The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

"Rarely are readers welcomed as wholeheartedly and intimately into the process of creation of truly great art as they are through Van Gogh's letters", writes Ronald de Leeuw in his Introduction to this magnificent new edition.Anyone familiar with the drawings and paintings Van Gogh produced during his short, intense life will discover in the letters facets of his personality suggested by his art. They will also discover a man very different from the familiar image of Van Gogh as a madman who died a martyr to his art. Letters to his brother Theo, to friends, and to fellow artists reveal the humanitarian causes he embraced, his fascination with the French Revolution, his quest for God and ethical ideals, and his largely unsuccessful search for love. Illuminated, too, are Van Gogh's conflicts as a painter torn between realism, symbolism, and abstraction and the emotional crises brought on by his adamant refusal to compromise his artistic integrity to satisfy the "art trade".

This volume reinstates a large number of passages omitted from earlier editions of Van Gogh's letters and includes, whenever possible, the wonderful pen-and-ink sketches Van Gogh added to his written messages. Ronald de Leeuw's notes provide informative links between the letters.

Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890) was born in Holland. He became an assistant with an international firm of art-dealers and in 1881 he went to Brussels to study art. After an unsuccessful love affair with his cousin he returned to Holland and in 1885 he painted his first 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 influences on his work.

In 1888 he left Paris for the Provencal landscape at Arles, the subject of many of his best works, including "Sunflowers" and "The Chair and the Pipe." It was here Van Gogh cut off his ear, in remorse for threatening Gauguin with a razor during a quarrel, and he was placed in an asylum for a year. On July 7, 1890 Van Gogh shot himself at the scene of his last painting, the foreboding "Cornfields 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 fine 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.