Page 490 - The Secret Museum

‘MY SKETCHBOOK SHOWS THAT I try to catch things “in the act”,’ wrote Vincent van

Gogh to his brother, Theo, in 1882. That is a little how I felt, 130 years later, looking
through four of the artist’s sketchbooks, in storage at the Van Gogh Museum, in
Amsterdam – as if I was catching him ‘in the act’ of creation.

There are seven of his sketchbooks in total in the museum, but only four with their
original covers. These four are stored in the prints and drawings archive. Van Gogh
carried each one in his pocket, at different times in his life.

Van Gogh had been all set for a deeply religious life but, aged 26, he transferred
his religious zeal to art. He decided to become an artist instead, as he felt he wanted
to leave ‘a certain souvenir’ to humankind ‘in the form of drawings or paintings, not

made to comply with this or that school but to express genuine human feeling’.
He moved to a rural town called Nuenen to live with his parents and begin

learning his craft. I was able to leaf through pages and pages of personal sketches and
observe van Gogh in the act of becoming an artist.

The first sketchbook has a royal blue, marbled inside cover and an empty pocket
at the back. 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. The painting once hung above the storage room,
upstairs in the gallery, but in 2002 it was stolen. Now the museum has no idea where
it is. They have only this pencil sketch – the only trace of a masterpiece that has now

disappeared.

Other pages of the Nuenen sketchbook contain images of the people and places of
Nuenen – people at work in the fields or weaving in workshops. In the faces of some
sketches I glimpsed the faces of the family in his first masterpiece, The Potato
Eaters. It felt very intimate to see the faces of people the artist lived amongst in such
a fragile, tangible form; they seemed more real to me in the pencil sketches – more
immediate – than in the paintings that hang in the galleries.

The second sketchbook has a black cover. Inside are more scenes of Nuenen, and
then glimpses of Antwerp, where van Gogh next went to live. There he visited a lot

of museums and indulged his new passion for Japanese woodblock prints. Van Gogh
would have felt he’d died and gone to heaven if he’d been let loose among the
Spaulding prints I saw in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In Antwerp, van Gogh became ill and run down, perhaps as a result of his diet, as
he lived almost entirely on bread, coffee and absinthe. So, in 1886, he moved to
Paris, to live with his brother. It was here that he filled the third sketchbook. It is
rectangular, far wider than the others, and it has a linen cover. It’s stuffed full of
drawings of things he saw in Paris – faces, and sculptures in museums, as well as

female nudes who posed for him. In one pencil sketch, I recognized the windmill at
Montmartre – a rural village at the time – which appears in lots of his paintings. Also
in this book are sketches of flowers, Theo van Gogh’s laundry list and a letter from