Looking for an inspiring book to read? Several books to deepen and expand your love for Vincent van Gogh are available for free.
The Van Gogh Museum Book Club started during the lockdown in which we read all books from the Van Gogh in focus series, followed by a Live Book Club Discussion. Museum staff joined the conversation to give background information and to answer questions.
The Book Club has reached an end as all books from the series have been read. The books will remain available in epub format (suitable for e-readers) and pdf, both in English and Dutch.
Vincent van Gogh, 'Piles of French Novels', 1887
The Van Gogh in focus series consists of seven small, compact books that focuses on unusual viewpoints in Van Gogh’s art. The books present many new facts and insights on topics such as Vincent's remarkable paintings of sunflowers, his passionate correspondence with his brother, or Vincent's love for Japanese art. All books are illustrated with documents, as well as paintings and drawings by Van Gogh.
The appearance of Vincent van Gogh’s art was transformed by his encounters with French Impressionist painting. It was the work of the Impressionists, who sought to capture the transient effects of colour and light, that encouraged him during his stay in Paris to abandon the somber palette of his earlier canvases and to adopt the rich, vibrant colour range of his most celebrated works.
This book follows Van Gogh’s discovery of and interaction with the art of Impressionists. Without Impressionism Vincent would not have become the painter we know today.
From 1886 to 1888, Vincent van Gogh lived with his brother Theo in Montmartre, the vibrant artistic quarter of Paris. During this crucial period, he developed from a realistic painter of peasant life into a modern artist following in the footsteps of the Impressionists.
This book describes Van Gogh’s relationship with Montmartre. Its distinctive windmills and vegetable gardens, the view over the city, the old narrow streets and the people out for a stroll – he captured everything with great enthusiasm and a fine eye for detail. Van Gogh also became friendly with other artists during this period and made his first serious attempts to sell and exhibit his work. When he left for Arles in the south of France in 1888, Van Gogh had succeeded in gaining a modest place for himself in the Parisian avant-garde.
Great artists often live on in our memory because of a single work that seems to encapsulate their artistic qualities. With Leonardo da Vinci it is the Mona Lisa, with Rembrandt The Night Watch, and with Van Gogh the Sunflowers.
Van Gogh painted eleven still lifes with sunflowers, the five most famous of these during his Arles period. What did this subject mean to him? Did sunflowers carry a powerful symbolic charge, or were they merely a pretext for entirely new experiments with colour? In this book, Louis van Tilborgh sheds light on Van Gogh’s search for a deeply humane, consoling form of art, and on the part that the Sunflowers played in that quest.
In his thirty-seven years Vincent van Gogh conceived many intense and passionate loves. Van Gogh’s story is punctuated by an extraordinary succession of unrequited, rejected and doomed loves, which he chronicled from the depths of his emotions. Some of the women in his life feature in his drawings and his paintings.
The only great love that would endure throughout his life was the love between him and his brother Theo.
An investigation into Van Gogh's last days: the spectacular discovery of the place where Vincent painted his last masterpiece, Tree Roots. The book is written by Wouter van der Veen, freelance researcher, author and scientific consultant. He has been studying the life and work of Vincent van Gogh for more than twenty years. In this publication he shares the story of the discovery.
Download for laptop or desktop PDF, 22.7 MB
Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Rembrandt his whole life long, both spiritually and artistically. Paintings like The Jewish bride and The supper at Emmaus made a profound impression on him.
Vincent often mentioned Rembrandt in his letters to his brother Theo, and occasionally he produced works that were based directly on those of his famous predecessor. Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt is a journey of discovery that reveals how Van Gogh gave Rembrandt a special place in his own life and work.
In July 2020 it's 130 years ago that Vincent passed away. To commemorate, the Book Club is reading: ‘A Great Artist is Dead. Letters of Condolence on Vincent van Gogh’s Death', by Ronal Pickvance.
The publication contains the letters of condolence which Theo van Gogh and his mother received after the death of Vincent van Gogh. These documents shed a new light on the artist's reputation. Not only young, avant-garde artists - Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Hayet among them - but painters such as Monet and Pissarro, who had already established a name for themselves, wrote to express their respect and admiration for their late colleague, while letters paying tribute were also received from collectors, art dealers and critics. Like them, several members of the family commented on the fact that Vincent had emerged as a talented and highly regarded artist. The Calzier presents literal transcriptions and annotated translations of these documents.
The discussion video of this book is no longer available unfortunately.
In Van Gogh and Japan Louis van Tilborgh explores Vincent van Gogh’s love of Japanese graphic art. Louis is Senior Researcher at the Van Gogh Museum.
Van Gogh started collecting Japanese prints while he was living in Paris, and became convinced of the need to look at things and to work ‘as the Japanese do’. When he moved to Arles in 1888, this developed into almost a religion. He now regarded the success, the future of modern art as being almost wholly dependent on emulating this exotic example.
Passionate as it was, however, Van Gogh’s love affair with Japan receded into the background after a year. He continued to venerate Japanese artists, but he now saw his own efforts to work in their soirit as overambitious. ‘Well then, I shall never mean anything significant as a painter, I fully realize that,’ he wrote despondently. Van Gogh and Japan shows just how wrong he was.
Vincent van Gogh was a groundbreaking painter and a prodigious writer of letters. His surviving correspondence reflects his passionate life. The letters tell the story of Van Gogh’s quest for his destiny, a search that led him to become an artist; of the great bond with his brother Theo, the only one who always believed in him; of his sometimes painful friendships and his yearning for recognition; and of his love for art and literature.
Behind this fascinating story there is another: that of the letters themselves. More than one hundred and thirty years old and often containing wonderful sketches, the original documents – most of them now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam ¬– unite the artist and the letter-writer.
