Early publications
The rise in popularity of Van Gogh’s paintings shortly after his death coincided with growing levels of interest in his letters. Indeed, the letters had a significant effect on public awareness of his work. Brief quotations from them appeared in the catalogue to a Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam as early as 1892. In August 1893 longer extracts appeared in the avant-garde magazine Van Nu en Straks, selected by the artist Henry van de Velde in consultation with the editor-in-chief August Vermeylen, whose intention was ‘to establish a memorial to praise Vincent van Gogh’.
By April 1893 Emile Bernard had begun to publish a series of extracts from the letters he had received from Van Gogh in the literary review Mercure de France, a project that continued with some interruptions until August 1897. This was of inestimable importance in arousing interest in Van Gogh.
The excerpts from both Van Nu en Straks and Mercure de France were published in German translation in Bruno Cassirer’s magazine Kunst und Künstler in 1904 and 1905, and in 1906 Cassirer collected the translated letters in a book, Vincent van Gogh, Briefe, essentially an anthology of the (late) correspondence.
Van Gogh’s letters to Anthon van Rappard were published in the Netherlands in 1905. A complete edition of the letters to Emile Bernard was published by Ambroise Vollard in Paris in 1911, with a long preface and four other articles by Bernard about Van Gogh. The text of the letters was expurgated, although Bernard wrote that he was reproducing the letters in full, including the peculiarities of Van Gogh’s French and the sometimes improper language, which, he asserted, had often been prompted by drink.
The 1914 edition
The publication in 1914 of the three volumes of Brieven aan zijn broeder (Letters to his brother), edited by Jo van Gogh-Bonger, was the first major edition of the letters. She herself had made a huge contribution to the recognition of Van Gogh’s work in the intervening years by exhibiting and selling drawings and paintings. Her introduction to the letters was strictly biographical and offered the first extensive description of the artist’s life based on the accounts of witnesses. The letters were printed in the language in which Van Gogh wrote them: the first two volumes covered the Dutch years and volume 3 contained the (predominantly) French letters, beginning with those sent from Paris in 1886. She had no qualms about editing the text, often omitting a name, a few words or a whole passage, short or long. In other cases she suppressed passages about issues that impinged on family sensitivities. A two-volume German edition of Jo’s publication was also published in 1914 by the art dealer Paul Cassirer (Bruno’s cousin), who had sold many works by Van Gogh from 1900 onwards.
The 1952–1954 edition
As translations of existing publications began to proliferate during the 1920s – into German, English and Japanese – and the artist’s fame continued to grow, letters from and to other people gradually surfaced. The English translation of the letters to Bernard appeared in 1938, edited by art critic Douglas Cooper (under the pseudonym Douglas Lord). Referring to the original manuscripts, he was the first to annotate the letters, looking at the chronology with a critical eye and improving the sequence that Bernard had imposed in 1911. Cooper applied the same rigorous scholarly standards to his later edition of the letters in the Van Gogh Museum collection, Paul Gauguin, 45 Lettres à Vincent, Théo et Jo van Gogh (1983), which included no fewer than fifteen previously unpublished letters received by Vincent.
After Jo’s death in 1925, her son Vincent Willem van Gogh took on his mother’s mission, and in 1932 he published his father’s letters to Vincent between 1888 and 1890, Théo van Gogh, Lettres à son frère Vincent. After the Second World War, V.W. van Gogh conceived of an ambitious edition: Vincent van Gogh, Verzamelde brieven (collected letters), including a number of previously unpublished letters. This collection appeared between 1952 and 1954 in four volumes and was translated in its entirety into English (Thames & Hudson 1958), Italian (1959), French (1960) and German (1965), becoming the essential point of reference for international Van Gogh research for half a century. V.W. van Gogh wanted to provide a counterweight to all the free interpretations, fables and myths about Van Gogh. In 1977, V.W. van Gogh published in facsimile all Van Gogh’s late letters in French from the Van Gogh Museum’s collection in a deluxe two-volume edition, Letters of Vincent van Gogh 1886–1890.
The 1990 edition
The invaluable contributions of Jan Hulsker to Van Gogh scholarship include his pioneering work Van Gogh door Van Gogh. De brieven als commentaar op zijn werk (1973). The letters were at the heart of all Hulsker’s research. His profound knowledge of Van Gogh’s life is reflected in several standard works, including the documentary biography of Vincent and Theo (Vincent and Theo van Gogh. A dual biography, 1990) and the catalogue of all Van Gogh’s works, published for the first time in 1977 and reprinted in 1996 with countless additions and corrections (The New Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches). He also edited the selection Een leven in brieven (1980), which has provided an introduction to the letters for many tens of thousands of Dutch-speaking readers.
In 1990, the centenary year of the artist’s death, the Van Gogh Museum published De brieven, a new Dutch edition of the complete correspondence, that included all known letters from and to Van Gogh and incorporating 21 previously unpublished letters as well as Hulsker’s new information on dating. The letters were no longer grouped by correspondent but placed in a single chronological sequence, and consequently a complete renumbering was undertaken.
The 2009 edition
In 1994 the Van Gogh Museum launched the Van Gogh Letters Project in partnership with Huygens ING (a division of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). The 2009 edition (launched in both print and online versions) was the result of fifteen years of dedicated research by a team of editors and translators, who not only built on the knowledge and scholarship of the preceding century, but – most importantly – who returned to the letters themselves, creating new transcriptions and fresh translations of the entire existing collection of both letters and related manuscripts. The letters were published in their entirety with illustrations and annotations, together with additional information about people and places, in Dutch, French and English, in simultaneous online and printed editions. It is from the transcriptions and translations of the Van Gogh Letters Project, the ‘gold standard’ in Van Gogh scholarship, that the present selection has been made by the original team of editors, whose introductions, notes and commentaries have been adapted, revised and updated for the present publication from the 2009 edition and from Ever Yours: The Essential Letters (2014).