The letters of Vincent van Gogh are the main source for understanding his life and work. 903 letters survive: 820 written by him and 83 he received. Of his own, 651 are addressed to his brother Theo and 7 to Theo and his wife, Jo. In them he describes what he is painting, why and how, spells out colors and compositions, draws small sketches of his paintings, and talks about books, other painters, money and his health. Until 1886 he wrote almost always in Dutch and after that almost always in French (overall, about two letters in Dutch for every one in French); five are in English. All of them can be read free at vangoghletters.org, the critical edition by the Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING. On this page you will find a guide to the correspondence and a selection of the most important letters, linked to the pages on the paintings they discuss.
What Van Gogh’s correspondence is
The edition of the letters brings together every surviving letter written and received by Van Gogh between 1872 and 1890. According to Van Gogh as a letter-writer on vangoghletters.org, the figures are: 820 letters by Vincent, 651 of them to Theo and 7 to Theo and Jo; and 83 letters received, including 39 from Theo and 2 from Theo and Jo. Many more have been lost: the editors estimate that at least 550 letters addressed to Van Gogh and at least 290 written by him are missing.
The earliest surviving letter dates from September 29, 1872, when Vincent, then 19, was working at the Goupil gallery in The Hague and Theo had just visited him: “Thanks for your letter, I was glad to hear that you got back safely. I missed you the first few days” (letter 001). The last one he sent is dated July 23, 1890, four days before he was wounded in Auvers-sur-Oise (letter 902).
Who Van Gogh wrote to
The vast majority of the letters are to Theo van Gogh (1857–1891), four years younger, an art dealer at Goupil (later Boussod, Valadon & Cie) and, from 1881 on, the brother who supported him. Vincent told him everything: finished paintings and works in progress, his doubts, his orders for paint and canvas. According to the classification by correspondent on vangoghletters.org, the other main correspondents are:
- Anthon van Rappard, a Dutch painter and friend: some 58 letters between 1881 and 1885, with long discussions about drawing and about The Potato Eaters.
- Willemien (Wil) van Gogh, his younger sister: 21 known letters (and three more to her and their mother), all between October 1887 and June 1890, in which he explains his painting to her.
- Émile Bernard, the young painter he knew in Paris: 22 letters from Vincent, full of sketches and ideas about color. One was written jointly with Gauguin.
- Paul Gauguin: 4 letters from Vincent to Gauguin and 16 from Gauguin to Vincent survive.
- His parents, Theodorus and Anna, and later his widowed mother; and occasional correspondents such as the critic Albert Aurier, Eugène Boch, John Peter Russell, Paul Signac, Joseph Roulin and the Ginoux couple in Arles.
In April 1889 Theo married Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who after both brothers had died kept the letters and was the first to publish them: the letters to Theo appeared in three volumes in 1914 as Brieven aan zijn broeder. In 1952–1954 her son, Vincent Willem van Gogh, gathered all the known correspondence in four volumes, and in 1990 the Van Gogh Museum published another edition with the new finds.
The letters, period by period
The letters follow Vincent’s life step by step. The edition numbers them chronologically, from 001 to 902 (plus a few additional ones). These are the number ranges for each period, based on the places and dates given in the edition (they also include the letters he received):
| Period | Years | Letter numbers |
|---|---|---|
| Goupil, England, Amsterdam, the Borinage and Brussels | 1872–1881 | 001–165 |
| Etten and The Hague (early years) | 1881–1883 | 166–384 |
| Drenthe | 1883 | 385–408 |
| Nuenen | 1883–1885 | 409–543 |
| Antwerp | 1885–1886 | 544–566 |
| Paris | 1886–1888 | 567–576 |
| Arles | 1888–1889 | 577–771 |
| Saint-Rémy | 1889–1890 | 772–872 |
| Auvers-sur-Oise | 1890 | 873–902 |
The gap in Paris is telling: between 1886 and 1888 the brothers shared an apartment in Montmartre and hardly wrote to each other, which is why we know much less about those two years. The Arles letters, by contrast, are the richest in descriptions of paintings: this is the time of the sunflowers, the bedroom, the night café and the Yellow House.
How to read Van Gogh’s letters online
The standard edition is Vincent van Gogh – The Letters, prepared over fifteen years by the Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING and edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. It was published in 2009, in print and online, and the website, vangoghletters.org, is still being updated. For each letter it offers:
- the original text in Dutch or French, newly transcribed from the manuscripts;
- an English translation;
- a facsimile of the manuscript and the sketches Vincent drew on the paper;
- the editors’ notes, which identify the paintings mentioned (with their F and JH numbers), the people and the books.
You can browse them by period, by correspondent, by place, or only those with sketches, and there is a word search. The edition’s translation is in English, and the quotes on this page and on our artwork pages are taken from that English translation. On our Van Gogh quotes page you will also find 26 famous quotes checked against the letters, and in the sketches in the letters, the drawings that accompanied the text.
