The Letters, 6 volumes (First Edition)

VAN GOGH, Vincent (ed. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten & Nienke Bakker). Vincent van Gogh: The Letters — The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2009. 6 vols.

4to. All six volumes in original publisher's hardcover, in original unclipped dust jackets, housed together in a large slipcase. Comprising: Vol. I, The Hague – Etten, 1872–1881 [letters 1–193]; Vol. II, The Hague, 1881–1883 [194–384]; Vol. III, Drenthe – Paris, 1883–1887 [385–576]; Vol. IV, Arles, 1888–1889 [577–771]; Vol. V, Saint-Rémy – Auvers, 1889–1890 [772–902]; Vol. VI, Commentary & Indexes. Approximately 2,000 pp. in total, with 4,300 illustrations, including facsimile reproductions of every surviving letter, together with new English translations, full scholarly annotation, and reproductions of the sketches Van Gogh included within his correspondence. First edition. Published jointly by the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) wrote, over the last eighteen years of his life, more than 900 surviving letters — the overwhelming majority to his younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris whose financial and emotional support sustained Vincent through every stage of his short and precarious career, but also to fellow artists including Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard, to his sister Wil, and to his parents. Together they constitute one of the most extensive and revealing bodies of correspondence left by any major artist in history — a document not merely of Van Gogh's life but of his mind at work: his reading, his theories of colour and composition, his responses to the paintings of his contemporaries, his religious and philosophical preoccupations, and the accumulating pressure of the mental illness that would eventually take his life at thirty-seven.

This edition, published in 2009 after fifteen years of research by a team led by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker at the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute, is the definitive critical edition of the complete correspondence and represents one of the most significant achievements in the scholarly presentation of primary source material in the history of art publishing. Previous editions of the letters — including the long-standard three-volume edition prepared by Van Gogh's sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger in the early twentieth century — were based on incomplete transcriptions, contained translation errors accumulated across successive editions and re-translations, and lacked the systematic annotation that modern scholarship demands. This edition corrects the historical record from first principles: every surviving letter was re-examined against the original manuscript, re-transcribed, and newly translated into English directly from Van Gogh's original French and Dutch, with the editorial team resolving longstanding disputes over dating, recipients, and textual accuracy that had accumulated across a century of prior scholarship.

The physical presentation of the letters is as significant as the textual scholarship: each letter is reproduced in facsimile alongside its transcription and translation, allowing the reader to see Van Gogh's own handwriting, his crossings-out and revisions, and — in the many letters where he included them — the small sketches he drew directly into his correspondence to illustrate paintings in progress or ideas he was working through. These sketches, integrated throughout the six volumes, provide a unique visual record of Van Gogh's working process, showing compositions at the moment of their conception, often before the corresponding painting was finished or in some cases before it was begun.

The result is a work that transforms the study of Van Gogh from something conducted primarily through the paintings and a partial, imperfect record of his own words into something conducted with full access to his own testimony, rendered as faithfully and completely as modern scholarship can achieve. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this publication for Van Gogh studies specifically and for the broader field of artists' correspondence as a category of primary historical source.

Fine. Set has been immaculately preserved and presents as such. Pristine and beautiful throughout, in fine dust jackets.

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Catalogue Number: HH000424