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The lives of artists provide us with a rich and abundant storehouse of material for understanding man's inner life. Among visual artists of modern time Van Gogh is one of the most fruitful subjects for psychoanalytic investigation. In addition to his countless objectified phantasies in the form of paintings and drawings, we possess hundreds of long letters written to his brother Theo in which he freely describes his affective feelings regarding his individual paintings in particular and art, love, and life in general. It is this collection of letters which provides us with deepest insight into Van Gogh's inner life, for scattered throughout them are innumerable passages that are practically in the nature of free associations. Many of the letters were written at intervals of two to three days.
Van Gogh's name recalls to many of us a number of the most brilliantly colored canvases of the last half century painted by this great artist. These paintings include his majestic landscape and orchard scenes from Southern France, “The Sail Boats of St. Maries”, “The Drawbridge at Aries”, “Field of Corn”, and his famous “Bedroom” and “Sunflower” canvases. By means of color reproductions, Van Gogh's paintings have been made available even to those who have never seen an original. So popular have they become that today they occupy places in modest homes formerly hung with chromolithographs.
Van Gogh's paintings were produced at a terrific speed. During the four years from 1886 to 1890 he produced over 600 paintings. This is slightly less than Cezanne's output in a period ten times as long and four times that of Seurat in a space of ten years. 1) His prolificness is partly explained by his ability to work directly in paint on canvas. It was not necessary for him to sit down and think out all his