The letters of Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · 1872 to 1890
Vincent wrote more than eight hundred letters that survive, most of them to his brother Theo, and the museum owns nearly all of them. A selection is shown in rotating displays, often with the small sketches he drew in the margins to show Theo what he was working on. The example illustrated here was sent from Nuenen in April 1885 and contains a drawing of The Potato Eaters, which hangs on the floor below, so you can compare the idea in ink with the finished painting. Because paper fades, the letters on show change every few months.
The letters are written in Dutch and in French, in a fast, clear hand that fills every corner of the page. Look at the way the sketches sit inside the text, sometimes with colour notes written across them in words: yellow, violet, a lemon sky. Vincent used the letters to think through pictures before and after painting them, so they are the closest thing we have to hearing him talk. He describes the weather, money, his health, what he has read, and, over and over, colour and what it can express.
Theo kept everything, and after both brothers died in 1890 and 1891 Theo's widow Jo van Gogh-Bonger sorted the letters, translated many of them and published them in 1914, which did more than anything else to make Vincent famous. The complete scholarly edition was finished by the museum in 2009 and is free to read online. Reading a few lines in front of the paintings turns the artist from a legend into a person: articulate, argumentative, funny, and far saner than the myth suggests.
Did You Know? Vincent's letters run to about nine hundred pages in the printed edition, and Theo kept even the ones that arrived with paint stains on them.
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