What Van Gogh’s letters reveal of his life

Review by Jackie Wullschlager

Published: September 19 2009 00:18 | Last updated: September 19 2009 00:18

The Letters: The Complete Illustrated Edition
By Vincent van Gogh
Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker
Thames & Hudson ￡325, six volumes, 2,240 pages

Even if van Gogh had destroyed every canvas he painted, his letters would still fix his place in history. The most complete, vivid, authentic and agonisingly frank account of the creative life ever written, the letters, like his drawings, form a day-to-day record of what passed before his mind and eye. Compulsively set down, dashed off and posted as soon as the ink was dry, they were composed – without a thought to publication – by an artist who lived and died unknown and isolated, too grim and cantankerous to manage social relations in person, but determined to communicate in his own way. “I can’t count on living a great many years”, he writes to his brother Theo in 1883, “but I have a certain obligation and duty – because I’ve walked the earth for 30 years – to leave a certain souvenir in the form of drawings and paintings in gratitude.”

After van Gogh’s death in 1890, his correspondence was discovered almost as soon as his paintings, and became famous with them. A selection appeared in 1893; almost all 900 extant letters were published in the Netherlands in 1914 and translated into English in 1958. They have always been an essential academic resource and, like all the artist’s work, entrance everyday readers for their immediacy and dizzying emotional accessibility. Intimate, compelling and comprehensive, the letters make a serious formal biography both redundant and impossible.

Nonetheless, a century after first publication, cultural and biographical references are obscure and, in the case of foreign editions, translations have dated. This new sumptuous, scholarly international edition in six volumes is, therefore, enormously welcome. The product of 15 years’ work by experts at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and at the Huygens Institute, it is the most important art publication of 2009, if not of the decade. Its innovative approach and ambitious scope significantly deepen our understanding of the great founder of modern art.

Reproduction of each known work among the 2,000 paintings by various artists that van Gogh mentions gives for the first time a full picture of his musée imaginaire. All his own paintings and drawings are excellently reproduced, too, whenever he refers to them, enhancing his commentaries on his work. A fresh, lively translation – modern without being gimmicky – reasserts his unadorned, evocative idiom.

In addition, annotations that are pertinent but not overwhelming provide a backcloth of bright quotidian detail: the popularity of a dish of milk and eels on the Hague’s Rijswijkseweg; the family of the Marseilles railway postman, Joseph Roulin, who modelled for “Sir and dear friend Vincent” in Provence; notes of prices for the paints, tobacco, chocolates sent by the selfless Theo – financial supporter, moral bedrock and metaphorical “travelling companion” through his brother’s life.

Best of all, the 242 letters which van Gogh illustrated with sketches are reproduced in their entirety, at actual size. Sent mainly to prove his progress to Theo, they offer sharp insights into his development and are also an emotional barometer. His handwriting changes, sometimes from line to line, from fastidiously neat to wildly chaotic; one envelope is entirely covered with drawings, others are returned because van Gogh, hopelessly impractical, has wrongly addressed them.

“I’m sending these three scratches that are still awkward but you’ll nonetheless see that there’s gradual improvement,” he writes in 1881. Van Gogh, like Matisse, was not a natural draughtsman, which is why the hard-won resolve and daring of his mature works is so triumphant. From tentative beginnings, his own bold, simplified style emerges, first in drawing, then on canvas as he applied paint with the same dynamic, graphic strokes. By the time of the great Provence work in 1888-1890, Theo was receiving reed-pen drawings of finished works alongside prose descriptions that cannot be bettered, and that demonstrate incontrovertibly that when van Gogh painted he was not mad but extremely lucid. From the asylum in St Rémy he writes, for example, of the 1889 “Cypresses”: “The trees in it are very tall and massive. The foreground very low, brambles and undergrowth behind, violet hills, a green and pink sky with a crescent moon ... thickly impasted, tufts of bramble with yellow, violet, green highlights.”

The intense looking by a voracious eye never wavers. “Do keep me constantly informed about whatever you see, that always gives me pleasure,” 19-year-old Vincent tells 15-year-old Theo in January 1873, when the brothers were juniors in different branches of Goupil print publishers, a company with family connections. Soon after, Vincent was transferred to London. “Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful,” he advises Theo. Tissot, Millais, Israëls, Boudin, Meissonier and other academic pompiers, as well as Constable, “a landscape painter who lived around 30 years ago, whose work is splendid”, are all praised in one London letter.

