When Vincent died, Theo wanted Aurier to have the honour of being the first to devote a lengthier publication to his deeply-mourned brother, and he told the critic that other writers had shown an interest – yet another indication that Van Gogh was no longer a complete unknown. Some six weeks after Vincent’s death, Theo wrote to his mother: ‘Last week we had a painter or a friend of Vincent’s to dinner three times, one was Aurier. He thinks he will be able to write a history of Vincent and promised he will often come to root around in his letters. He is someone who makes an extremely good impression. I’m still finding such interesting things in Vincent’s letters, and it would really be a remarkable book if people could see how much he thought and remained true to himself.’66. FR b937, Paris, 8 September 1890. Van Gogh’s letter to Aurier (letter 853) was included in Aurier 1893, pp. 265-268, the first of Van Gogh’s letters ever published in a book.

At some point Theo must have lent Aurier the letters from the Saint-Rémy period for a while. Jo did the same shortly afterwards and did not get these letters back until after 27 March 1892: ‘one evening he gave you the bundle of letters dated from Saint-Rémy – but the next morning he needed them to look for something and sent the maid to ask for them back. But later on ... I think I did give you that bundle of letters dated from Saint-Rémy. I’ve finally finished sorting out all the letters (everything he wrote from 1872 onwards) and it’s just the ones from the Saint-Rémy period that I’m missing. Then I suddenly remembered that I gave them to you. ... I would be really, really pleased if you could have a look through your papers – if you don’t have them I don’t know what’s happened to them – and that would be a real shame because it was such an important time and they are the only ones missing from the correspondence which I’m preparing for the press. ... This is so rewarding for me because it’s the only thing I can do in memory of my husband and Vincent.’ (Jo van Gogh-Bonger to Albert Aurier, 27 March 1892, FR b1510).

The writers of exhibition reviews pointed to the unusual aspects of Vincent’s work, sometimes dismissively, but most of the critics were at least intrigued, if not entirely won over.77. Cf. Welsh-Ovcharov 1974, Zemel 1980 and Stein 1986, pp. 176-194. The letters of condolence Theo received after Vincent’s death also provide a considerable insight into his early reputation.88. Published in Pickvance 1992. Admittedly, the many compliments they contain might have been prompted in part by consideration for his bereaved relatives, but this apart there was also clearly a sincere regard for the artist.

After his brother’s death Theo felt that he had a mission to find understanding and esteem for his work in collaboration with a small group of sympathetic artists and critics, but his deteriorating health caught up with him. In October 1890, in the advanced stages of syphilis, he suffered a bout of severe mental confusion. He had to be admitted to an asylum, was transferred to a clinic in Utrecht and died in January 1891, just six months after his older brother. Jo van Gogh-Bonger was left a widow at twenty-nine with a small son, Vincent Willem, who had been named after his artist uncle barely a year earlier. Her life had been turned upside down in the space of two years. She left Paris, returned to the Netherlands and opened a guest house in Bussum to provide for herself and her child. She had the responsibility for a large collection of works of art and immediately resolved to continue Theo’s mission – to gain recognition for Vincent’s work. On 14 November 1891 she noted in her diary: ‘Besides the child he [Theo] has bequeathed me another task – Vincent ‘s work – to get it seen and appreciated as much as possible; keeping all the treasures that Theo and Vincent had collected intact for the child – that, too, is my work.’99. FR b4550-III, 14 November 1891. Soon after this she wrote, ‘now I’m going to start on the letters in earnest and diligently, before the summer rush begins, they have to be ready,’1010. FR b4550-IV, 24 February 1892. and set herself the goal of publishing Vincent’s letters to Theo. It was to take her until 1914 to achieve it.1111. See 1914: Jo van Gogh-Bonger published Vincent van Gogh. Brieven aan zijn broeder.

