LONDON.- Vincent van Gogh’s short, passionate life was powered by an almost unimaginable creative energy that eventually overwhelmed him. The outlines of his story –the early strivings in Holland and Paris, the revelatory impact of the move to Provence, the attacks of madness that led ineluctably to his suicide –are almost as familiar as the paintings. Yet it is more than possible that neither the paintings nor Van Gogh’s story would have survived at all if it had not been for his remarkable sister in law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger. After Vincent’s death and that of her husband, his brother Theo, Jo devoted her life to preserving and exhibiting the paintings, and editing the letters. It is in her short and unaccountably neglected biography that we can come closest to Vincent the man.

Jo van Gogh-Bonger’s Memoir is introduced here by Martin Gayford, author of The Yellow House, and is illustrated with 86 pages of reproductions of Van Gogh’s greatest paintings and drawings.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calm, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

What am I in the eyes of most people — a non-entity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.