Thirst for life

"I experienced the true painter in me only when I was missing teeth and breath."

The story of the delusional Dutchman Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is the tragedy of a brooding genius whose tenacity went far beyond tolerable limits. When he left his position in his uncle's gallery and developed his own talent as a lay confessor to Belgian miners, his calvary began to be written, framed by incomprehension and the struggle for bare existence. He forgot that even an artist who creates out of pure conviction - in his own way and regardless of contemporary taste - must be alive for something. He did not intend to compromise on this, and was therefore dependent for life on the charity of his brother Theo, even after they left the pragmatic Netherlands for France together. In the land promised to painters, Vincent first sought truth in art with the bohemians of Paris over absinthe, and then discovered the potential of colour in the light of Provence. But he underestimated the treacherous shadows that turn passion into obsession...

Stone's account of the decade-long creative struggle of the post-impressionist who was at the birth of modern painting looks into a tortured soul driven to the desert of madness. The American biographer's masterpiece depicts van Gogh's unfulfilled loves, dramatic friendships and the pressure of inner demons that the hermit cannot resist. He can only paint. In the French south alone, over a thousand paintings emerged from this glut, of which only one was sold during the painter's lifetime, but the next decade proved how cruelly wrong the snobbish connoisseurs had been.

Today, an entire museum is dedicated to van Gogh's legacy and hundreds of millions are paid for his paintings. Although he himself has paid the ultimate price for his hypersensitivity, the world has long acknowledged with humility that his canvases radiate an inner freedom so timeless that it leaves the audience breathless.

"The story of a burning force that torments the soul of a genius with the vigour of a mistral." - The New York Times

"An exceptional reading experience. The trauma of the misunderstood artist is presented with an enviable empathy that the painter's contemporaries were unfortunately mostly incapable of. " - Forum

"A novel as compelling as Vincent's canvas of Starry Night. Colourful, innovative and full of inner turmoil, who knows the direction and at the same time is the only support for the hero. The reader does not have to be a painter to sense how true this literary image is..." - lubymiczytać.pl

"A conscientious, considerate, yet sovereign portrait of a red-haired genius that even portraitists from the royal courts of the Renaissance would not be ashamed of. " - Saturday Review of Literature

He sat as if nailed, his burning eyes boring holes in the thin colour and the thin emotion. "Mine are better, " he said to himself. "Mine are truer, deeper. I'll say more with a carpenter's pencil than he will with a whole box of paint. It expresses the obvious. He finishes the job, but doesn't say anything. Why do they praise him so much and give him money and refuse me what would be enough for black bread and coffee? "(...) His hunger was more insistent than that which he had suffered last winter, when for many days he had subsisted on dry bread. He just needed to know and feel that there are other painters in the world, people like him, who struggle with the same technical problems and think in the same way. That there are people through whom the satisfaction of his efforts will be given, for they too show a serious interest in the alphabet of the painter's craft. - excerpt from the text