Vincent van Gogh [antikvár]

PREFACE by ihe nephew of Vincent van Gogh What a fascinating book ! This handsome work will surely delight a very large number of readers; for more than iifty years of enthusiastic and detailed research are reflected in this thorough and copiously illustrated biography. 1 have introduced many of Marc Edo Tralbaut's books in the past. But when my old friend asked me to write a preface for his latest work, I hesitated at first—and for good reasons. An author should need no introduction when his books have been published in many languages and he is well known in Europe and America, when he has received many honours— the Visser-Neelandia Prize being only the latest—and when a professor of Jean Leymarie's stature has dubbed him "The Learned Van Goghian". Tralbaut's reputation alone is enough to guarantee the value of this work. But I hesitated only for a moment, for 1 realized that it was imperative that 1 should mention something of which the reader might well be unaware. In 1966 Marie-Louise Theyssens, a student at the Antwerp Institute of Librarians, Archivists and Museum StalTs, submitted a bibliographical thesis on the works of Marc Edo Tralbaut. Her bibliography listed twenty-five books, about one thousand two hundred and fifty articles appearing in newspapers and journals, and six plays, one of which was about my Uncle Vincent and was entitled In the Shadow of the Crows. When Miss Theyssens was being awarded her degree, M. Prosper Arents, one of the members of the examining board, and the author of the best life of Rubens, described Dr Tralbaut as "The Balzac of Art-Historians", as a tribute to the wealth and diversity of his writings on the subject. The reader will realize now why I thought it needless to offer any introduction to the latest publication in Marc Edo Tralbaut's massive work on Vincent van Gogh—he has already written more than a hundred books or articles on the subject. Indeed my late wife used to say of him: "Tralbaut has been bitten by the van Gogh bug !" It was when Marc Edo Tralbaut was a student in 1917 that he first read Vincent's letters to my father which had been published by my mother in 1914. From then onwards he devoted his life to analyzing every aspect of the painter's life and work. There are strange coincidences in the lives of some men. One should not attach too much importance to them, let alone consider them as acts of providence, but sometimes they are worth mentioning. Here are two which the reader will certainly appreciate. My friend's great-grandfather was a shipowner with a fleet of more than sixty barges and canal-boats. He gave each of his sons two boats when they married. The boats he gave to Louis Tralbaut, the author's father, were called Le Pays du Froment (Wheatlands) and Théo, although there was nobody of this name in the family. Thus it came about that Marc Edo Tralbaut was born on the Théo at two o'clock in the morning on Friday January 3, 1902.