When Vincent van Gogh wrote about books, he did not write like a reader.
He wrote like a man holding on.
Reading, for him, was not leisure.
It was respiration.
Among the names that recur in his letters—Dickens, Balzac, Zola—Shakespeare stands apart. Not as a dramatist, not as a literary monument, but as a presence. Vincent did not admire Shakespeare. He endured him. The way one endures weather.
After laying down Shakespeare’s book, he would turn to a blade of grass, a pine branch, an ear of corn, to calm himself. The reading was antagonising; contemplation became his way of easing the post-reading aura. He shifted human infinitude into the anatomy of the mundane.
Shakespeare appears in Vincent’s letters not as theatre, but as exposure. Not plot, not craft—but states of being. Grief without rescue. Madness without reason. Guilt without exit. Vincent recognized something familiar here: an art that does not tidy life, does not soften it, does not offer correction.
He distrusted polish. Anything too finished felt dishonest to him. Refinement without pain smelled false. What he sensed in Shakespeare was the opposite—rawness that had not been sanded down. King Lear does not become wiser in madness; he fractures. Hamlet does not resolve doubt; he lives inside it. Macbeth is not redeemed by remorse; he is eaten by it. These are not arcs. They are climates.
A painter reading a playwright seems an odd alignment. Yet Vincent read Shakespeare as he looked at peasants and fields—without hierarchy. Just as worn boots could hold as much truth as a cathedral, Shakespeare’s figures were not elevated beings but recognizably human: excessive, fearful, uncontained. Shakespeare did not arrange life into lessons. He allowed contradiction to remain alive. For Vincent, this was moral courage.
His own life sharpened this recognition. Poverty. Illness. Rejection. Loneliness. These made him impatient with art that merely pleased. He needed art that stood beside suffering. Shakespeare did not console him. He accompanied him. In that sense, Shakespeare stood closer than many painters. He understood how darkness moves inside the chest—how thought itself can wound.
There was also a technical kinship. Shakespeare’s language is not ornamental; it is bodily. Storms enter the mind. Blood speaks. Sleep refuses entry. Vincent responded to this because his seeing was physical, almost painful. He painted as if the world pressed too hard against the eyes. Shakespeare’s words pressed the same way—on the inner vision.
This may be why Vincent grouped Shakespeare with novelists rather than poets. He did not read him as verse but as lived density. Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac—these were artists who entered the street, the family quarrel, the broken worker, the failing father. They did not escape the world. They stayed.
Seen this way, Vincent’s paintings begin to resemble soliloquies. The sunflowers are not decoration; they are excess speaking. The crows over wheat are not symbols; they are mental weather. Like Shakespeare’s characters, they do not explain themselves. They simply exist.
Vincent did not read Shakespeare to learn how to write.
He read him to remember how to look.
To look without evasion.
To accept that art need not heal or resolve.
It only needs to remain truthful.
In that shared refusal to lie, a painter and a playwright—separated by centuries—recognized each other.

This ekphrastic prose poem is from my book Photonic Postcard. It was written in response to a Vincent’s painting—listening not to its form, but to the silence it leaves behind.

Vincent is Peasant Painter

Vincent wants to tag himself nowadays as a peasant painter, just wants to paint them in a mellifluous mood but his masterstrokes betray him as some are strips upon wounds. Wisps of hair are drooping beneath the black bonnet of a woman because, beguiling, butterflies are fluttering in the stomach as procurers of the Netherlands are hungry. Black creek sheepishly emerges beneath the kneel of the nasal mountain, “puffing up sunken cheeks”, but it seems Vincent has not gone berserk yet and, whenever he is tired, dark circles of tumuli begin to engulf him in the infinite sleep, and whole pains of peasants begin to pour out of the ocular prism. They only open when Vincent sleeps!