Knowing next to nothing about Van Gogh before reading his biography, I am struck by what a great reader and collector of images he was, how pictures and words were married together for him. (He would’ve been a great cartoonist, I think.)
This passage From Naifeh & Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life describes the process of collecting and collage at work, how images and words are combined and transformed in the artist’s mind:
The consoling images that Vincent took from literature and art underwent a similar transformation as he reimagined them—simplified and intensified them—in pursuit of his heart’s elusive comfort. He changed the names of poems and paintings. He disregarded dissonant characters and authorial views. Like the illustrated books of his childhood, he grafted words to images and images to words, insistently reshaping both to his narrative of reassurance. He paired pictures with poetry, sometimes transcribing lines from literature and scripture directly onto his prints to create collages of consolation. This process of layering words and images so gratified his manic imagination and his search for comfort that it would become his principal way of seeing and coping with the world.
Collage is something he learned as a child:
Under their mother’s tutelage, all the Van Gogh children mastered the parlor arts of collage, sketching, and painting, in order to decorate and personalize the gifts and notes they relentlessly exchanged. A simple box might come adorned with a bouquet of painted flowers; a transcribed poem, with a cutout wreath. They illustrated favorite stories, marrying words to images in the manner of the emblem books widely used to teach children moral lessons.
Related: glue one thing to another