He moved to a rural town called Nuenen to live with his parents and begin learning his craft. He decided to become an artist instead, as he felt he wanted to leave “a certain souvenir” to humankind “in the form of drawings or paintings, not made to comply with this or that school but to express genuine human feeling.” Van Gogh had been all set for a deeply religious life but, aged 26, he transferred his religious zeal to art. The early sketchbooks bespeak Van Gogh’s religious upbringing and how he transformed that spiritual intensity into a creative practice. Thankfully, Molly Oldfield brings this hidden gem to light in The Secret Museum ( public library) - the same magnificent tome that gave us the surprisingly dark story of how the Nobel Prize was born - which culls sixty never-before-seen “treasures too precious to display” from the archives and secret storage locations of some of the world’s top cultural institutions.Īt Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, Oldfield finds the artist’s seven surviving sketchbooks, only four with their original cover, meticulously stored in the prints and drawings archive. In an 1882 letter to his brother Theo, he wrote: “My sketchbook shows that I try to catch things ‘in the act.’” This private record of the artist’s genius, however, has remained obscured from public view. Given my soft spot for the sketchbooks of famous artists and private notebooks of great creators, I was delighted to discover that, unbeknownst to most, Vincent van Gogh kept one.

The Secret Museum by Molly Oldfield