The story of Vincent van Gogh’s life is more heartbreaking, and heart-lifting, than the romantic myth that has enshrouded him for decades. It is told, in his own words and works, in the six-volume “Vincent van Gogh: The Letters”. His 819 surviving letters (and the 83 addressed to him) form the core. The first letter was written when Vincent, aged 19, was a trainee at The Hague branch of Goupil & Cie, a firm of international art dealers. Like most of the letters, it was sent to his brother, Theo, then 15. The two remained close. Theo became an art dealer and Vincent’s main source of financial and emotional support.

Van Gogh is irascible, engaging, intelligent, touchy, high-minded, well read, rebellious and pigheaded. When he started dressing like a tramp he claimed it was, in part, to advertise his refusal to join polite, ie, hypocritical society. (Equally, it may have been because polite society was refusing to accept him.) He was often miserable, occasionally love-struck, almost always fiercely committed to something or other and sometimes mad.

Art and literature were his constant companions. He wrote often about what he was reading and seeing. His concern was never a book’s place in the canon or a painting’s in art history. He judged a work on what it communicated, and how. From Antwerp he wrote that the religious

paintings of Rubens are “theatrical…But what he can do is paint a queen, a statesman, well analysed, just as they are.” He wrote beautifully about landscapes and peasants. In time, he gave a vivid, perhaps unequalled, account of an artist making art.

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