The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh refers to a collection of 903 surviving letters written (820) or received (83) by Vincent van Gogh. More than 650 of these were from Vincent to his brother Theo. The collection also includes letters van Gogh wrote to his sister Wil and other relatives, as well as between artists such as Paul Gauguin, Anthon van Rappard and Émile Bernard.

Vincent's sister-in-law and wife to his brother Theo, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, spent many years after her husband's death in 1891 compiling the letters, which were first published in 1914. Arnold Pomerans, editor of a 1966 selection of the letters, wrote that Theo "was the kind of man who saved even the smallest scrap of paper", and it is to this trait that we owe the 663 letters from Vincent. By contrast Vincent infrequently kept letters sent him and just 84 have survived, of which 39 were from Theo. Nevertheless, it is to these letters between the brothers that we owe much of what we know today about Vincent van Gogh. Indeed, the only period where we are relatively uninformed is the Parisian period when they shared an apartment and had no need to correspond. The letters effectively play much the same role in shedding light on the art of the period as those between the de Goncourt brothers did for literature.

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". Within two years both brothers were dead: Vincent as the result of a gunshot wound, and Theo from illness. Joanna began the task of completing the collection, which was published in full in January 1914. That first edition consisted of three volumes, and was followed in 1952–1954 by a four-volume edition that included additional letters. Jan Hulsker suggested, in 1987, that the letters be organized in date order, and undertaking that began in when 1994 the Van Gogh Letter Project was initiated by the Van Gogh museum. The project consists of a complete annotated collection of letters written by and to Vincent.

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