The Armchair Art Lover

The next-best thing to seeing the current show at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum is an armchair visit to the free, open website, the Van Gogh Letters Project, an enormous, beautiful, and remarkably easy-to-navigate online compendium of the entire Van Gogh oeuvre, both image and word. Or maybe it’s a draw.

Beside its phenomenal collection of paintings, the Van Gogh Museum holds the great majority of Van Gogh’s correspondence. The Van Gogh Letters Project is the result of the Museum’s 20-year collaboration with the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose forte is the scholarly publication of literary and historical texts, to produce and disseminate a new, complete, annotated edition of the artist’s correspondence. The Van Gogh Letters Project is now complete and available to scholars and amateurs worldwide.

The original intent was publication in book form, but the Project’s magnitude and the rapid advances in electronic media convinced the Museum and Institute staff to publish the entire Project electronically. As the Project website’s introduction explains, electronic publication “does greater justice to the immense volume of material and the complex of interrelated layers of information, and gives visitors to the site more options and more ways to use the edition.” For those who “prefer to study or enjoy the letters by reading them in the ‘traditional’ manner, there is an accessible, fully illustrated [five-volume] print version [in English, Dutch, and French], with brief notes, the content [of which] comes directly from the scholarly web edition.”

The electronic version of the Project consists of full facsimiles of all the Dutch and French letters, full transcription into modern Dutch and French, and full translation into English (as well as translation into French of the Dutch letters and Dutch of the French letters). Also undertaken was a comprehensive annotation of the letters, including commentary, and cross-references to the entire Van Gogh oeuvre and all the art, literature, events, places, and individuals to which the artist referred in his correspondence.

According to the electronic version, the Project is intended for “Van Gogh specialists, art historians and literary scholars . . . and students of art history, the history of literature and allied disciplines.” The internet is, however, accessible to amateurs as well, so that anyone with access to a computer and the worldwide web can experience the Project to his/her heart’s content. This means that all of us armchair art lovers can freely examine Van Gogh’s correspondence, consider his personal expression of his working intentions and his intimate conversation with family and friends. In our era of digital messaging we can recall the special pleasure of writing and reading letters, almost feeling the texture of the paper between our fingers, seeing the inky trail of character and emotion in the handwriting.

The Van Gogh Letters Project permits us to imagine that we are on the receiving end of the great master’s extraordinary gifts as an artist, art theorist, and prose stylist. The letters can be read as a chronological stream of highly literate prose, a memoir, if you will, on the evolving work and mental state of arguably the greatest painter of the late 19th century.

The letters can also be read topically. If, for example, one wants to know everything that Van Gogh ever wrote about, say, the little house he rented in Arles, the subject of his "The Yellow House", one has only to click on CONCORDANCE and then WORKS OF ART MENTIONED/ILLUSTRATED and UNILLUSTRATED. Here, for example, is Vincent’s 1 May 1888 letter to Theo, his first reference to the house. Again on 9 September 1888 the artist writes about the house in Arles to Theo and to their sister Willemien.

Five weeks later, in another letter to Theo, Van Gogh takes us with him through that beckoning blue-green door of the Yellow House and into his bedroom, into his thought process as he structures the painting and begins to apply color to the canvas.

Imagine! One of the greatest painters of human history has invited us to accompany him into his inner sanctum as he plays out the thread of his thought process, as his mind, eye, and hand work in splendid synchrony!