A bottle of absinthe, some onions, a book about homeopathy, a letter from his brother Theo: These are the items that Vincent van Gogh included in his first painting after "the ear incident." "The ear incident," is how the curators of The Real van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters refer to one of the more famous episodes in the painter's life: Not "the mutilation" or "the day Vincent hacked off a bit of cartilage with a razor after a fight with Gauguin and then gave it to a prostitute." The euphemism is deliberate, and telling: This major new show at London's Royal Academy, which explores not just the paintings but the letters they inspired, is aimed at dispelling the crazy-artist myths that have surrounded van Gogh since he took his own life 120 years ago.
As well as 65 paintings (and 30 drawings), the show features more than three dozen original letters on loan from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and drawn from the hundreds the artist wrote, mainly to his art-dealer brother Theo. Most of them have never been seen in public before. Taken together, says curator Ann Dumas, they disprove "the idea of him as a mad genius. He's this very thoughtful, reflective man who thinks deeply about his work. It's so much more rounded than the cliché." The letters, in small rounded handwriting with the ink faded to sepia, hang next to the relevant paintings, whose astonishing colours are undiminished after more than a century (except in the rare case where the artist used an unstable pigment). This van Gogh is a polyglot, writing in English, French and Dutch, and an opinionated theorist - about photography, psychology, art history. An avid reader, he dots his letters with literary references to Zola and Balzac, Eliot and Dickens. Unlike the popular image of an uneducated savant spontaneously churning out swirling landscapes, he's revealed to be a methodical plodder when it comes to draughtsmanship and colour.
Soon after he decided to become an artist in 1880 at the age of 27, he wrote to Theo about his maddening attempts to capture perspective - "downright witchcraft," he said, a sentiment that any modern-art student could appreciate. Finally, he developed a portable frame with a keyhole in the centre that he carried with him everywhere to help him capture perspective. Thrilled, he sketched his new invention in a letter to Theo.
Van Gogh's paintings are notorious for being diminished in reproduction - the tones are muddied, the pictures flattened. Seen up close, the luminous colours come to life, and the force of the brushstrokes and crusting of paint gives the canvases a sculptural quality. One of van Gogh's favourite paintings, a swirling column of a cypress tree ("a dark blot on the sun-drenched landscape") made Theo uneasy, because it was so thickly painted and too stylized for his taste. He told his brother and after that, a wounded van Gogh used less paint.
He soaked up these criticisms and never stopped, although the recognition he desired always eluded him. As he painted his way from Paris to Arles to Saint-Rémy, where he was in an asylum for a year before his suicide, his letters were punctuated by sadness (even as the paintings beside them blaze with life.) "You'll say that this is something like, say, the face of death," he writes to his sister Willemien about the famous Self-portrait as an Artist (1888). About his homeopath Dr. Gachet - subject of another famous portrait - he writes, "He certainly appears to me as ill and confused as you or I." Despite the curator's best attempts to rehabilitate the man, you can make him only so cheerful.
From the window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, van Gogh could see a little walled field, and painted the labourers within it and the mountains beyond, with a turbulent sky overhead.
"It's these paintings that have led people to say, 'this is the work of a madman,' but it's not at all," said Dumas. "It's a style he deliberately developed to express the strong feelings that nature inspired in him." In 1890, van Gogh was distressed by his falling out with Gauguin and the collapse of his dream of an artists' commune. He was terrified of the attacks he suffered (thought to be related to epilepsy) and frustrated by his lack of success and his financial dependence on Theo.
Still, he moved to Auvers in the north of France and painted more than 70 canvases in the 70 days before his death. On July 23, four days before he shot himself, he wrote a final letter to Theo: "I'm applying myself to my canvases with all my attention." But an earlier draft of that same letter, which was found on his body, revealed another truth: "Ah well, I risk my life for my own work and my reason has half foundered in it."
The Real van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters is at the Royal Academy of Arts in London until April 18. ( www.royalacademy.org.uk ).