A REVEALING AND MOVING LIFE OF VINCENT VAN GOGH, HIS SEARCH FOR LOVE AND DEVASTATING ROMANTIC LOSSES A heartless prostitute named Sien; shy, spinsterish Margot Begemann; a widowed first cousin Kee; 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. Vincent described this romantic yearning, as art historian Derek Fell recounts in this remarkable biography, in his correspondence not only in the famous letters that Vincent exchanged with his brother, Theo, but also in heartfelt missives to his aggrieved mother, his loyal sister Wil, and his devoted sister-in-law, Johanna. Focusing especially on van Gogh's letters to these steadfast women in his life, Fell examines Vincent's interior life and poignantly documents his emotional decline. For Vincent shared with them and Theo the hopes that he placed in his relationships with the women he loved and the crushing disappointments that seemed inevitably to ensue. Indeed, the blows that Vincent's psyche suffered-like the dramatic showdown with Kee's father in which the devastated Vincent held his hand in a lantern's flame-continually undermined his self-worth and led to his psychological unraveling. In a sensitive reading and astute interpretation of van Gogh's own written words, Fell illuminates the passions that at once commanded Vincent's genius and tormented his heart. Fell sheds bold, new light, too, on the circumstances that spiraled the artist downward into depression and finally to despair, as he explores van Gogh's tumultuous friendship with Gauguin and the catastrophic misapprehension, two days before Christmas, that cost Vincent his ear, his sanity, and, within two haunted years, his life.