The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

[3] Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the wife of Vincent's brother Theo, spent many years after her husband's death in 1891 compiling the letters, which were first published in 1914.

The letters effectively play much the same role in shedding light on the art of the period as those between the de Goncourt brothers do for literature.

[6] Theo van Gogh's wife, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, devoted many years to compiling the letters about which she wrote: "When as Theo's young wife I entered in 1889, our flat in the Cité Pigalle in Paris, I found at the bottom of a small desk a drawer full of letters from Vincent".

In 1906 Bruno Cassirer published a small volume of selected letters of Vincent's to Theo van Gogh, translated into German.

[10] Beginning in 1888 and ending a year later, van Gogh wrote 22 letters to Émile Bernard in which the tone is different from those to Theo.

[6] His writing style in the letters reflects the literature he read and valued: Balzac, historians such as Michelet, and naturalists such as Zola, Voltaire and Flaubert.

[6] Van Gogh's letters paint a chronicle of an artist's life, with the notable omission of the period when he lived in Paris and therefore had no need to correspond with his brother.

He included in the letters sketches of common people, such as miners and farmers, for he believed the poor would inherit the earth.

[15] Australian Impressionist painter; worked with Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet at Belle-Ile.

[19] Doctor referred by Pissarro who gave medical treatment to van Gogh’s nerve disorders.

Wheat Fields is a series of landscape paintings that van Gogh executed in his later stage of life.

Margaret Drabble describes the letters from Drenthe as "heart-breaking", as he struggled to come to terms with the "darkness of his hereditary subject matter", the bleak poverty and meanness of Dutch peasant life.

His letters from Arles describe his utopian dream of establishing a community of artists who lived together, worked together, and helped each other.

In reality their relationship was always fraught, and by the end of the year they had parted for good, van Gogh himself hospitalised following a breakdown in which he had mutilated one of his ears.