Dear Theo

Around 1978, I read an extraordinary book titled Dear Theo. Dear Theo is a collection of hundreds of letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother and closest friend Theo, an art dealer in Amsterdam.  In these letters, Van Gogh told amazing stories of his discoveries of the beauty and wonder of nature and the people that captured his attention, all of which became the subjects for over 900 paintings he made between 1880 and 1890. In 1878 he wrote, “Great art feeds the inner life, as do the works of those who apply themselves with heart, mind, and soul. If one can only remember what one has seen, one is never idle or lonely, and never alone.”

When Van Gogh moved to Paris, his art began to take on a unique style. His daring approach to painting was to fervently apply the colorful paint with thick and bold brushstrokes. He mostly painted outdoors no matter what the weather conditions were to fully capture the emotion and natural state of his subjects.  But, fame would not come to him for many decades following his early death at age 37 in 1890. The tragedy of Van Gogh is that he only sold one painting and this one sale came 4 months before his death. His bouts with depression and rage are well documented but make sense for what he perceived as total rejection by the general public and his Impressionistic colleagues of his artistry.

After Vincent’s death, Theo died just 6 months later and is buried next to his brother. Theo’s wife Johanna inherited all of Vincent’s paintings and dedicated her life to arranging public showings all over the world of his work, thus bringing his remarkable art to the attention of millions. 100 years after his death, 7 of Van Gogh’s paintings sold at auction for a total of 700 million dollars. Today those same paintings are worth over one billion dollars.

People’s perceptions of Van Gogh are that he was a mentally unstable artist, but if you look beyond what you’ve heard and read some of the letters that he wrote to this brother, you will discover that he was a passionate and compassionate artist, a gifted writer, and a profound thinker. At age 25 he wrote, “The best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, whatever you like, but love with a lofty and intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and always try to know deeper, better, and more.”

Vincent Van Gogh was ridiculed in his time for his paintings which were regarded as too bold and too unusual. The fact is he was excited by all the beauty he saw around him and enthusiastically painted what he saw on canvas. In a letter to Theo he wrote, “Try to walk as much as you can and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her.  If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.”