Promise Redeemed

Dear Theo,

Thanks for your letter. I was glad to hear you arrived home safely. I missed you the first few days; it was strange not to find you when I came home in the evening . . .

This note by the 19-year-old Vincent van Gogh, then a salesman in Goupil's art gallery in The Hague, to his younger brother Theo, 15, began the greatest correspondence in the history of art. Eighteen years and hundreds of letters later, it was to end with the letter found in Vincent's pocket after he had fatally shot himself with a revolver: "Well, the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak. But yet, my dear brother . . . I tell you again that I shall always consider you to be something more than a simple dealer in Corots, that through my mediation you have had your part in the actual production of some canvases, which will retain their calm even in the catastrophe . . ."

From Van Gogh's letters have already been quarried bestsellers, psychoanalytical monographs and at least one better-than-average movie, Lust for Life (TIME, Sept. 24, 1956). But a fuller and more vivid story than any of these is revealed with the publication of The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (New York Graphic Society; $50), a handsome three-volume set that includes 194 tipped-in facsimiles of the illustrations Vincent sketched into his letters, with the heedless profusion of a man who had far more confidence in his draftsmanship than in his vocabulary. No more stark and intimate account of a painter's agonies, slow development and indomitable courage was ever set down.

Night of the Soul. The one stable relationship of Vincent's life was with his younger brother. And it is to Theo, first cautiously, then in a torrent, that he pours forth his doubts and his struggles. From the coal pits of Belgium, he confessed to Theo his failure as a lay preacher, crying: "How can I be of use in the world? Can't I serve some purpose and be of any good?" But only a few months after this night of the soul, Vincent could write, "Well, even in that deep misery I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself, in spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. From that moment everything has seemed transformed for me."

Vincent van Gogh was 27 when he found his profession; he was 37 when he died. In the ten years he painted more than 800 canvases, turned out as many or more drawings and watercolors. There is hardly a step of the way that his letters do not chronicle and enlighten.

A dramatic example of just how rich a treasure trove Van Gogh's letters can be was recently provided by Boston Museum of Fine Arts Director Perry Rathbone. Offered an early Van Gogh, Rathbone could see little on the canvas but grimy images in olive green and dull brown beneath heavy coatings of varnish. But he remembered one of Van Gogh's letters to Theo describing just such a work, "a loom on which a piece of red cloth is being woven . . . Those looms will cost me a lot of hard work yet, but in reality they are such splendid things, all that old oakwood against a grayish wall." Rathbone bought the painting, and with nothing but Van Gogh's word for it ordered the restorer to begin work, saw the original emerge in colors that matched Van Gogh's description. This week Director Rathbone will proudly put Boston's newly cleaned Weaver (see color) on display, with soundly documented evidence that it was among the first major works of Van Gogh's painting career.

Stubborn Faith. In art's hierarchy, Van Gogh has survived the sensationalism of severed ear lobe and suicide,* is assuming the status of the most widely popular artist in Western art since Rembrandt. At San Franusco's De Young Museum, an exhibition of 84 Van Gogh paintings and 71 sketches, valued at more than $9,000,000, most of them owned by Theo's son, Engineer Vincent W. Van Gogh, is drawing the largest crowd in the museum's history. Emperor Hirohito last week went to the Tokyo National Museum to inspect Japan's first large-scale Van Gogh exhibition (60 oils and 70 watercolors, drawings and pencil sketches flown from Holland) as humbler art lovers queued up outside for hours before the opening.

Van Gogh sold only two paintings in his lifetime. But in his letters he gives repeated proof of his stubborn faith in his own work. On one occasion, while he was still working in Holland, Van Gogh gave a friend a landscape, but left it unsigned, remarking: "Actually it isn't necessary; they will surely recognize my work later on, and write about me when I'm dead and gone. I shall take care of that, if I can keep alive for some little time."

* An early protest was executed by Hugh Troy, the practical joker, who carved a shriveled ear from cornbeef, smuggled it, suitably boxed and labeled, into the Museum of Modern Art's first Van Gogh show in 1935, caused a near mob scene.

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