'Field with Irises near Arles' 1888
In 2009, the van Gogh Museum started a collaboration with the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences to develop a digital edition of the letters written by Vincent van Gogh (1835-1890) to his family and friends (Ciula, 2010). The corpus contains 902 letters and it is the result of 15 years of research and cultural reading done by the Museum and the Huygens ING (Ciula, 2010). Here below you can find an example of an audio recording of one of the letters from Vincent to his brother Theo. This is quite an interesting letter since van Gogh never sent it to his brother but instead, he was holding it when he took his life in a field near Auvers.
A special aspect of Vincent’s letters was the presence of more than 240 small sketches which the author calls ‘scratches’ (Van Gogh Museum, n.d). Each sketch was different from the others and it contained details or characteristics of what van Gogh was painting at the moment. Vincent decided to add these small sketches to let the reader, Theo or one of his friends, know about what he was painting at that moment (Van Gogh Museum, n.d). The drawings were either quickly made with pen or more detailed and colourful. When he was drawing with the pen, he was writing the name of the colours close to the elements. An instance of this is the letter that contained a sketch of the ‘Field with Irises near Arles’ in which he wrote the colours ‘blue’, ‘grey’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’ and ‘purple’ (Van Gogh Museum, n.d).
For more information about van Gogh letters: Vincent van Gogh Digitised Letters