Sketch of the painting “Worn Out” in a letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo, mid September 1881, Etten (letter 172) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
In the final year of production, a team of 20 worked on the project. We owe them an immense debt of gratitude. The two original editors, Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten, began work on the letters project in 1994, and in 2002 they were joined by Nienke Bakker. The freely available website has already had over 2.1m visitors.Īlthough there have been a series of earlier published editions of Van Gogh’s letters, the last major one was in the 1950s. A 780-page abridged version is available in eight languages. Worldwide sales have now exceeded 15,000 copies, not bad for a publication which had a cover price of €395 (the English edition is currently out of print). The full edition has been published in four languages: English, French, Dutch and Chinese (with Korean now likely). The letters are meticulously annotated, with another 160,000 words of notes in the printed edition (and 700,000 words in the longer web annotations). Altogether the text of the correspondence is 986,000 words. Of the letters, 820 are from Vincent, with 658 to his brother Theo, and 83 to the artist (the vast majority are in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum).
The statistics demonstrate the ambition of the Van Gogh letters project. The result, published in October 2009, is a 6-volume, 2,164-page-edition and a searchable web version.
In a 15-year project, the letters were painstakingly transcribed, translated into English and fully annotated. It is a decade, this month, since the publication of the annotated edition of Van Gogh’s 902 letters.
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