A heartless prostitute named Sien; shy, spinsterish Margot Bergemann; the 17-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 he so ardently desired. Vincent described this romantic yearning not only in the famous letters that he exchanged with his brother, his aggrieved mother, his loyal sister, and his devoted sister-in-law. Fell examines Vincent's interior life and documents his emotional decline. Indeed, the blows that Vincent's psyche suffered led to his psychological unraveling. Fell sheds new light, too, on van Gogh's friendship with Gauguin and the catastrophic misapprehension that cost Vincent his ear, his sanity, and, within two haunted years, his life. Color illus.