Van Gogh's letters show his method, not madness

       While Vincent van Gogh has become almost as famed for his troubled mind as for his paintings, a new exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum seeks to remind us there was more method than madness to his style.
       In honour of the publication of a new compendium of all the artist's known correspondence, the museum has put more than 100 personal letters in which he discusses his craft on display alongside the actual paintings.
       Museum director Axel Ruger said the exhibit, opening today, is arranged to make a visitor feel "as if you are being led through the collection with Van Gogh giving commentary on his own work".
       Seeing the letters next to the paintings underlines Van Gogh's professionalism,which is sometimes overlooked amid spectacular biographical details such as his mental illness, his apparent amputation of part of his own left ear, and his suicide in 1890 at age 37.
       In the letters - known from recent books and films - Van Gogh writes about both the philosophy of painting and the technical details.
       "I'm working on those peasants around a dish of potatoes again," he said in a letter to his brother Theo on April 9, 1885, referring to one of his earliest masterpieces,The Potato Eaters .The note also contains a sketch of the painting.
       Van Gogh, who was influenced by the Impressionists, said he felt there was "life" in the piece, which he started in the day and continued working on by lamplight on a large canvas.
       "The beautiful effects of the light in nature require one to work very fast" he said, adding he didn't feel he could yet compare with 17th-century Dutch masters such as Rembrandt.
       "At the point where I now am, though,I see a chance of giving a felt impression of what I see ...[but] never exactly - for one sees nature through one's own temperament."
       The compendium includes all 820 known letters by Van Gogh, tracing his youth and late start as a painter to his spectacular blossoming in the late 1880s.
       "The number of letters isn't really unusual but the literary quality of the letters, that's special," said curator Leo Jansen, one of three experts who spent 15 years on the project.
       "You literally can't find it in any other artist: he was painter and writer at the same time."
       Van Gogh's letters were previously translated into English in 1958. The new compendium includes 20 new letters as well as complete versions of some letters previously only published in part.
       More importantly, Mr Jansen said, it gives more precise translations and includes reproductions of more than 2,000 paintings Van Gogh makes reference to.In all, it offers an unusually complete picture of the mental world of one of the world's great artists.
       The entire compilation has been put online as a free, searchable database in French, Dutch and English.
       The museum exhibition opens today and runs through Jan 3,2010.