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Much has been published about Van Gogh but his own letters and those especially to a kindly fellow artist offer the most valuable information of his personality from which his work originated.
For him art was a matter of feeling and not one of pure esthetics alone: “in a picture, I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting, I wish to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to give by the actual radiance and vibration of our colorings”. In his “Bedroom at Aries” he wanted “to express a feeling of perfect rest” (in spite of the atmosphere of poverty!).
The heat and the light of the sun, a worship of the fiery orb and the radiancy of brilliant color run like a refrain through his paintings and his letters. Van Gogh was impulsive, emotionally unrestrained, mystic, unbalanced. He painted intuitively and ferociously without preliminary planning. He had to put his emotions to canvas immediately before they could be corrected by his intellect. Realizing this he writes: “I regret sometimes that I can't make up my mind to work more at home and from memory. The imagination … alone can bring us to the creation of a more exalting and consoling nature than we are shown in a solitary glance at reality.”
Of Van Gogh's essential humanity his letters dealing with Bernard's poor health and military service, give a vivid testimony.
Of few artists as much about their privacy and over such a long period as in Van Gogh could be obtained and this thanks to his frankness in his letters. Reading them one can follow not only his own troubles, his ever-present financial problem but also the troubles of his