VAN GOGH AND THE ARTISTS HE LOVED

Vincent Van Gogh was a revolutionary artist who changed the nature of draughtsmanship so thoroughly, brightened the palette for serious painting and infused his art with so much personal character, it was hard for his contemporaries to see the merits of his work. When he died at the age of 37 in 1890 he was not completely unrecognised, but it wasn't until the end of 1888 when his younger brother Theo entered three of his paintings in an Avant-Garde exhibition that a few major artists and writers began to give Van Gogh's work a serious look. In all the major cities he lived - The Hague, Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, London and Paris - Van Gogh applied his keen eye and devilish intellect to all the art he could find. He frequented museums and declared 'It is good to love as much as one can' as he embraced life, especially art and literature, with passion. He studied Gustave Doré's work intensely, and tenderly called Millet 'Father Millet', and was devoted to the Old Masters and their influence on his work would always be profound. The works selected for this magnificent volume provide an opportunity to see the artists who were the predominant painters of the era, some famous some still not, and why they gave the world Van Gogh inhabited so much pleasure. There are several works by Jean-Francois Raffaëlli who shared Van Gogh's sensibility for the subject of the downtrodden and influenced for example Van Gogh's portrait 'Woman Rocking a Cradle', an image so important to him that he made five versions of it, focussing our attention on the working-class woman's rough hands just as Raffaëlli did. A painting by Jozef Israëls of a peasant family at a dinner table inspired Van Gogh's most famous early work 'The Potato Eaters'. Just as Rembrandt painted himself almost a hundred times, Van Gogh made more than 30 self portraits over a much shorter span of time. We watch Van Gogh experimenting with loose brushwork and bright colours as used by Manet, studying the pointillist dots used by Seurat and appreciating the work of Monet, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, all positioned here side by side with images and for detailed comparison in the text by this bestselling author. With chapters arranged from Religion, Romanticism, The Barbizon School, English Art and The Graphic, Japanese Prints, The Female Sitter, Still Life, Impressionism, The Sea and more. An afterword on his legacy by Ann Dumas. Glossy white pages, hundreds of full page colour images. Tiny remainder mark. A magnificent tome of 409pp, 22.33 x 26cm.
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