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SELF-PORTAIT WITH A JAPANESE PRINT, PARIS, 1887-88, VAN GOGH

“What is drawing? How does one get there? It’s working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? – since hammering on it doesn’t help at all.”

October, 1882 and, in a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent van Gogh is worrying away at the question of artistic creation. It is a concern he returned to continually in his letters until his death in 1890, aged 37.

A new selection of his correspondence has been published to tie in with a planned exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in October (pandemic allowing).

Words mattered to him, as another new book, Vincent’s Books, a look at the painter’s relationship with the writers who inspired him, reminds us. “I have a more or less irresistible passion for books,” he wrote, “and I have a need continually to educate myself, to study, if you like, precisely as I need to eat my bread.”

Vincent van Gogh A Life in Letters, edited by Nienke Bakke, Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten is published by Thames & Hudson, price £30. Vincent’s Books, by Mariella Guzzoni is also published by Thames & Hudson, priced £19.95. Photograph Emily Dreyfus Foundation.