giovedì 3 ottobre 2013
Did
you know Vincent van Gogh kept a sketchbook? Several of them, in fact.
For years, seven of them were kept at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum,
hidden away in the institution's archives. Now, they've been unveiled
for all the world to see in Molly Oldfield's The Secret Museum.
The first sketch in the Van Gogh booklet pictured above is of a church in Neunan, The Netherlands.
Secret Museum comes to our attention via Brain Pickings' Maria Popova,
who harbors the best kind of obsession with the scrawls and doodles of
history's greatest minds. Oldfield's book, she says, provides a
fascinating look at Van Gogh's life and his development as an artist –
that they contain within their pages the seeds of inspiration for some
of his greatest work.
Expand
"The
first sketchbook has a royal blue, marbled inside cover and an empty
pocket at the back," writes Oldfield in her description of Van Gogh's
drawings. "The first image he sketched in it was a church in Nuenen. He
later painted this church in View of the Sea at Scheveningen and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen. [Pictured at left.]"
In the
final sketchbook, rough depictions of sunflowers channel Van Gogh's
unmistakable eye for natural forms; though, as Oldfield notes, when he
drew them, Van Gogh was about as far from famous as a person could be.
Having
never sold a painting in his life, at that moment, Van Gogh would never
have conceived of a time when his sunflowers would be instantly
recognized across the planet."
Just beautiful. We'd love to flip through some of these sketchbooks ourselves.
Post
