They will go on show beside paintings that became some of the most expensive sold in the 20th century.
The RA show, opening in January next year, will be the first major exhibition of Van Gogh’s work in Britain in more than 40 years, and the first anywhere to bring together familiar works with letters by the artist that give vivid accounts of his life and opinions.
One of many poignant moments in the correspondence — described by the curator Ann Dumas as “without equal” among artists’ letters — comes in June 1888, when Van Gogh remembers that even though he’s down to his last 50 franc note, making money is simple. “Fortunately, it’s extremely easy to sell the right sort of paintings in the right sort of place to the right sort of gentleman,” he writes. “You only have to go down the Rue de la Paix — there strolls, just for that reason, the good art lover.”
The tragedy was that, in Van Gogh’s 10 years as a professional artist, art lovers wouldn’t touch his paintings with a barge pole. He sold just one picture, to the artist sister of a friend. And although he dreamed of subsidising other painters to follow him from the grime of Paris to the blazing light of Provence, only one painter, Paul Gaugin, ever responded — with disastrous consequences. After an explosive row between the two, either Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear, or (according to a recent theory) the panic-stricken Gauguin did, and then fled Arles forever.
The letters shed fascinating light on his work. One is a mournful description to his sister of his “very red beard, quite unkempt and sad” with a self-portrait showing exactly that; another is a cypress sketched in a letter to his long-suffering brother Theo explaining how he’s struggling to paint with the sombre foliage. One pairing of letter and painting may be his very last work, done days before his death: A comparatively cheerful missive to Theo, with a sketch of wheat fields under swollen clouds, and a painting, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’, in which some light breaks through.
Whether Van Gogh was happy or despairing, flat broke or briefly able to pay the rent and his absinthe bill, letters poured from him: Over 800 survive, and caches of previously unknown correspondence still surface regularly. They were written on small pieces of cheap paper, and are rarely displayed as they are now extremely fragile. The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam is lending 35, along with a dozen paintings. “These letters are the closest we can come to Van Gogh as a person,” museum director Axel Rüger said.
The exhibition coincides with a monumental piece of scholarship by the Amsterdam museum. After 15 years’ work, all the surviving letters are being published in transcription and facsimile, together with annotations tracing every person and historical event mentioned, illustrations of every related sketch, and details of every work by other artists referred to by Van Gogh. In print, the letters will run to six volumes, over 2,000 pages, published in Dutch, French and English — the Thames and Hudson UK edition, published on October 8, 2009, will cost £325 — but at the same time the entire archive will be placed online for free.
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