Van Gogh, Still Life with a Plate of Onions, Arles, 1889.
1. Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters
Take a deep dive into the creative and turbulent mind of the artist with Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters. This beautifully illustrated book brings Van Gogh’s relationships, character and creative processes to life. It charts his short but intense career, during which he painted some of the most memorable and evocative works ever created.
Reading the letters feels like peeking behind the curtain into one of history’s most famous studios. Written in the first person, they let us see the world through Van Gogh’s eyes. Reading his descriptions of colours, places and people breathes new life into a long-gone world and brings Van Gogh closer than ever before.
Read Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters to find out more.
2. Vincent's Books
For Van Gogh, books were almost as important as art. The painter read avidly, devouring everything from biographies to monographs and museum guides to literary magazines. The books he read guided his life choices, inspired his art and allowed him to explore distant cultures.
Vincent’s Books gives us a privileged look at Van Gogh’s library. The work charts his life from his early adulthood, when he considered becoming a pastor, to his career as a painter and his troubled later years. Thought-provoking and original, Vincent’s Books will help you get to know Van Gogh in a completely new way, and maybe even provide a little inspiration for your own creative output.
Read Vincent’s Books to learn more about the artist and what inspired him.
3. Van Gogh Paintings: The Masterpieces
Leaf through iconic images in this beautiful book to gain a new perspective on Van Gogh’s most famous works. Taking in 100 of the artist’s most beautiful paintings, as well as some of his best lesser-known canvases, Van Gogh Paintings: The Masterpieces explores the works in the context of the artist’s short but brilliant career.
Van Gogh’s many letters weave a narrative that runs through the book and helps make sense of his paintings. Reading his words side by side with the works he created lets you step inside the artist’s mind and brings the sights, scenes and ideas of nineteenth century Holland to life.
Find out more about the man and his paintings by reading Van Gogh Paintings: The Masterpieces.
4. Japanese Prints: The Collection of Vincent van Gogh
To truly appreciate an artist, you need to understand what inspired them. For Van Gogh, a huge part of his inspiration came from Japan. The country had a considerable influence on the artist and his work, with Van Gogh showcasing Japanese prints throughout his studio. He was fascinated by their unusual spatial effects, expanses of strong colour, everyday subjects and attention to details from nature.
These days, it’s hard to imagine just how exciting it must have been to see prints from the other side of the world, but for Van Gogh, it was truly mind blowing. Japanese Prints showcases the most beautiful prints from Van Gogh’s personal collection and analyses how these images directly influenced his art.
Read Japanese Prints to find out more about Van Gogh’s love of the Far East.
5. Vincent's Portraits
Evocative, dramatic and beautiful, Van Gogh’s portraits bring the characters of nineteenth century Europe to life, with subjects ranging from friends and fellow artists to agricultural workers and sex workers. Vincent’s Portraits showcases some of the artist’s best portraits and self-portraits, and uses Van Gogh’s own words to breathe life into the faces we see before us.
Van Gogh was passionate about capturing the essential characters of his models by using expressive colour and brushwork. He believed ‘painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter’, and put as much of himself into the images as his subjects.
Learn more about Van Gogh’s skill as an artist by reading Vincent’s Portraits.
6. Vincent's Gardens
Smell the fresh scent of the pines and the rich aroma of the roses that leap from the pages of Vincent’s Gardens. Van Gogh’s love of nature is clear to see in every painting. The joy he took from the colours, compositions and creatures he came across jumps out at the viewer and makes it impossible not to fall in love with these vibrant works.
As well as landscapes, Van Gogh painted a number of studies of trees and flowers that he found in the allotments, parks and gardens of Holland and France. Like portraits of the natural world, these intimate images capture the character of his subjects and reflect the artist’s lifelong fascination with nature.
Take a stroll in the greenspaces of nineteenth century Europe with Vincent’s Gardens.
7. Vincent's Trees
For Van Gogh, painting a study of a tree was like painting a portrait of a human. Leaf through Vincent’s Trees to get a real sense of just how fascinated the artist was by their shapes, textures and colours. The treescapes in the book vary from intricate pencil sketches to vibrant watercolours and oils and showcase a number of stylistic experiments.
Van Gogh used his unique eye and skilled brush to bring trees to life and imbue them with real personality, so much so that you can almost hear the rustle of the leaves in the poplars and the sound of people walking beneath towering chestnuts in the parks of Paris.
Read Vincent’s Trees to see the natural world through Van Gogh’s eyes.
8. Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise
Bursting with creativity, colour and often a real sense of disquiet, the works we see in Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise were made during the final seventy days of the artist’s life. In many of the landscapes you can almost feel Van Gogh searching for peace and calm, while the swirling skies, twisted trees and intense colours of other images offer a glimpse into his inner turmoil.
We’re led through the seventy four paintings and thirty drawings he created in Auvers-sur-Oise by essays from leading specialists, as well as maps, historical photos and sketches. Learn where Van Gogh found his inspiration, where he created his masterpieces and how his reputation burgeoned after his self-inflicted death.
Walk with the artist through the final days of his life with Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise.
9. The Drawings of Vincent van Gogh
In The Drawings of Vincent van Gogh, we get a masterclass from one of the greatest artists in the world. Van Gogh was passionate about drawing, believing it was the ‘root of everything’. He created more than a thousand graphic works during his short life.
The Drawings of Vincent van Gogh showcases some of his most evocative and important studies. In these monochrome works, we can see Van Gogh developing his style, deciphering the world and finding the subjects that most fascinated him. Art historian Christopher Lloyd uses family correspondence, sketchbooks and comparative works by Rembrandt, Dürer and others to put the drawings in context, resulting in a fantastic overview that will give readers a much deeper understanding of the artist.
Read The Drawings of Vincent van Gogh to better appreciate the artist and his ground-breaking talents.
10. Who Shot Van Gogh?
The more Vincent van Gogh books you read, the more you’ll come to realise that we still don’t really know what made the artist tick. To some, he was a dangerous madman. To others, a religious fanatic, while still more believed he was a suffering genius who embodied calm and compassion.
In Who Shot Van Gogh? we get an in-depth look at these competing theories as well as insight from fellow artists, friends and family, doctors and psychoanalysts. Often funny and always revealing, this fascinating book will challenge many preconceptions about Van Gogh and give readers a new appreciation for the man and his masterpieces.
Read Who Shot Van Gogh? to get a new perspective on the artist.