Richard Roland Holst was the first person to make real use of the direct access he had to Van Gogh’s letters. He was one of the organizers of the Van Gogh exhibition that ran in the Kunstzaal Panorama (Amsterdam) from 17 December 1892 to 5 February 1893.1313. Exhib. cat. Amsterdam 1892-1893. He produced a Symbolist print inspired by Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for the cover of the accompanying catalogue, and among the works listed he included four brief quotations from the letters, all taken from the later letters in French.1414. Roland Holst also quoted two passages from Bernard’s article on Van Gogh in Les hommes d’aujourd’hui (Bernard 1891).

With the inclusion of quotations from the letters in his catalogue, Roland Holst was the first person to publicly establish a connection between Van Gogh’s work and his letters, but it would have reached a small and almost exclusively Dutch audience. This changed in August 1893 when longer extracts appeared in the Dutch-language Belgian avant-garde magazine Van Nu en Straks.1515. Van Nu en Straks 1 (1893) 3 (August), pp. 1-36. The young artist Henry van de Velde, the editor responsible for the design of the journal, in consultation with the editor-in-chief August Vermeylen, chose passages from nine letters in Dutch and four in French. He preceded them with an introduction in which he explained the editors’ intention in simple and unmistakable terms: ‘to establish a memorial to praise Vincent van Gogh’. Van Gogh’s work had been exhibited at the Salon of Les Vingt in Brussels in January 1890 and in February 1891, and now, yet again, Belgium proved more receptive than any other country to the controversial Dutchman.1616. See G. van Kerckhoven, ‘Het Van Goghnummer van Van Nu en Straks. De rol van Henry van de Velde bij het tot stand komen van het derde nummer van de eerste reeks’ (undated typescript, Van Gogh Museum Library).

The passages for Van Nu en Straks were selected to reflect and underline the magazine’s progressive artistic and social ideology: it was time for a new, modern art that derived from and served the people, but without sacrificing the artist’s individuality. There were considerable parallels with the Arts and Crafts movement, and the magazine’s aesthetic typography and design was a manifestation of this.1717. See Greer 2007. There were illustrations of three landscape drawings and a portrait of Van Gogh by Horace Mann Livens, whom Van Gogh had got to know in the months he lived in Antwerp. Vignettes by the Dutch artists Johan Thorn Prikker, Toorop and Roland Holst accompanied the text.

Van de Velde was greatly impressed by Van Gogh’s work at the exhibition at Les Vingt in Brussels in 1890. He was to visit Jo van Gogh-Bonger at home in May 1894.1818. See Fred Leeman, ‘Van Goghs postume roem in de Lage Landen’, in exhib. cat. Essen 1990, pp. 162-181, esp. 173-174 (Dutch edition). Vermeylen went to see her in December 1892 to discuss the publication of extracts of the letters in Van Nu en Straks.1919. See Hammacher 1970, p. 19; and Van Nu en Straks 1982, pp. xv-xvi. Jo, for her part, must have seen this as a great opportunity, for when the batch of letters and drawings she sent to the editors went missing she immediately sent others.2020. See Van Nu en Straks 1988, vol. 1, pp. 342-343 and vol. 2, p. 178 (n. 2). The packet turned up after all a short while later.

After Jo van Gogh-Bonger went back to the Netherlands,2222. In 1901 she married the artist Johan Cohen Gosschalk, who died in 1912. Through this second marriage her name became Cohen Gosschalk-Bonger, but we shall continue to call her Van Gogh-Bonger, as is customary in the literature. This was the name with which she signed the preface to the reprint of Brieven aan zijn broeder in 1924. it was Bernard who shouldered Theo van Gogh’s task in France and tried to bring Vincent’s work to the attention of the public. Jo’s brother Andries was also involved in the early years, but his role was confined almost wholly to providing practical support for Jo, at least in so far as tensions between the pair permitted.2323. See Account book 2002, Introduction, esp. pp. 21-26. In September 1890 Bernard had helped Theo to stage an exhibition in Theo and Jo’s apartment in the cité Pigalle, and as early as the summer of 1889 he had tried to champion Van Gogh’s work while the artist was in the asylum in Saint-Rémy. He sent a brief review to Albert Aurier, editor of the magazine Le Moderniste. Bernard’s contribution was not published; a few months later Aurier’s own article appeared in Mercure de France.

