Lust for Life

American author Irving Stone’s Lust for Life (1934) is a biographical novel based on the life of Vincent van Gogh, the great Dutch Impressionist painter. In writing the novel, Stone drew heavily on the more than 700 surviving letters between van Gogh and his beloved brother Theo; in the author’s own assessment, his story is “based 98 percent on documentary evidence.”

The novel is structured around the places of van Gogh’s life. It is divided into nine sections, each titled after its setting: London, the Borinage, Etten, The Hague, Paris, Arles, St. Remy, and Auvers. In each place, the artist learns something that feeds into his work. The book devotes many pages to the genesis of van Gogh’s most famous paintings, including Sunflowers, Bedroom in Arles, and Wheat Field with Crows.

Stone begins his story with Vincent’s teenage years. Vincent’s father is a predikant, a Dutch Calvinist minister, and his upbringing is strict and religious. During these years, he suffers the first of many unrequited passions, for a local girl, Ursula. With his family’s help, Vincent secures a position at an art dealer’s in London. His work goes well, and for a while, he is happy. However, he falls in love with his landlady’s daughter, Eugenie, and his proposal is rejected. He becomes depressed, taking comfort in religion.



Eventually, Vincent decides to become a Calvinist pastor. After failing the entrance exam, which would have allowed him to study Theology at university, Vincent is sent as a missionary to the deeply impoverished mining town of the Borinage in Belgium. The locals don’t take him seriously as an evangelist because he looks like a “madman,” and soon, instead of preaching, he is spending his time sketching the scenes and people around him, excited by the beauty he perceives amid the squalor. He gives away most of his salary to poor families, and he donates his comfortable rooms above the bakery to a homeless person, moving to an unheated hut. As a result, he is dismissed from his position, for ‘undermining the dignity of the priesthood.”

Back in Etten, Vincent conceives another unrequited passion, for Cornelia “Kee” Vos-Stricker. When he proposes, she responds: “No, nay, never.” Later, he tries to visit her at her parents’ home in Amsterdam. When she refuses to see him he thrusts his hand into a lamp flame, begging to be allowed to see Kee just for as long as he can keep his hand there. For a time, Vincent sets up house with a former prostitute, Sien Hoornik, and her children, but his parents pressure him to end the relationship. Vincent begins working with oil paints. At this stage, his palette is dominated by the gloomy greys and browns favored in Dutch painting of the era.

With the encouragement and financial support of his brother Theo, an increasingly successful art dealer who believes in the value of his brother’s work, Vincent moves to Paris. There he meets the great artists of his day: Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, and Gauguin, as well as writers and thinkers. In conversations and arguments with these figures, Vincent begins to formulate his own theory of art: “It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.” His work explodes with color.



His relationships continue to be a source of trouble, and Vincent moves to the country town of Arles, seeking refuge from his Paris lifestyle, but also craving sunlight and its colors. Theo again helps him to make the move, providing continuous emotional support in his letters. In Arles, Vincent begins to paint incessantly, embracing the yellows that would become his trademark: “As the summer advanced, everything became burnt up. He saw about him nothing but old gold, bronze, and copper, covered by a greenish azure sky of blanched heat. There was sulfur yellow on everything the sunlight hit…He became a blind painting machine, dashing off one sizzling canvas after another without even knowing what he did.”

Vincent pleads with Gauguin to join him in Arles, which he does, but when Gauguin refuses to treat Vincent as an equal, their relationship deteriorates. The troubled friendship and Vincent’s creative frenzy takes its toll. The artist suffers a breakdown and cuts off his own ear, delivering it to a prostitute at a nearby brothel who had once commented on his ears’ well-formed shape. Vincent is hospitalized. Theo rushes to the hospital to be at his side.

After a period of intense depression, Vincent voluntarily confines himself at the insane asylum at St Remy. He paints from memory and from earlier sketches.



Released from the asylum, Vincent spends the last years of his life painting in Auvers, still suffering from depression. At the age of thirty-seven, he shoots himself in the chest. He survives the initial wound. Theo rushes to his side again, finding him alive and apparently well. Soon afterward, Vincent begins to decline and dies.

Lust for Life was Stone’s first successful foray into biographical fiction: he would become best known for his novel based on the life of Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961). In 1956, Lust for Life was adapted into a film of the same title, starring Kirk Douglas as van Gogh. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards and won one.