What I’m trying for is the shortest means to that end - on the understanding that the work is of genuine and lasting merit, which I can only expect if I put something really good into it and make an honest study of nature, not if I work exclusively with an eye to saleability - for which one is bound to suffer later.

In fact, his fits (most likely due to epilepsy) were debilitating, and often kept him out of commission for weeks at a time. I'm not sure why it was such a shock, but I didn't expect the language to be descriptive, imaginative, piercing. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. As one of the greatest victims of the phenomenon that Walter Benjamin explores in his The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, one could expect to see posters of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, or his Room, or Starry Night, in a third of the rooms of students. So instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity, in other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress.In that year van Gogh went to Antwerp where he discovered the works of Rubens and purchased many Japanese prints. From English literature his favourites were clearly Charles Dickens and, very dear to him, George Eliot.

There may be a great fire in your soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself by it, all that passers-by can see is a little smoke coming out of the chimney and they walk on. Despite a widespread tendency to romanticize his ill health, art historians see an artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence wrought through illness. A nonentity, or an oddity, or a disagreeable man, someone neither has nor ever will have any place in society.Mind you, as we come to the end of his life, his output literally goes through the roof (though for a while he was not allowed to paint, namely because he would have psychotic attacks and attempt to swallow his paints), but before his death he was literally painting one painting a day (sometimes two). During this time, though, references to paintings and art, and close descriptions of landscapes, fill his letters.