VAN GOGH, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.

‘I Dream My Painting and I Paint My Dream’

VAN GOGH, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. London: Thames and Hudson in association with the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute. 2009.

Six volumes, 4to. Uniformly bound with illustrated boards and dust-jacket depicting extracts from Van Gogh’s letters, bright blue endpapers, housed in a protective box; numerous in-text coloured illustrations; split to top right edge of box discreetly repaired; a sharp, bright, near fine set.

First issue of the definitive edition of the Letters of Vincent Van Gogh: a monumental six-volume record of his life and art, meticulously edited, exhaustively illustrated, and beautifully produced.

‘If you're well, you should be able to live on a piece of bread, while working the whole day long, and still having the strength to smoke and to drink your glass […]. And still to feel the stars and the infinite, clearly, up there. Then life is almost magical, after all.’

The culmination of a fifteen-year project undertaken by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, this monumental six-volume edition is at once a model of international scholarship, book design, and production.

Fresh transcriptions of every known letter to or from Van Gogh are supported by an abundance of additional information about him, his family, his correspondents, and the contexts in which the letters were written. As befits the publisher of the set, each volume is richly illustrated, the letters meticulously ‘supported on a complex sub-structure of pictorial examples – every single work mentioned in the correspondence, from the merest sketch to finished masterpieces, is identified and reproduced’ (Banville).

An immersive record of the ‘great and unrelenting struggle to make a life and to make art, and to make a life in art’ (ibid), the set – issued simultaneously in Dutch, English and French – supersedes all previous editions of the letters and is unlikely to be dislodged.

SKU: 2124887