本书展示了梵高在他10年的职业生涯中创作的一系列激动人心的画像，反映了这位艺术家借以描绘现代生活多样性的强烈的视觉冲击。在他的许多画像中，我们可以察觉到这位艺术家想要用极富表现力的方式表现许多主题的欲望。在参考了梵高大量信件的前提下，Skea阐述了这位艺术家以作家的视角看待他选择的作画对象，以及他觉得自己的画像应该在某种程度上唤醒在他看来是支撑人类生存的精神基础。

Despite his posthumous fame as a painter of flowers, still-lifes, gardens, landscapes and city scenes, during his lifetime Vincent van Gogh believed that his portraits constituted his most important works. Although as an artist he was ‘touched by so many different things’, he was nevertheless committed to the art of portraiture – a quality that distinguished him from his contemporaries. Van Gogh was passionate in his avoidance of bland, photographic resemblances, in the hope of capturing the essential character of his models by means of expressive colour and brushwork.

Showcasing a dramatic set of portraits created during Van Gogh’s ten-year career, this book reflects the strong visual impact with which the artist captured the diversity of contemporary life. In his many portraits, we can discern the artist’s desire to record expressively a number of themes, from the plight of the agricultural workers in his native Brabant and the destitution of prostitutes and their children in urban Europe, to the lives of his cosmopolitan acquaintances in Paris, including café owners and art dealers. It was here that he began his remarkable sequence of self-portraits. With reference to Van Gogh’s extensive correspondence, Skea elaborates how the artist perceived his chosen subjects as would a writer, and how he felt that his portraits should somehow evoke what he considered to be the spiritual underpinning of human existence

Table of Contents

Introduction: ‘And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter…’ • 1. The Netherlands • 2. Paris • 3. Arles • 4. Saint-Rémy de Provence • 5. Auvers-sur-Oise • Sources of Quotations, Further Reading