A widowed first cousin, Kee; a prostitute named Slen; shy, spinsterish Margot Bergemann; the seventeen-year-old peasant girl Stien de Groot - to all of them Vincent van Gogh would declare his love. In none of them would he find the wife to seal the emotional bond that he so perfectly imagined and ardently desired.
In the artist's correspondence to his brother Theo, to his aggrieved mother, his loyal sister Wil, and his devoted sister-in-law Johanna, Vincent opened his heart. In this penetrating book Derek Fell focuses on van Gogh's letters to these three steadfast women he called his sisters, and in poignantly documenting the artist's emotional decline examines Vincent's interior life and the downward course of his journey into madness.
