Van Gogh Drawings

This choice selection of beautifully reproduced drawings spans the full length of van Gogh's brief but prolific career. The works range from his early impressions of peasant life to drawings that served as studies for the great canvases he painted at the close of his life, including Landscape with Cypresses and Starry Night.


Van Gogh's quest to be "alone with nature" and with those whose lives were close to the land took him first to the desolate reaches of northern Holland and ultimately to the sunlit fields and villages of southern France. The drawings presented in this book record the life, the land, and the people he encountered; familiar images to us through his paintings, yet startlingly fresh in these lesser-known works in another medium. Themes include peasants in their fields and cottages, village gardens, fishing boats, the postman Roulin, a drawbridge, fields of grain, a self-portrait, the house he lived in, the room he slept in, and the courtyard of the hospital in Arles.

Van Gogh Drawings offers a beautiful and stirring collection of work, one that clearly displays the artist's powerful affinity for the drawing medium. During the last six years of his life, his most productive period, van Gogh produced approximately 700 drawings and 800 paintings. Virtually unknown at his death, he had sold only one of this astonishing number of works. Now, a century later, they number among the most universally admired and prized of man's creative achievements. The drawings presented here, chosen from museums and private collections around the world, dramatically record the brief journey of his life and the unfolding of his genius. The captions, which draw heavily upon information provided by Jan Hulsker in The Complete Van Gogh, list subject, date, medium, dimensions (in centimeters, height before width), and the institutions in which they are located. 44 black-and-white illustrations.