A latest exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum has put more than 100 personal letters in which he discusses his craft on display alongside the actual paintings. Considering 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 amputation of his own left ear and his suicide at the age of 37. In the letters he writes about both the philosophy of paintings and technical details. In a letter he wrote to his brother Theo on April 9, 1885, he said “I am working on those peasants around a dish of potatoes again”, referring to one of his masterpiece “The Potato Eaters”. In the note he also wrote “I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating those potatoes in the lamp light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food”. The note also contains a sketch of the painting.

Van Gogh was a social and financial failure, selling one work in his lifetime. But his letters remind us more about his methods and techniques than his madness to his styles of painting.

Exhibition opens on Friday 9^th of October 2009 and run through January 3, 2010.