Key letters
A selection of 25 letters, in chronological order, with their number in the 2009 edition (linked to the full text on vangoghletters.org) and the related page on this site.
| No. | Date and place | To | What it’s about | On this site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | Sep 29, 1872, The Hague | Theo | The first surviving letter to Theo, after his visit to The Hague. | Biography |
| 155 | Jun 22–24, 1880, Cuesmes | Theo | He breaks a long silence with Theo; the “bird in a cage” that knows he is good for something. His first letter in French. | Borinage route |
| 191 | Dec 1–3, 1881, The Hague | Theo | He arrives in The Hague to work with Anton Mauve, who sets him to paint a still life with some old clogs. | Mauve and Van Gogh |
| 224 | c. May 7, 1882, The Hague | Theo | The break with Mauve and the confession of his life with Sien Hoornik. | Sorrow |
| 400 | Oct 28, 1883, Nieuw-Amsterdam (Drenthe) | Theo | The struggle between “I’m a painter” and “I’m not a painter.” | Van Gogh quotes |
| 497 | Apr 30, 1885, Nuenen | Theo | The Potato Eaters, nearly finished after “a whole winter” of studies of heads and hands. | The Potato Eaters |
| 577 | Feb 21, 1888, Arles | Theo | He arrives in Arles to find at least 60 cm of snow. | Arles route |
| 591 | c. Apr 1, 1888, Arles | Theo | The blossoming peach trees dedicated to Mauve, who had just died. | Souvenir de Mauve |
| 602 | May 1, 1888, Arles | Theo | He rents the right wing of the Yellow House for 15 francs a month. | The Yellow House |
| 653 | Jul 31, 1888, Arles | Willemien | The portrait of the postman Roulin, with “a head something like that of Socrates.” | Portrait of Joseph Roulin |
| 666 | Aug 21 or 22, 1888, Arles | Theo | The sunflowers, painted “with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse.” | Sunflowers |
| 676 | Sep 8, 1888, Arles | Theo | The night café: “the terrible human passions with the red and the green.” | The Night Café |
| 691 | c. Sep 29, 1888, Arles | Theo | Sketches of Starry Night Over the Rhône and of the Yellow House “under a sulphur sun.” | Starry Night Over the Rhône |
| 705 | Oct 16, 1888, Arles | Theo | The bedroom: a painting meant to be suggestive “of rest or of sleep.” | The Bedroom |
| 716 | Nov 1 or 2, 1888, Arles | Émile Bernard | A letter written jointly with Gauguin. | Letter by Van Gogh and Gauguin |
| 726 | Dec 17 or 18, 1888, Arles | Theo | A visit with Gauguin to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier; their discussion is “excessively electric.” | Van Gogh and Gauguin |
| 728 | Jan 2, 1889, Arles | Theo | Written in the hospital after the December crisis, to reassure Theo. | Arles (1888–1889) |
| 782 | c. Jun 18, 1889, Saint-Rémy | Theo | He announces “a new study of a starry sky”: The Starry Night. | The Starry Night |
| 800 | Sep 5–6, 1889, Saint-Rémy | Theo | The reaper, “the image of death,” yet with nothing sad about it. | Wheatfield with a Reaper |
| 822 | c. Nov 26, 1889, Saint-Rémy | Émile Bernard | The asylum garden and the anxiety of “seeing red.” | The Garden of the Asylum |
| 853 | Feb 9 or 10, 1890, Saint-Rémy | Albert Aurier | His reply to the first major article on his work. | Letter to Albert Aurier |
| 856 | Feb 19, 1890, Saint-Rémy | Willemien | The blossoming branches against a blue sky he is painting for his newborn nephew. | Almond Blossom |
| 877 | Jun 3, 1890, Auvers | Theo | A sketch of the portrait of Dr. Gachet. | Portrait of Dr. Gachet |
| 898 | c. Jul 10, 1890, Auvers | Theo and Jo | Immense wheatfields under turbulent skies, to express “sadness, extreme loneliness.” | Wheatfield under Thunderclouds |
| 902 | Jul 23, 1890, Auvers | Theo | The last letter he sent, with a sketch of Daubigny’s garden. | Daubigny’s Garden |
What the letters tell us: a few keys
Read in order, the letters show how a gallery clerk, then a failed preacher, decides at 27 to become a painter and teaches himself almost alone, with the help of books, of friends such as Van Rappard and, for a few months, of Mauve. They also show his method: Van Gogh describes every important painting with the exact names of the colors, as in The Bedroom, where he lists the pale violet walls, the red tile floor, and the bed and chairs in “fresh butter yellow” (letter 705). And they reveal how he thought about painting, as when he writes: “In my painting of the night café I’ve tried to express the idea that the café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes” (letter 677), or when he sees in a reaper the image of death, which “takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold” (letter 800).
The letters also debunk myths: many lines that circulate as his do not appear in them or have been cut short. You can find them checked one by one in Van Gogh quotes.
On this site
- Letter from Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard (letter 716).
- Van Gogh’s letter to Albert Aurier (letter 853).
- Van Gogh quotes: 26 genuine quotes, each with the letter it comes from.
- Sketches in the letters: the drawings Van Gogh made for Theo and his friends.
- Johanna van Gogh-Bonger: the sister-in-law who kept and published the letters.
- Theo van Gogh: a biography of the man who received almost all the letters.
- Self-Portrait or Portrait of Theo van Gogh: the painting that may depict him.
- Anton Mauve and Van Gogh: the story of his first teacher, told through the letters.
Sources: Vincent van Gogh, The Letters, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING (vangoghletters.org): the pages “Van Gogh as a letter-writer” and “About this edition” and the classifications by correspondent and by period; letters 001, 155, 191, 224, 400, 497, 577, 591, 602, 653, 666, 676, 677, 691, 705, 716, 726, 728, 782, 800, 822, 853, 856, 877, 898 and 902, with their notes. Quotes from the edition’s English translation.