The best of van Gogh's eternally popular paintings, gathered together in one magnificently produced volume. Nearly 120 years after his death, Vincent van Gogh and his work continue to exert a powerful fascination. This book offers the reader a selection of the artist's most unforgettable canvases as well as some lesser-known examples, many drawn from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It explores the works in the context of van Gogh's short but brilliant career, in which frequent spells of isolation did not preclude lively engagement with his artistic peers and the ideas of his time. Van Gogh's brush was guided by a remarkable, restless, and wide-ranging intelligence that found another outlet in the continuous stream of letters written to family and friends. The artist's correspondence— one of the most important archival resources of nineteenth-century art— provides the narrative thread around which this study develops. Belinda Thomson considers van Gogh as a cosmopolitan figure who combined in his art experiences and traditions absorbed in his native Netherlands and in Victorian England, and then succeeded in assimilating and making his mark on the practice of painting in France at one of its richest periods. 170 color illustrations.