Book Brief- “Leaving Van Gogh”
“There I was, a haunted man, with the gay yellow books and the bells of the foxglove pressed up to the front of the picture. The angle of the flowers echoed the way my body leaned to the side of the canvas, so that they yellow books somehow held us steady. But for all the physical resemblance, what makes this portrait a marvel is not the way it captures anything specific to me. It is more than that Vincent used my features to create a portrait of world-weariness. He later told me that he had described it to Gauguin in a letter as having “the despairing expression of our times.”’
Leaving Van Gogh, page 60
Historical Fiction
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