother Theo was an art dealer. Fewer realise that Theo had stepped into the post Vincent had been sacked from. Theo's devoted support of his brother, whose initial talent wasn't obvious, was almost saintly. This book, though it concentrates on Vincent's three years in Provence (during which his most celebrated canvases were produced) sets that peak of his painting career in the context of all that had gone before. A Dramatis Personae of the people to whom the letters were addressed, illustrated where possible with photographs, helps us understand Van Gogh's world.

The letters are, of course, translated into English - but we have snippets of the originals in facsimile, sepia ink on notebook paper - and some letters, to Anglophone recipients like the Australian artist John Russell, are written in English; Vincent Van Gogh was good at languages. Most valuable, however, are the many thumbnail sketches of paintings Vincent was working on which he included in letters to his brother. These are exceptionally vivid, and we see not only how the artist's style strengthens, but how the distinctive brushstrokes of his paintings mirror the way he draws. Many of the landscape drawings are exceptionally accomplished, making it clear that, at least by the end, the apparent naivety of Van Gogh's style is deliberate.

Vincent writes to Theo about his use of colour; how he longs to capture the spirit of Japanese prints in his work with figures and landscapes, and how he is calculatedly exaggerating colour, talking at times of acheiving an "African" intensity. There is a tendency to look for the source of the peculiarities of Van Gogh's style in his mental problems; to see his paintings as the product of madness. It is clear from the letters that, like any artist, he is striving to communicate through style; and that he is also ambitious to be an original, different painter who will be recognised for his originality by the art world. How much he is aware of his mental problems is clear from the letters; how much they influenced his art, is up to the reader to decide.