AUSTRALIA: Van Gogh the collector

"Well my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it. That's all right... but what's the use?"

So wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo on Sunday July 27, 1890. It was just before he took his revolver, went outside into the fields and shot himself.

Dr Vincent Alessi was only 15 when his older brother showed him a small book containing some of the hundreds of letters van Gogh wrote to Theo. He read them, became captivated by the troubled artist who so vividly described his life in the letters and, 25 years later, is still in awe of the Dutch painter.

"My brother kindly allowed me to highlight sections in the book and I'd write notes in the margin. I knew little about van Gogh and, because the book had no illustrations, I had no idea what his work was like," Alessi says. "But the letters were so beautifully written that I began reading more about him and looking at images of his paintings. Then I started reading academic books about his practice as an artist and I became fascinated with him as a person..."

Later, as an honours student at La Trobe University in Melbourne, this latter-day Vincent wrote a thesis on the sun's symbolism in van Gogh's paintings. He took this further in research for his PhD and visited the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

There he was able to study the letters and view the Japanese prints van Gogh had collected as well as 17 folios of 1400 black and white woodblock prints by English artists published in newspapers such as the Illustrated London News and The Graphic in the latter half of the 19th century.

Until he saw them, Alessi had not known how large this print collection was and, realising how influential they must have been in van Gogh's development as an artist, he decided to focus on this un-researched aspect of his life.

Back in Melbourne, he pored over van Gogh's letters to locate where he had mentioned hundreds of other prints that had been lost from the collection, then began painstakingly searching for them in the State Library which holds copies of both newspapers from the time.

"Using his letters I was able to identify the prints by either the title or van Gogh's descriptions. It meant flipping through 10 years of the newspapers to match the images with the text in the letters and, even though the search was really tedious, it was fascinating to read so much of Victorian England - a period I knew very little about."

Alessi is now artistic director of the La Trobe University Museum of Art and he believes van Gogh collected 2,000 or more of the English illustrations. His search in the library identified nearly 600 that the curators in the Van Gogh Museum had not known existed.

Van Gogh obtained a complete set of The Graphic and the Illustrated London News published in the mid-1860s and continued to buy later ones from a local bookseller. He kept them in folios and this suggested to Alessi they had been used as a teaching aid.

"They were filed under workers, farmers, people employed in factories and were stored that way, I think, so when he was doing his own painting, he could refer to them and see how an illustrator might have shown the way someone was working in a field or a factory. He probably started collecting the prints in the early 1880s but, after 1884, there are no further references in his letters to him acquiring anything new and it was no coincidence this happened at the time he became more confident as an artist and no longer needed the prints."

Alessi says one of the significant but little-known events in van Gogh's life was that he had not set out to become a great artist but was pressured by his well-to-do family to find a job "so he wouldn't slip any further down the social scale".

Theo proposed he find work as an illustrator so he studied the woodblock prints to learn how to draw with the idea of going to London and becoming an illustrator himself. It was four years before he picked up a paintbrush and began his short but enormously prolific life as a painter.

"From an aesthetic point of view, the Japanese prints are more beautiful to look at than the English black and white ones but they both had an equal amount of influence on him. He didn't copy directly from the English prints but I argue his painting style was a result of them, given that the illustrators had to rely on dark outlines purely because they were woodblock prints and needed a dark outline to hold the block together."

Another astonishing aspect about the English prints is the fact they survived. Van Gogh left them with his mother when he went to live in Paris and she kept them even after he died. As Alessis says, she must have been a great hoarder because she never thought of him as a great artist and nor did many of those who knew him yet she kept his prints. They and his Japanese print collection, along with his tool box and his painting box are still held by the museum.

"I can't think of too many artists where we've had such first-hand knowledge of them as we do of van Gogh," Alessi says. "Through his letters and what he collected we can piece together almost his whole life. The prints held by the Van Gogh Museum are in storage and they don't get seen very often because they are fragile but also not very exciting to look at. Yet they are really important and underpin almost everything he did. He said himself that the really great artists were the English black and white illustrators."

The images van Gogh included in his print collection were carefully chosen, he says, and had a major influence in shaping his view of what it meant to be an artist. He didn't collect illustrations of royalty but of ordinary working people, especially the poor.

"If you look at the way he actually paints, there's a strong drawing quality and quite often they have really dark outlines. That, I would argue, comes from the prints because of the way they were made they needed to have strong outlines and that boldness is evident in his paintings. You only have to look at his 40 or so self portraits, they were definitely was shaped by his prints."

Does he or La Trobe have a painting by van Gogh then? "No, I don't have a van Gogh (surprise, surprise) nor do I own any of the prints I researched. But I really enjoy looking at them and I still pop into the State Library from time to time to browse through those newspapers..."

geoff.maslen@uw-news.com