The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Money arrives in an envelope from a brother in Paris, and the painter who opens it answers with a letter that describes, in words, a canvas Theo has not yet seen: the exact yellow of a wheatfield at noon, why the sower has to stand against it, how much light is left in the day. Vincent van Gogh wrote hundreds of these, from the coal pits of the Borinage where he had preached and failed, from the yellow house at Arles, from an asylum window, and when the words ran out he drew in the margin.