Parallel with his appetite for art was his voracious reading in Dutch, French and English (and he wrote in all three languages). Long extracts from poetry and history were copied out by hand and sent with his letters. He greatly enjoyed Keats, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot (particularly Adam Bede), as well as Bossuet, Michelet, Balzac, Zola and Daudet. But his own style of writing was by no means literary (once he had passed the stage of constantly echoing the Bible). He is direct and conversational, not blessed with much humour (save sardonic flashes) and, early on in the correspondence, rather a bore on his youthful troubles, such as his highly strained relations with his pastor father.
Like his paintings, Van Gogh’s letters reach out beyond himself. The most mundane of painted motifs — a jug of flowers, a chair, a pair of shoes — have a force and allusiveness that endow them with a life that transcends the simplistic or a drift into sentimentality. In the earlier letters the questions of ‘how to live’ and ‘how to be useful’ are faced (but not answered) with Christian zeal; later, once painting is his sole preoccupation, the necessity of self- expression, fuelled by absolute honesty, answers those questions. When he felt his mastery of his chosen medium was running away from him, owing to his increasing periods of madness, he killed himself. But what is so exhilarating is that self-pity and whining play a minor role. It is Van Gogh’s optimism and enthusiasm that win us, alongside his practicality and terre-à-terre appraisal of a given situation.
Read chronologically, the letters unfold as an unconscious autobiography. The only substantial gap in the narrative is the two years (1886-88) in which he lived with Theo in Paris, when, of course, there was no need to correspond. It was then that Vincent awoke to and embraced ‘modern’ painting as it was happening around him in the studios he visited and the artists’ groups he joined. How we would have liked this Dutchman’s take on the café life into which he was drawn but which he felt compelled to leave behind on his fateful journey south to the provincial town of Arles. But it was there that he painted everything that is the raison d’être for this magnificent publication.
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