The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

This daunting epistolary turned out to be far better than expected. Although Van Gogh 's detailed descriptions of the paintings he was working on are not of particular interest to me, his thoughts on the books he read are quite enjoyable. As it happens, Van Gogh was quite a scholar, reading French and English authors, as well as his native Dutch, untranslated.

Among his favorites are my favorite author (although her hegemony is not as concrete as it once was), George Eliot, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Eliot makes perfect sense. She fits right in with his favorite painters Millet and Delacroix, a portrayer of unassuming provincial life. But Bunyan is a more interesting choice. It is tempting, if Van Gogh had a taste for allegory, to look for allegory in his own work. This is especially true given the symbolic importance he gave to certain objects: sunflowers represented gratitude to Van Gogh, for instance. But if the paintings are to viewed as a "Pilgrim's Progress" of corts, as an allegorical journey, where is the pilgrim? It is Van Gogh himself. the vast majority of his paintings have the feeling of being visual snapshots, glances from the eye of a real person, and not artificial contsructs. These are things he saw and painted, his room, his bed, his chair, his boots, and they are loaded with allegorical symbolism. In fact, Van Gogh himself identified one of his chair still lifes as an allegorical portrait of Gaugin.

It is often mistakenly said that Van Gogh's last painting was "Wheat Field With Crows", an understandable mistake given the ominous tone of that painting. The truth is that many paintings were completed at the same time that final month of his life, and I prefer to think that the final--or at least the most relevant--of that group is "The Reaper". On his path, Van Gogh met many people, but it is this character whom he met last.