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In 1885, a 22-year-old Dutch woman named Johanna Bonger met Theo van Gogh, the younger brother of the artist, who was then making a name for himself as an art dealer in Paris. History knows Theo as the steadier of the van Gogh brothers, the archetypal emotional anchor, who selflessly managed Vincent’s erratic path through life, but he had his share of impetuosity. He asked her to marry him after only two meetings.
Jo, as she called herself, was raised in a sober, middle-class family. Her father, the editor of a shipping newspaper that reported on things like the trade in coffee and spices from the Far East, imposed a code of propriety and emotional aloofness on his children. There is a Dutch maxim, “The tallest nail gets hammered down,” that the Bonger family seems to have taken as gospel. Jo had set herself up in a safely unexciting career as an English teac
How Van Gogh paid for his mentally ill sister s care decades after his death | Van Gogh theguardian.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theguardian.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Not the least of our losses in this plague year was one of our greatest poets, Derek Mahon. Washing Up (Gallery Press) is a glorious late harvest - vigorous, funny, angry, blithe - beautifully produced, like all Gallery editions, and including, appropriately, a lovely tribute to another luminary of the dead poets society, Ciaran Carson. Mahon s last is vividly alive. Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters, edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten (Thames & Hudson) is a judicious selection from the magnificent six-volume Complete Letters of 2009. Had he not been a painter, Van Gogh could have made his name as a writer, as his correspondence shows. Impassioned, often heartbreaking, furious, funny and tender, these letters form a unique testament from a pivotal figure in 19th-century art. For my third choice, I am going to flout the rules by picking a book to be published in January 2021: Billy O Callaghan s Life Sentences (Cape) is a superb and moving novel of