Summary: "'I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour, of drawing and--of the artistic life,' Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1888. 'And if we work in that faith, it seems to me that there's a chance that our hopes won't be in vain.' His prediction would come true. In his brief and explosively creative life--he committed suicide a few years later at the age of thirty-seven--Van Gogh made us see the world in a new way. His shining landscapes of Provence and somber portraits of workers shattered the relationship between light and dark, and his hallucinatory visions were so bright they nearly blinded the world."--Jacket.
Review: "I love this book, footnotes included. No matter how much you have read on Van Gogh, you will want to read Julian Bell's taut and persuasive life. Bell brings you the master stripped of a century of romantic mold and revealed as intimately as the facts allow. A painter himself, Bell is one of our best critics, and Van Gogh is one of our best artists, and there's no such thing as getting enough of either one of them." --Deborah Solomon, author of American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell; from jacket.