The plurality of his taste surprises. So do references to Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot, both still alive during van Gogh’s London sojourn, as “men and women who may be considered to stand at the forefront of modern civilisation”. The 20th century, obsessed with creative individuality, revered van Gogh as lone pioneer; this has clouded how crucially he was shaped by 19th-century social upheaval and idealism. The new volumes explode that myth and return him to a cultural context whose masters included Millet, mentioned 200 times, and gritty social realist Zola, the most cited writer here.

Vincent van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo (1881)

The last thing van Gogh wanted was to stand as solitary genius. “I still hope not to work for myself alone. I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour, of drawing and – of the artistic life. And if we work in that faith, it seems to me that there’s a chance our hopes won’t be in vain,” he tells Theo in 1888. That insistent “we”, and the religious allusions, are fundamental. Son of a Calvinist pastor, van Gogh disastrously tried jobs as teacher and minister: “I would see less of a problem in the future if I were less awkward in dealing with people”. He then turned to drawing, with the initial aim of becoming an illustrator in order to depict the lives of the suffering masses.

He practised what he preached, too: among his most painful misjudgments was to set up home with Sien Hoornik, a lazy, avaricious, manipulative, syphilitic prostitute and model. She was already pregnant and a single mother when they met. Van Gogh romantically tried to empathise with and improve “this ugly wasted woman. To me she’s beautiful ... Life has given her a drubbing and sorrow and adversity have left their mark on her – now I can make use of it.”

One volume here chokes with Biblical quotations, appended to letters during his most fanatically religious phase. Slowly, however, van Gogh came to reject Christian doctrine – only to replace it with as fervent a belief in the sacred power of nature. The task of modern art was to set down this truth with a new expressiveness, based on a fresh response. “What is drawing?” he asks. “How does one get there? It’s working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How does one get through that wall? – since hammering on it doesn’t help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently ... The great isn’t something accidental; it must be willed”.

He began, as art students had done for centuries, with figure drawing, but from the start, landscape claimed him. Sense of place is a recurring joy. “You must imagine me sitting at my attic window,” he tells Theo from The Hague at four o’clock one summer morning in 1882. “Over the red tiled roofs comes a flock of white pigeons flying between the black smoking chimneys. But behind this is an infinity of delicate gentle greens, miles and miles of flat meadow, and a grey sky as still, as peaceful as Corot.”

Pollard willows suggest to him a procession of beggars, trodden grass looks tired and dusty as slum-dwellers. Eventually he left potato-coloured Holland for Arles in search of southern light and, with it, spiritual illumination. He painted, at shrill emotional pitch, exactly what he saw: “The stretches of water make patches of a beautiful emerald and a rich blue ... pale orange sunsets making the fields look blue – glorious yellow suns.”

Nothing could have been further from van Gogh’s mind, when he painted such incandescent works as “Sower with Setting Sun”, “The Painter on the Road to Tarascon”, “Starry Night”, than the landscapes of pleasure, fully liberated from the restraint of realistic colour, which secular modernism evolved from them. “Man is not placed on this earth merely to be happy; nor is he placed here merely to be honest. He is here to accomplish great things through society ... to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on,” van Gogh warned. Nevertheless, “the uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant colour, well arranged, resplendent”.

These pages thrill with that hope, tremble with van Gogh’s lack of reserve and thin skin and thud with his anguish. With our hindsight, we fear for him when he writes, during a defiant infatuation that “it’s just as impossible for someone who loves to take back that feeling as it is to take one’s own life ... [and] I really don’t think I’m a man with such inclinations”.

We share Theo’s anxiety, as febrile masterpieces speed from Arles to Paris, about “how hard your mind must have worked and how you endangered yourself ... Even if my heart isn’t as sensitive as yours, I can sometimes imagine the distress that you feel.”

But despite van Gogh’s volatility, suicide does not look inevitable. Right to the end he plans, makes arrangements, follows the fortunes of family, neighbours, other artists, almost jokes – “I prefer to make fun of myself than to feel lonely” – while always yearning for transcendence: “Just as we take the train to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.”

Above all, through the paradoxes of his character, these marvellous volumes, with their interlacing of words and images, convey as never before the unity of his artistic project – social, aesthetic, emotional, spiritual – and his search for his destiny: a quest that reads here with the personal urgency, validity and vitality of a great novel.