Life was such a burden to him; but
now, as so often happens everybody is
full of praise for his talents … Oh
Mother! He was so my own, own brother.

—Theo Van Gogh in a letter to his mother after Vincent’s suicide

Theo’s reflection on his brother’s death encapsulates two aspects of Vincent’s existence. The first is the commonly held mythological vision of the artist burdened by physical and mental illness, poverty and loneliness, who is appreciated for his artistic genius, “as so often happens,” only after his death. However, with the words “He was so my own, own brother,” Theo bears a moving and poetic testament to the loving and attractive aspects of his brother, a vision which is often hidden by the shadow of the popular myth.

The title of David Sweetman’s biography, The Love of Many Things: A Life of Vincent Van Gogh, likewise addresses the complexity of his subject’s life and reputation. In his narration of Vincent’ s life, Sweetmant relates the stories which have given rise to Vincent’s apotheosis as “the archetypal artist of the modern age: ignored and rejected, while sacrificing himself physically and mentally in the service of his art.” However, the biographer challenges this simplistic popular notion as he brings to light the artist’s “love of many things.” Sweetman writes in his introduction, “Indeed if one tries to look at the paintings with eye and mind uncluttered by the legends that have accrued about him in the hundred years since his death, one can see that the works themselves are gloriously, happily sane.” This book, published on the centenary of Vincent’s death, is the first biography of Van Gogh to be written in the last twenty-five years. Since then, new research and more modern and mature understanding of the artistic movements of the last century have allowed Sweetman to present a “fresh look” at Vincent’s life.

To meet David Sweetman is to meet a man whose intellectual cruise control is permanently set at twice the speed limit. He is a self-proclaimed research fanatic. “Research is wonderful. Put me in a library where I haven’t been before and it’s very difficult to get me out. You could just scrap the book for all I care, I’d be content to just sit and do research.” His final product, however, is evidence that the apparent nonchalance towards writing is mostly facetious. Sweetman later admits his love for writing, emphatically gesticulating as he proclaims, “I have tried to describe every detail of Vincent’s environment, to make the reader see the things as Vincent saw them.” This attention to detail is never onerous, nor does it draw attention to itself. The author’s careful balancing fo plot, setting, and various themes allows the book to read like a well-told story.

In the opening pages, in which Sweetman explores Vincent’s childhood and early youth, the author adamantly dispels the notion that Van Gogh was born a crazy genius. “Indeed, for the first twenty years of his life there were no grounds for thinking that Vincent was in any way different from those around him except in minor and at the time insignificant ways. Later such details would be pored over and blown up out of proportion in an attempt to uncover incipient signs of both genius and madness.” However, Sweetman does not shy away from psychoanalysis. Van Gogh’s father was a Dutch Reformed minister and his mother was an amateur artist. One can hardly ignore their influence on their son whose two greatest passions in his short life were religion first, and then art.

Having thrown away his promising career as an art dealer with a major firm in London and Paris, Vincent found himself in Borinage, a coal-mining region in Southern Belgium, attempting to follow in his father’s footsteps. Although his talents as a preacher were highly suspect, Vincent became fanatically sympathetic with the poverty-stricken miners who “led lives of near-slavery in conditions of unimaginable squalor.” Vincent did everything possible to share the lives of the miners. He starved himself, giving any food he received to the miners. He moved from a modest room in the house of a local family to a severely inhospitable shack near the mine. Because of this eccentric self-mortification, combined with an inability to preach, Vincent was dismissed, but his association with the poor never left him.

At the relatively late age of twenty-seven, “without much evidence of aptitude, [and] with little inclination to undertake the necessary training,” Vincent decided to become an artist. He fervently hungered to create art of and for the poor, common people. However, Vincent had no source of financial self-support, and was entirely reliant on the allowance he received from his brother Theo for the rest of his tempestuous life. David Sweetman captures the turbulence of this troubled life, as well as offering a precise analysis of Vincent’s progression as an artist. He investigates Vincent’s training in Brussels, his relationship with a prostitute at The Hague, his friendship with artists such as Paul Gaugin in Paris, his addiction to absinthe and his inability to sell his work.

Sweetman’s best writing appears in the last two chapters in his book, in which he investigates Vincent’ final years of growing artistic genius, and increasing attacks of madness. In one passage, the author conveys the passionate vitality of the sunflowers Vincent painted in his new home, the yellow house” in Arles:

They scream yellow. Some are set in a
yellow vase on a yellow table, some
are violently alive, burning with
sunshine, others are dead, limp,
exhausted but not with the tranquil
death of a real sunflower when it
passes into a dry-brown state before
scattering its polished yellow seeds;
this was death by self-immolation, a
yellow suicide…Before he started
painting he would drink innumerable
cups of strong, black coffee,
deliberately overstimulating himself
so that he could reach that high note
of yellow. It was a dangerous thing.

It was in this “yellow house” that Vincent was later found in his bloody bed, having cut off his ear and presented it to a local prostitute. This was the first of a series of mental attacks which eventually led to his suicide. He was confined to a mental institution and his yellow house sealed by the police until Vincent’s friend Paul Signac arrived to visit his ailing friend. David Sweetman conveys the power of the awesome moment which transpired when they re-entered Vincent’s home:

When they entered the shuttered rooms,
they found Vincent’s paintings waiting
like forgotten treasures in a half-lit
cave…Stacked in these cluttered
chambers was one of the greatest
achievements of nineteenth-century
art, produced in less than a year, and
looking at them once more was the man
who had started out a mere eight years
before virtually unable to hold a
pencil and who had done all this in so
short a time. Signac can only have
looked as his hunched, wounded friend
in amazement.

Vincent Van Gogh has traditionally been considered an “evangelist” of the Expressionist and the Abstract-Expressionist movements in art. In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited the work of Cezanne, Gaugin, Seurat and Van Gogh, hailing them as the precursors to the modern movement. Sweetman sees this as Vincent’s “canonization — by a church to which he had never belonged.” One of the main intentions of his book is to take a “fresh look at Van Gogh’s life, unhampered by outdated theory.” In the past, authors and critics have painstakingly tried to hammer square pegs into round holes by analyzing Vincent’s life and work within the constraints of the theory that he was the “prophet of modern art.” Sweetman argues that “to support this, almost everything about his intentions had to be ignored or distorted and his own taste in art denigrated, for Van Gogh was a passionate lover of the art of his own time, an art aggressively rejected by the founders of the modern movement.” Rather than rejecting his roots, Vincent increasingly looked back, admired and drew inspiration from his artistic environment. Sweetman demonstrates that Vincent was indeed “one of the last artists of the 19th century, not the first of the 20th century.”

This biography is not for the reader seeking erudite and in-depth artistic analysis of Van Gogh’s painting. Sweetman mockingly dismisses the art world’s hyper-theorists who have not time to talk to ordinary people wanting to know about art, because they are too preoccupied with their own discussions. “They are always deconstructing this and deconstructing that. Van Gogh painted for ordinary people. His art is purposely very simple, and I don’t mean that as a put-down, it’s a compliment, it’s very difficult to be simple.” One might also apply this description to the biography. While Sweetman’s thorough scholarship and valid argumentation make the book valuable to students of art, it is nonetheless simply written and entirely accessible to ordinary readers.

Sweetman himself has been inspired by the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. He calls his book “an inadequate attempt to repay an enormous debt.” On the other hand, David Sweetman’s biography is a more than adequate attempt to resurrect Vincent for a moment, and then lay him back to rest a little less misunderstood.