Bernard first published on Van Gogh in 1891, in the series Les hommes d’aujourd’hui (‘Men of Today’).2424. Bernard 1891. On Bernard’s efforts in greater detail: Van Gogh 2007, Introduction. In April 1892 he organized an exhibition at Galerie Le Barc de Boutteville in rue Le Pelletier in Paris, where sixteen paintings and a number of drawings were on show for a month.2525. See exhib. cat. Mannheim 1990, pp. 100, 292-293 (cf. for the address: FR b833). The collection had been in Paris for some time after Theo’s death, and he urged Jo van Gogh-Bonger to leave it in France because he believed that this would best serve the interests of Van Gogh’s reputation.2626. See Account book 2002, pp. 24-25; in 1891 Bernard also had photographs taken of twelve of Van Gogh’s works and marketed them as a set to generate money for an exhibition. See Larsson 1993, pp. 127-128.

Bernard was one of those who appreciated early on that the letters could help make Van Gogh’s artistic aspirations understandable. But he also recognized their intrinsic value as documents humains, and believed that a wider public might be interested in them. In the article in Les hommes d’aujourd’hui he observed that an edition of the letters he had received from Van Gogh ‘would have novelty and appeal’. By publishing excerpts from the letters, as he later explained, Bernard wanted ‘to try to make Vincent appreciated by revealing his spirit, his struggle, his life. There was nothing more powerful than his letters. After reading them, you would doubt neither his sincerity, nor his character, nor his originality; you would find everything there.’2727. Lettres à Bernard 1911, Introduction, pp. 40-41. The first four instalments, which appeared monthly from April to July, were taken from Van Gogh's letters to Bernard himself, who wrote in the introduction to the April issue: ‘He was the noblest human character one could meet: frank, open, alert to the possible, with a certain trace of comical mischievousness; an excellent friend, an implacable judge, utterly without egoism or ambition, as his so simple letters show, in which he is as much himself as in his countless canvases.’2828. Mercure de France 4 (April 1893), p. 329. Bernard’s introductions to this series and to the series of letters to Theo (see below) were reprinted in Lettres à Bernard 1911.

Bernard devoted a great deal of time and thought to the modest editing he had to do for the Mercure publication. A passage in a letter to Andries Bonger of 31 December 1892 gives us an insight into his difficulties: ‘I copied out part of the letters, it’s very time-consuming and fiddly work. I am often forced to complete unfinished sentences and to follow ideas through impenetrable mazes. At other times it’s as clear as water from a spring. What do you think of this idea, for example: Luther is the great light of the Middle Ages. Luther in the Middle Ages and an assertion of that kind, that could damage Vincent... Should such things be included? Tell me frankly what you think.’2929. Amsterdam, RPK, inv. no. F 735. Bernard, as this reveals, wanted to protect Van Gogh from his supposed mistakes or exaggerations, and in the Mercure version he consequently replaced Van Gogh’s ‘Middle Ages’ with ‘the Renaissance’.3030. Mercure de France 4 (May 1893), p. 20. In the Vollard edition (1911) Bernard decided on a different solution: there he reproduced the passage correctly, but added a note to the effect that he did not share Van Gogh’s views. See letter 632, n. 23.

Bernard selected five main themes from the correspondence: seventeenth-century Dutch painting, new painting, descriptions of Van Gogh’s work and progress, Van Gogh’s reactions to Bernard’s work, and his views on religion and society. The instalments were illustrated with works by Van Gogh, mainly letter sketches and drawings.

