While Vincent van Gogh has become almost as famed for his troubled mind as for his paintings, a new exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum seeks to remind us there was more method than madness to his style.
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Seeing the letters next to the paintings underlines Van Gogh's professionalism, which is sometimes overlooked amid spectacular biographical details such as his mental illness, his apparent amputation of part of his own left ear after a quarrel, and his suicide in 1890 at age 37.
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The compendium includes all 820 known letters by Van Gogh, tracing his youth and late start as a painter to his spectacular blossoming in the late 1880s. "The number of letters isn't really unusual but the literary quality of the letters, that's special," said Curator Leo Jansen, one of three experts who spent 15 years on the project.
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Van Gogh's letters were previously translated to English in 1958. The new compendium includes 20 new letters as well as complete versions of some letters previously only published in part. More importantly, Jansen said, it gives more precise translations and includes reproductions of more than 2,000 paintings Van Gogh makes reference to. In all, it offers an unusually complete picture of the mental world of one of the world's great artists. For Van Gogh fans not interested in buying the 6-volume set, the entire compilation has been put online as a free, searchable database in French, Dutch and English - the three languages in which the painter wrote.
The database consists of 902 letters. It can be searched by:
+ Period
+ Correspondent
+ Place
+ Letters with Sketches
Here's are the results for the word "ink." You'll see the letter number and by cursoring over an result you'll see the search term in context.
Click on a letter number and you'll go to the complete letter. Here, several option are available including the option to view a facsimile of that particular letter.
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