The Van Gogh Letters Archive

[retsuko]

For all those who are interested in art, Van Gogh, the artistic process, and the layout and use of a really spectacular web page, I urge you to check out:

http://vangoghletters.org/vg/

The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam has scanned and annotated all 902 of Vincent Van Gogh's letters and put them up (for free!) on this wonderful site. Each letter has been translated, scanned, and annotated with both comments and the relevant artwork Van Gogh speaks about. You can sort the letters by date or recipient, or search by subject matter. You can also modify the way the letters are displayed on the page. Simply fabulous! I wish I had hours and hours to spend looking these. The sketches included in the letters are also available for viewing by themselves, or as part of the larger letter. Definitely worth a look for those of us who can't buy the six-volume book or travel to Amsterdam.

Comments

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

It says something about my state of mind right now that my most immediate reaction was not "squee!," but curiosity about what kind of metadata they're using, even though Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists in the whole world.

What an incredibly cool digitization project. I'd love to know more about how they handled it!