On a later occasion – the publication of the integrated version in 1911 – he wrote that in selecting the extracts he had refrained from including personal issues relating to himself or other people. ‘Rather than publishing all of them straightaway, it was necessary, so to speak, to extract only their essence, so that the desired goal might be attained through cautious contact between the public mind and Van Gogh’s mind. In publishing these fragments in the Mercure de France, I therefore took the position of reproducing nothing that could wound through coarseness of language, crudity of expression, of publishing nothing relating to myself, of giving only the initials of friends involved in our lives in those days.’3131. Lettres à Bernard 1911, Introduction, p. 41. And the extracts, presented in a fairly random order, do indeed reveal little if anything about private circumstances or intimacies; the scabrous tone in some of the letters is also avoided. Bernard did dare to include the following line: ‘Painting and loving women are not compatible; and that’s what’s really damned annoying’. However, the original text was a good deal earthier: ‘Painting and fucking a lot are not compatible; it weakens the brain, and that’s what’s really damned annoying’ (letter 628). Another and perhaps more insidious form of this exercise of discretion is that he twice edited out Signac’s name because there was bad blood between them.

The letters to Bernard were followed by excerpts from letters to Theo: nine instalments in the period August 1893 to February 1895, with a final flourish delayed to August 1897. Bernard was also responsible for this series. He had borrowed the letters from Theo’s widow, who also paid for the plates for the illustrations to the letters, as her account book reveals.3232. See Account book 2002, Introduction, p. 20, and p. 94 (they cost f 51.70½). On 28 June 1896, when Bernard, who was in Cairo at the time, mailed back these letters, he wrote to her: ‘pray God that they may be published properly one day, in their entirety’.3333. FR b830-831. Alfred Vallette, the publisher of the Mercure de France, asked Jo’s brother Andries, who was still living in Paris at the time, to translate the extracts that had been selected from the Dutch letters into French.

The Mercure publications had the desired effect. In the first place they brought Van Gogh’s letters to the attention of the magazine’s international, modern-minded readership, among them artists and literary figures, art lovers and collectors. The prestige of the magazine meant that the letters were also mentioned in articles and magazine reviews in the European press reporting on special events in the art world.3434. One example is the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, which commented on the Mercure publication in May 1893 (8, 11 and 21 May). Het Vaderland did something similar in August 1893, when the Van Nu en Straks publication came out (4, 19, 22, 24, 25 and 26 August 1893). This brought the letters to a still wider public in a very short time. The extracts in the Mercure were rapidly translated into other languages. The poet Johannes Jørgensen, for instance, published several letters to Bernard in the Danish magazine Politiken.3535. Exhib. cat. Copenhagen 1984, p. 30. Young Danish artists and collectors showed an early interest in the Neo-Impressionists, not least because of Paul Gauguin’s links with their country. Gauguin’s wife Mette Gad was Danish, and the couple lived briefly in Copenhagen (1884-1885). However, Gauguin wanted to continue his artistic career in France and abandoned his family. Mette, who had contacts in artistic and aristocratic circles, promoted her husband’s work. See Wildenstein 2001, pp. 178-179. A full bibliography of letter translations in this period does not exist, but there can be no doubt that translations of the Mercure letters were also published elsewhere. They certainly were in Germany.

The name Cassirer is involved in the early dissemination of Van Gogh’s name in Germany in two ways. In 1898 the cousins Paul and Bruno Cassirer established an art gallery and publishing house. They parted company in 1901, and from that moment on Paul, the art dealer, was one of the driving forces behind the spread of Van Gogh’s work in Germany, while Bruno, the publisher, did the same for the letters.3737. See Feilchenfeldt 1988, Feilchenfeldt in exhib. cat. Essen 1990 (Dutch edition), and Brühl 1991, pp. 334-336. From 1902 Bruno Cassirer published the magazine Kunst und Künstler; edited by the critic Emil Heilbut; it focused on fine and applied art.3838. Brühl 1991, pp. 246-286. In the 1904 and 1905 issues he published a series ‘Aus der Korrespondenz Vincent van Goghs’ – German translations of extracts of letters that had been in Mercure de France and Van Nu en Straks. They were illustrated with letter sketches, drawings and paintings.3939. In 1914, however, it was Paul Cassirer who published the Briefe an seinen Bruder; see 1914: Jo van Gogh-Bonger published Vincent van Gogh. Brieven aan zijn broeder.

