There is a rapid sketch by Vincent van Gogh of a sunny square in the south of France where a man is waiting expectantly by an open door. In the distance, a steam train is arriving, puffing smoke into the sky. It is just a simple drawing of a corner of Arles in 1888. But when we realize that the man is the artist himself, and that the sketch is part of a happy invitation to his brother in Paris, it brings the drawing to life. This then is the yellow house where he could "live and breathe, think and paint." Behind the green shutters is the room he decorated with a vase of sunflowers. Here he painted some of his greatest works before illness led to the clinic in Saint-Remy.
Although van Gogh is celebrated for his oil paintings, drawing was an essential part of his artistic expression, and is valued in its own right. A new exhibition of drawings from the archives of the Van Gogh and H.W. Mesdag Museums in Holland has opened at the Yasuda Kasai Museum of Art in Shinjuku. It opens up the private, extraordinary world of a great artist.
The experience is quite different from an exhibition of finished oil paintings. "The drawings speak so directly to us," says Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum. "They have an intimacy that paintings can lack."