HAIKUS FOR VINCENT VAN GOGH III

This bilingual haiku collection introduces haikus featuring the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853-July 29,1890). Van Gogh was born in Zundert, southern Netherlands, where his father was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. After a stint at the art dealer Goupil & Cie, run by Uncle Cent (as Vincent van Gogh II was referred to), in The Hague, London, and Paris, as a substitute teacher in London, and as an acting missionary in Belgium, van Gogh tried to become a painter and studied art.
Then in 1886, in order to study painting in earnest, van Gogh moved to Paris, where his younger brother Theodorus van Gogh (Theo, May 1, 1857-January 25, 1891) was an art dealer at Goupil & Cie. There, he met a plethora of prominent Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters and eagerly absorbed their techniques.
After trials and tribulations for two years, van Gogh established his own hatching style, which was marked by a curvy, parallel brushstroke and vivid colors. Finally in 1888, he moved to Arles in southern France, which he considered the "Japan of Europe."
The rest is history. Van Gogh made many of his most famous paintings in Arles and its suburbs, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Overall, within a ten-year period of active painting until his death in July 1890, he left us with as many as 1,032 drawings and about 861 oil paintings, as well as 144 watercolors and 10 lithographs.

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This haiku anthology traces the extraordinary life of van Gogh along with his impressive art works, and with haikus as a homage. Specifically, this collection presents 54 selected works van Gogh made in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and 54 corresponding haikus newly written by this author, with appropriate season words per the Japanese calendar with annotations.