100 books like The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh

Break of Day is a uniquely beautiful book, short and elegant. It's about the solace Colette's house and garden in the South of France provided her after a broken marriage. No truer book has been written about that part of France, and how that land can ravish a visitor. I thought of it often when I was writing my own book. Colette had a house in the hills above St.-Tropez, and she writes about gardening, the movements of the day, her animals, the people who come and go, and the delicious, sensual tastes of that part of the world. Break of Day is also an elegy to the memory of her mother, whose strength guides the writer through her exquisite melancholy. Colette writes with a pen dipped in sun, oil, sweat, and salt. 

No one wrote about the South of France with more affection and understanding than Marcel Pagnol. He was a novelist, playwright, director, and memoirist. Pagnol’s family had a small house in the hills near Marseille where they spent summers. His book, My Father’s Glory, is about those months Pagnol spent there as a child and about his family, mostly his father. (The companion book, My Mother’s Castle, concerns his mother more.) The story of his aunt’s sweet, delicate courtship with his eventual uncle is worth reading the book alone. If you’re like me, you will come away from reading this book wishing you’d been part of Pagnol’s kind and joyous family and his life in this little corner of France. The good news is that with this book, you very nearly are.

M.F.K. Fisher was not only one of our greatest food writers, she was one of our greatest writers, period. Fisher lived for long periods in France, and the result of two of these sojourns is Two Towns in Provence, which is about Marseille and Aix-en-Provence. These two iconic towns are a mere forty miles apart in distance but worlds apart in temperament, character, and spirit. Fisher captures both of their personalities with her exquisite prose, guided by her sympathy and love for these cities and their people. She is especially wonderful at capturing Marseille, a city that has been called mysterious, even unknowable. You cannot have a better guide to two of France’s most renowned and remarkable cities.

An absolute classic, this book has had two subsequent editions since its first publication in 1957, each with a new foreword and epilogue. It depicts the pre-Peter Mayle Provence, primitive and resourceful, naïve and worldly wise, generous and hard-working, that Wylie discovered when he spent a year observing life in the village of Roussillon (disguised as Peyrane) in 1950-51. A typical Provençal village, Peyrane—population just over 300, one café-tabac, one hotel, two general stores, and one butcher—was still largely self-sufficient in terms of food, many families owning chickens and rabbits and cultivating a garden. Wylie writes with humour, warmth, and genuine affection for its inhabitants; I loved his account of the firemen's banquet, the attention to detail in the planning process, the banquet itself, and the post-banquet meditations.

I adore David Hockney. He draws so beautifully, and in so many different ways, and is always inventive in his art-making. He makes me see more through his art and was a major inspiration for me when I was starting out as an editorial illustrator years ago. This book is a 2020 pandemic conversation between Hockney, now living in Normandy, and his good friend, the art critic Martin Gayford in the UK. It really speaks to the devotion that artists have to observing life and creating something beautiful from it. I love the joy Hockney brings to his work and see that as a powerful energy to create from.

Sadly, when asked about the artist, most people describe Vincent as the man who chopped off his own ear. I hate that they do.

This book though is neither gratuitous nor indulgent. Instead, it offers a detailed, well-researched, and intelligent response to the question - Why did Van Gogh cut off his ear? There has been much speculation about the events that led to Vincent delivering his ear to a maid at a brothel in Arles.

This book is essential reading for any who wishes to open conversations about Vincent’s motivations and the happenings that led to that gruesome act on a specific day in December.

Martin Bailey is an expert on all things Van Gogh, and any of his books could have been recommended.

This one though - if we are learning about influences that have shaped and guided and disconcerted Vincent - has to be considered. To know the artist is to understand the numerous homes and landscapes that have shaped and influenced both him and his art. In an era when people rarely left the area where they were born, Van Gogh was both a traveller and unsettled.

This book made me truly consider what that might actually mean.

How can travel help us find the good life? The Art of Travel asks this question of artists such as Edward Hopper and Vincent van Gogh, with profound and amusing results. Why can anticipating travel be more pleasant than actually going away? What is the lure of the Bahamas, of the ‘exotic’, of open deserts? Throughout, De Botton invites us to pay better attention to the world around us. I especially enjoy his musings on the profundities of travel—on waiting at Heathrow airport, circling ring-roads, and dried ketchup of motorway service stations.

Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger fascinates me.

Her existence as an artist’s sister-in-law, art dealer’s wife, widow, and mother overshadowed her key contribution to the reputation building she undertook for the van Gogh family. I wanted to understand how Johanna and Theo began their relationship. I needed to understand why Johanna, after Vincent’s death, became obsessed with providing the artist’s work with the recognition it failed to attract in his lifetime.

I was thrilled to discover this now out-of-print book. It includes translations of letters exchanged between Johanna and Theo. It provides a stunning platform to voice the bond, love, and the intimacy that the couple gifted each other in their too-brief time together.

This is one of the most endearing and unaffected love stories.

Picture book biographies need to narrow their focus on a subject, and I love the way the author achieves this. She could have written about Van Gogh’s life in general, but she used the refrain “Vincent can’t sleep” to describe his childhood, schooling, boring jobs, and finally becoming an artist. Insomnia led to his most well-known painting, “The Starry Night.”

I also admire how gently she portrayed his mental illness by emphasizing his quest to find the colors of the night. Lean prose contrasts neatly with Van Gogh’s free-wheeling brushstrokes, richly illuminated by Grandpré’s sweeping illustrations.