Bookishness and jottings

The Telegraph explores Vincent Van Gogh's bookishness.

As a new exhibition at Tate Britain will reveal, Van Gogh’s passion for Dickens, along with other British writers such as Shakespeare, John Bunyan, John Keats, Thomas Carlyle, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, not only gave Van Gogh spiritual comfort but set light to his imagination and invigorated his social conscience.
“His interest in literature gives us a view of Van Gogh that goes beyond the figure of the tormented artist,” says curator Carol Jacobi. “Instead, he seems intellectually curious, connected to the things going on around him, synthesising books, images and real life in a way that would become key to his art. There was no line in his head between looking and reading.” (Lucy Davies)

Many years ago we highlighted the Brontë mentions in his letters.

AnneBrontë.org posts about Jottings on Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell by W.P.P., which was published before Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë.