Van Gogh Paintings

Fast 130 years after his death, Vincent Van Gogh continues to exert a strong fascination. This outstanding book offers the reader a selection of the artist's most unforgettable paintings, as well as some lesser-known examples, many of which come from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It examines the works in the context of Van Gogh's short but brilliant career, where frequent phases of isolation nonetheless allowed for vibrant engagements with his contemporaries and the ideas of his time.

Van Gogh's brush was guided by a remarkable, restless, and versatile intelligence, which found another expression in the continuous stream of letters he wrote to family and friends. The artist's correspondence—one of the most important archival resources of 19th-century art—forms the narrative thread around which this study develops. Belinda Thomson views Van Gogh as a cosmopolitan figure who blended experiences and traditions absorbed in his home country of Holland and Victorian England, and then managed to assimilate the painting practices in France during one of its richest periods, leaving his own mark.

About the author: Belinda Thomson studied at the University of East Anglia and the Sorbonne before earning her Master's in Art History at the Courtauld Institute. She has published books on Gauguin, Vuillard, Post-Impressionism, and Impressionism.