BEIRUT: “Van Gogh and the Seasons” by Sjraar Heugten is based on an exhibition held at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia and celebrates the artist’s connection with the natural world throughout his career.
The sumptuous coffee table book is a work of art in and of itself, but it is not light on text. Rather, the book features excerpts from the artist’s prolific correspondence. The Dutch post-Impressionist artist is one of the most famous painters in the world, but he was also a gifted letter writer as the book shows.
Readers can expect picturesque scenes of Arles, a town in the south of France, which Van Gogh described in a letter to his sister as boasting “a landscape (that) takes on tons of gold of every shade — green-gold, yellow-gold, red-gold, ditto bronze, copper. In short, from lemon-yellow to the full yellow.”
Speaking of yellow, it would be near impossible to collect together Van Gogh’s work without a nod to his iconic sunflowers. The artist painted several versions of his famous vase of subjects, the most well-known of which depicts yellow flowers in a yellow jug against a yellow wall — a fountain of colors brimming with ochres, golds and shades of corn.
This fascinating book explores Van Gogh’s captivation with nature and seasonal changes and takes the reader on an educational journey into why the master painter worked the way he did and what inspired him.
“I even work in the wheat fields at midday, in the full heat of the sun without any shade whatever. And there, I revel in it like a cicada,” he wrote in a letter in the summer of 1888.
According to the book, he took great joy in working out in the elements and did so until his death on July 29, 1890. He was 37-years-old and had sold just one painting, a far cry from the fame he was to gain posthumously.
This beautifully presented book allows the reader to explore a subject that has not yet been dealt with in the world of mainstream publishing — the impact of nature on the work of one of the greatest painters of the 19th century.
Book Review: Exploring Van Gogh’s obsession with the great outdoors
Book Review: Exploring Van Gogh’s obsession with the great outdoors
What We Are Reading Today: The Correspondence
- During this period, Thoreau was well established as a writer and lecturer, and he continued to pursue the interests and activities that had occupied him earlier in the 1850s
Author: Henry David D. Thoreau
This is the third and final volume of the first full-scale scholarly edition of Thoreau’s correspondence in more than half a century. Together, the volumes present every known letter written or received by Thoreau, almost 650 in all, including more than 100 that have never been published before.
“Correspondence 3: 1857–1862” contains 239 letters, 121 written by Thoreau and 118 written to him. Sixty-seven letters are collected here for the first time; of these, 44 have not been published before, including five dated between 1837 and 1855 that are included in an addenda.
During this period, Thoreau was well established as a writer and lecturer, and he continued to pursue the interests and activities that had occupied him earlier in the 1850s.
Letters document the publication of “Chesuncook” (1858) and “An Address on the Succession of Forest Trees” (1860), as well as his preparations, a few months before his death, for the posthumous publication of “The Maine Woods “ and the essays “Walking,” “Autumnal Tints,” “Wild Apples,” and “Life without Principle.”
