Vincent van Gogh

What is filed under van Gogh's name here is his correspondence rather than books he set out to write: some six hundred and fifty surviving letters, most of them to his brother Theo, who paid for the paint. They are why his life is documented almost day by day, and they are good prose in their own right, arguing about colour, money, Millet and Japanese prints. He came to painting at twenty-seven, after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher among Belgian miners. The Potato Eaters came in 1885, the Arles canvases in 1888, and The Starry Night while he was a patient at Saint-Remy. He died in 1890, at thirty-seven, having sold almost nothing.