The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

THE LETTERS OF VINCENT VAN GOGH ‘Van Gogh’s letters… are one of the greatest joys of modern literature, not only for the inherent beauty of the prose and the sharpness of the observations but also for their portrait of the artist as a man wholly and selessly devoted to the work he had to set himself to’ - Washington Post ‘Fascinating… letter after letter sizzles with colorful, exacting descriptions … This absorbing collection elaborates yet another side of this beuiling and brilliant artist’ - The New York Times Book Review ‘Ronald de Leeuw’s magnicent achievement here is to make the letters accessible in English to general readers rather than art historians, in a new translation so excellent I found myself reading even the well-known letters as if for the rst time… It will be surprising if a more impressive volume of letters appears this year’ — Observer ‘Any selection of Van Gogh’s letters is bound to be full of marvellous things, and this is no exception’ — Sunday Telegraph ‘With this new translation of Van Gogh’s letters, his literary brilliance and his statement of what amounts to prophetic art theories will remain as a force in literary and art history’ — Philadelphia Inquirer ‘De Leeuw’s collection is likely to remain the denitive volume for many years, both for the excellent selection and for the accurate translation’ - The Times Literary Supplement ‘Vincent’s letters are a journal, a meditative autobiography… You are able to take in Vincent’s extraordinary literary qualities … Unputdownable’ - Daily Telegraph ABOUT THE AUTHOR, EDITOR AND TRANSLATOR VINCENT WILLEM VAN GOGH was born in Holland in 1853. He became an assistant with an international rm of art-dealers and in 1881 he went to Brussels to study art. After an unsuccessful love aair with his cousin he returned to Holland and in 1885 he painted his rst masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, a haunting scene of domestic poverty. A year later his brother Theo, an art dealer, enabled him to study in Paris, where he met Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat, who became very important inuences on his work. In 1888 he left Paris for the Provencal landscape at Aries, the subject of many of his best works, including Sunowers and The Chair and the Pipe. It was here Van Gogh cut o his ear, in remorse for threatening Gauguin with a razor during a quarrel, and he was placed in an asylum for a year. On 27 July 1890 Van Gogh shot himself at the scene of his last painting, the foreboding Cornelds with Flight of Birds, and he died two days later. RONALD DE LEEUW has been the director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam since 1986. He trained as an art historian at the universities of Los Angeles, California, and of Leiden, The Netherlands. As a specialist in nineteenth-century painting, he has been responsible for numerous exhibitions in The Netherlands and abroad, including the 1990 Vincent Van Gogh Centennial retrospective in Amsterdam. Since 1990 Ronald de Leeuw has also directed the Museum Mesdag in The Hague, known for its ne Barbizon and Hague School holdings. In 1994 he was appointed professor extraordinary in the history of collecting at the Free University of Amsterdam. ARNOLD POMERANS was born in 1920 and was educated in South Africa. He emigrated to England in 1948, and from 1948 to 1955 taught physics in London. In 1955 he became a full-time translator and has had just under two hundred major works issued by leading British and US publishers. Among the authors translated by him are Louis de Broglie, Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud, George Grosz, Jan Huizinga, Jean Piaget and Jules Romain. THE LETTERS OF VINCENT VAN GOGH Selected and Edited by Ronald de Leeww Translated by Arnold Pomerans PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, Lo ndon WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New Y ork 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3 124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Oces: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 1996 Published in Penguin Books 1997 15 This collection cpytxt © Ronald de Leeuw, 1996 This translation cpytxt © Sdu Publishers, 1996 All rights reserved The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Contents About This Edition Translator’s Note Introduction Biographical Outline Early Letters Ramsgate and Isleworth Dordrecht Amsterdam The Borinage Etten The Hague The Hague, Drenthe and Nuenen From Nuenen to Antwerp Paris Aries Saint-Rémy Auvers-sur-Oise Bibliography Index For Gerlof About This Edition The text of this selection of letters is based on De Brieven van Vincent van Gogh (The Letters of Vincent van Gogh), edited by Han van Crimpen and Monique Berends-Albert and published in 1990 by the Van Gogh Museum in collaboration with Sdu (the Netherlands state publishing house). The translation of letters originally written in French is based on a new transcription specially prepared for this edition. The letters D, F and E in square brackets indicate whether a particular letter was originally written in Dutch, French or English. Van Gogh’s letters have come down to us largely undated. In most cases, however, the correct sequence and date have been determined satisfactorily, though some problems with dates remain, especially in letters from the Aries period. In all these cases the dates given in the Sdu edition have been provisionally retained. Drawings have been included only when the letters selected here were illustrated by the artist himself The greatly improved and enlarged 1990 edition of the Letters is still obtainable only in Dutch, so the numbering of the letters used here is based on the 1914/1953/1973 edition, which has been the basis of all translations to date. As a result, this book can be used in conjunction with the existing Van Gogh literature, in which that numbering is commonly found. The letters to Van Rappard bear an R-number, those to Émile Bernard a B-number and those to his sister Wil a W-number. The recently discovered letter from Wil van Gogh to her girlfriend Line Kruysse, which is quoted here at some length, was rst published in the Bulletin van bet Van Gogh Museum (1992/3, Vol. 7). This edition is not primarily intended for readers well versed in art history, so no attempt has been made to relate the pictures mentioned in the text to the oeuvre catalogues of Baart de la Faille and Jan Hulsker. Dates of birth and death of the dramatis personae are given in the Index. Translator’s Note Quotations from letters Van Gogh wrote in French that appear in the linking text and in the Introduction have been translated from the Dutch, unless the letters in question are included in this book. Quotations from Johanna van Gogh-Bonger appear in her English. Translations of French words or phrases used by Van Gogh in his Dutch letters have been provided in notes, except where they are already familiar in English. Introduction Nothing annoyed Van Gogh more than ‘acting as a pedestal for something you do not know’; being misused for an end he himself did not pursue. Although the circumstances of his life often gave him good cause, he stated emphatically that’… on no account would I choose the life of a martyr. For I have always striven for something other than heroism, which I do not have in me …’ The story of any artist’s rise to fame makes fascinating reading and none is more fascinating than Van Gogh’s. His contemporaries’ alleged failure to appreciate his talent, the claim that he sold only a single painting in his lifetime and his death under intriguing and not yet fully explained circumstances have all red the imagination. In 1913, when Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the widow of Van Gogh’s brother Theo, put the nishing touches to the rst complete edition of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to her husband, she did so with some trepidation. In her Introduction she expressed the wish that the letters should be read ‘with consideration’; at the same time she hoped that his dramatic life would not obscure the perception of his oeuvre. For the serious reader and the art historian, the publication of these letters added a fresh dimension to the understanding of Van Gogh’s artistic achievement, an understanding granted us by virtually no other painter. Van Gogh himself was an avid reader of artists’ biographies, devouring whatever he could nd on the lives of painters he admired - Delacroix, Corot, Millet and Monticelli - and he expected conduct from artists in keeping with the character of their art. At the beginning of his own artistic career, he treated Alfred Sensier’s biography of Millet, La vie et l’œuvre de J.-F.

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