The first major exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh’s work to be shown in London for over 40 years, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters features some of the great painter’s most famous masterpieces, as well as original letters and drawings: not to be missed!
- With 65 paintings, 40 drawings and 40 letters on display, this exhibition focuses on recurrent themes within the artist’s correspondence. It unites sketches drawn in his letters with its paintings, revealing his thoughts about some of his best-loved masterpieces.
- It also shows a rather unknown aspect of the artist as a compulsive and eloquent letter writer, who left behind a legacy of 1,000 letters written to his young brother Theo and his artist friends, therefore providing an intimate self-portrait of the man and the way he defined himself as an artist and as a person.
Why go and see it?
- Because it is first major exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh’s work to be shown in London for over 40 years, displayed in the magnificent surroundings of the Royal Academy, and because it features some of the artist’s most iconic paintings, such as Self-portrait as an Artist, The Zouave and L’Arlésienne.
- Because it offers the possibility to discover thanks to the letters on display the artist’s multi-faceted intellectual universe, blending his reflections on philosophical subjects, his vast knowledge of art and literature and his love of people and nature, thus providing with a very different portrait from the mad genius of popular myth.
The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters from 23 January to 18 April 2010, Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington house, Piccadilly, W1 (Green Park, Piccadilly Circus), £12 full price.
