Van Gogh Painter

Known the world over, Vincent Van Gogh continues to exert a compelling fascination. This book offers the reader a selection of the artist's most unforgettable canvases, as well as some lesser-knows examples, dranw from the collection of the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and eslewhere. It explores the works in the context of Van Gogh's short but brilliant career, in which frequent spells of isolation did not preclude lively engagement with artistic peers and the ideas of his time. Van Gogh's brush was guided by a remarkabble, restless and wide-ranging intelligence, which found its other outlet in the continuous stream of letters penned to family and friends. One of the most important archival resources of nineteenth-century art, the artist's correspondence provides the narrative thread around which this study develops. The author considers Van Gogh as a cosmopolitan figure who combined in his art the experiences and traditions he absorbed in his native Holland and in Belgium, and who then succeeded in assimilating and making his mark upon the practice of painting in France at one of the richest periods in the history of art.