Kunst und Künstler reached the specific group of people interested in art, but in 1906 Bruno Cassirer built the bridge to a much wider, more general readership by collecting the translated letters in a separate book, Vincent van Gogh, Briefe, which was essentially an anthology of the (late) correspondence. The edition contained twelve illustrations of works and was edited by the translator Margarete Mauthner, who was also a collector and owned several drawings and paintings by Van Gogh – all from the artist’s period in the South of France. More than ten reprints appeared in various forms (differing numbers of illustrations, de luxe or cheaper book designs and the like).4040. Briefe 1906. 31,000 copies were sold in 1932. Cf. B. Plachta, ‘Franz Kafka reads the letters of Vincent van Gogh’, Variants 2-3 (2004), pp. 173-194, esp. p. 176. Bruno Cassirer and his publishing activities thus made a considerable contribution to the letters’ fame in Germany, the country where Van Gogh struck the greatest chord in the decades after 1900.4141. Needless to say, these published letters alone were not responsible for Van Gogh’s great success in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century. But it is beyond our present scope to explore, for instance, Paul Cassirer’s activities, the Secession exhibitions in Berlin (the first with Van Goghs in 1901), the immense influence of Julius Meier-Graefe’s writings about Van Gogh or the prestigious Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912.

It is conceivable that the series of Mercure publications prompted the idea of publishing the letters to Van Rappard, who died in 1892.4343. It is not clear who actually owned the letters at that time. At some point they came into the possession of the man of letters Johan de Meester (exhib. cat. Amsterdam 1974, p. 15), but the January issue of the series in Kritiek van Beeldende Kunsten en Kunstnijverheid discussed below acknowledged ‘support from several others’ and thanked Van Rappard’s widow for her ‘kindness’ (p. 228). On 18 January 1936 Johan de Meester’s widow Annie de Meester-Obreen informed V.W. van Gogh that ‘I myself wrote a short piece for one of the American papers that were interested, explaining how the letters came into my husband’s hands and who Johan de Meester and Anton van Rappard were’ (FR b6996-3). They appeared in 1905 in the second year of publication of Kritiek van Beeldende Kunsten en Kunstnijverheid. The monthly magazine printed a selection of the Van Rappard letters in every issue that year, occasionally accompanied by a brief discussion of Van Gogh. The August issue was actually devoted to him in its entirety and included a lengthy overview by Albert Plasschaert, the magazine’s senior editor. The letters were not illustrated.

More widespread recognition of Van Gogh’s work came about later in the Netherlands than in other countries, even though exhibitions had been staged in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague soon after his death. In contrast to the situation in Germany, it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Dutch part of his oeuvre that won the greatest acclaim. Many early works that had never been exhibited before were shown at three sensational exhibitions in 1903 at the Kunstzalen Oldenzeel in Rotterdam.4444. For these exhibitions at the Oldenzeel gallery see: Op de Coul 2002. The publication of the Van Rappard letters in Kritiek van Beeldende Kunsten en Kunstnijverheid coincided with an important moment in the Dutch reception of Van Gogh – the major retrospective in the summer of the same year in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. There were some 450 works on show, both drawings and paintings, most of them from Jo van Gogh-Bonger’s collection. The introduction to the catalogue was written by her second husband, Johan Cohen Gosschalk, who also quoted from the letters and printed a series of excerpts at the back of the book.4545. Exhib. cat. Amsterdam 1905. Cohen Gosschalk included passages both from the letters to Theo and from the letters to Bernard that had appeared in the Mercure de France. En passant he also quoted from a draft letter to Paul Gauguin (pp. 50-51). See RM23.