Vincent van Gogh: the letters

The complete annotated English edition

The complete, English-language annotated, illustrated edition of Vincent van Gogh’s letters is available online. The Huygens Institute produced the digital edition in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The letters are of interest to both specialists and the general public and are accessible worldwide. The online edition is also considered a benchmark in editorial scholarship. The editors were Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker.

Image: Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Self-portrait, Paris, summer 1887. Collection Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

To the online edition.

Why this edition?

Around 1990, art historians and curators worldwide expressed a clear need for a complete, English-language edition of Van Gogh’s letters, annotated with the most up-to-date knowledge. The Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute combined their expertise in the field of Van Gogh and editorial science to make this possible.

The editors devised the content model for the edition, provided the texts, checked the translations and conducted research for the annotations and introductions. The IT specialists at the Huygens Institute built the digital publication environment.

For wider distribution, printed editions in Dutch, French and English were also published on the basis of the digital edition, with abridged annotations and introductions.

To the book.

The work on the letters

Approximately 900 letters were transcribed directly from the original documents, allowing errors in previous editions to be corrected. Letters that were not in the Van Gogh Museum’s collection (several dozen) were consulted elsewhere in Europe and the United States. This formed the basis for a new, reliable English translation.

The explanatory notes help to understand the historical, biographical and cultural contexts. People, art-historical and biographical backgrounds and more than 2,000 works of art by Van Gogh and others are identified and illustrated where possible.

Who else contributed

The project was made possible thanks to the efforts of more than twenty interns, several temporary researchers and a team of six translators. IT specialists from the Huygens Institute, (image) editors from the Van Gogh Museum and the publishers Mercatorfonds, Thames & Hudson and Actes Sud also contributed. Together, they made this special edition a reality.

Spin-offs and follow-up activities

There were exhibitions at The Morgan Library, New York in 2007-2008, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam in 2002, 2009, and online in 2020-2021 and at the Royal Academy in London in 2010. In addition, a comprehensive anthology was published, translated into ten languages, and a smaller anthology, which is still being reprinted in Dutch and English. There is also a complete Chinese translation. Smaller selections were reprinted for special occasions, such as exhibitions.

Awards and recognition

The printed, complete edition was awarded the Dutch Book Trade Prize and the Europa Nostra Award, recognising the project’s scientific and cultural value.

Artists’ Letters

Vincent van Gogh: the letters is part of the overarching project Artists’ Letters, which also includes the correspondence of Piet Mondrian and Isaac Israëls to Jo van Gogh-Bonger.