Van Gogh's Letters,

January 22, 2003 7:59 PM

Van Gogh's Letters unabridged & annotated. Searchable by topic or keyword.
posted by jragon (12 comments total)

Van Gogh's letters to his beloved brother are beautiful works of literature.

Would that we, in this season, could dwell for a quiet while in the fields of Arles.

Excellent link....thank you.
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 8:21 PM on January 22, 2003

This is awesome. I've long been fascinated by Van Gogh and this resource is about as good as they come. The searching is excellent. The calandar is magnificent!

Call me morbid but I've always wanted to read this one. The last two paragraphs are chilling. It seems so absolutely stupid but there's a cold sort of imitation rationality to it. And dispair of course. I sympathize (but not too much!).

Thanks jragon. I'll be reading from these for a long while yet.
posted by wobh at 8:24 PM on January 22, 2003

doh! "calendar" (sigh)
posted by wobh at 8:24 PM on January 22, 2003

Thank you, jragon, for posting this wonderful link. Its a perfect example of "classic" MeFi.
posted by anastasiav at 10:31 PM on January 22, 2003

jragon, thank you so much -- spectacular link. I remember seeing my dad getting teary-eyed reading a collection of Vincent's letters to Theo when I was young; since then I've never been able to hear "Starry Starry Night" without choking up, thinking not only of van Gogh's tragic descent into madness but also of my dad's quiet grief reading about it, all those years later.
posted by scody at 10:32 PM on January 22, 2003

Wow. Great collection and presentation. Not surprisingly, reading these letters makes me feel a trifle uncomfortable - like I'm trespassing, listening through a crack in the door - but still and yet, I keep clicking 'next'...
posted by Opus Dark at 11:42 PM on January 22, 2003

excellent excellent link
posted by nthdegx at 11:46 PM on January 22, 2003

Van Gogh has always been my favorite, but I had only seen a handful of his paintings at the Norton Simon museum in Pasadena until this past October, when my wife and I went to a wonderful exhibition of the letters and hundreds of his paintings and sketches in Kobe. It was amazing to see humble postcards, crammed full of his beautiful script, the way he totally filled up the cards and letters. Some weeks later in early December one of the paintings we saw was stolen from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.
posted by planetkyoto at 1:16 AM on January 23, 2003

Here's an interesting site about VanGogh and Gauguin called, unsurprisingly; vangoghgauguin.com
posted by hama7 at 4:54 AM on January 23, 2003

Nice link.
posted by The Michael The at 6:06 AM on January 23, 2003

Such a great link - thanks so much for it! I found myself wishing that there were more illustrated examples, and larger images, so that I could study the sketches and handwriting. The Art of the Illustrated Letter has letters to and from artists and writers of note, too, but again, the images could be larger.
posted by iconomy at 7:24 AM on January 23, 2003

There's also the excellent Altman movie, Vincent & Theo
posted by matteo at 1:00 PM on January 23, 2003