Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him, Guzzoni, Mariella. Published by University of Chicago Press, 2020. 8vo up to 9½” tall., 231 with colour, sepia and black and white photographs and facisimies, bibliography, notes, index. Yellow cloth, dark blue titles, blue endpapers, brown reading ribbon. Blindstamped monogram to half title and otherwise volume is in fine, unread condition and housed in a fine jacket.
“Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me.”
One of the most famous artists in history, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was also a man with another powerful passion–for books. An insatiable reader, Van Gogh spent his life hungrily consuming as many books as he could. He read, reread, and copied out books in Dutch, English, and French. He knew many passages by heart from works by Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, and Maupassant, among many others. As he wrote to his brother, Theo, in one of their hundreds of letters: “I have a more or less irresistible passion for books.”
Van Gogh’s musings on his favorite writers, include Thomas Kempis, Charles Blanc, Honor de Balzac, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Erckmann-Chatrian, Homer, Victor Hugo, Pierre Loti, Jules Michelet, William Shakespeare, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emile Zola.
