Anne Clark Amor

Badly Soiled in the Struggle for Life

The Love of Many Things: A Life of Vincent Van Gogh

By

Hodder & Stoughton 381pp £17.95 order from our bookshop

‘I don’t even dream of exhibiting my work. The idea leaves me absolutely cold…I think a certain popularity the least desirable thing of all,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo in 1882. His work was unsellable in his lifetime, and embarrassed friends to whom he gave his pictures scarcely knew what to do with them. His doctor used one of them to mend a chicken coop, from which he later retrieved it. Now that van Gogh’s pictures command astronomical prices in the international art market, it is inevitable that the centenary of his death should be celebrated by several new biographies.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us