Book excerpt: Rejected in their day by painters, critics, and collectors, the visions of Vincent Van Gogh now rank among the most beloved and influential works in the history of Western art. The artist sold only a single painting in his lifetime, despite an abundant oeuvre of more than 2,000 artworks. Today his paintings fetch tens of millions at auction, and visitors from around the world flock to Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum. The artist's life of grinding poverty, his severe mental illness, and the derision of his contemporaries combined to form a romantic ideal of the tortured artist. Twenty-three years after Van Gogh's suicide, in the wake of his slowly growing fame, the painter's sister published this memoir. An intimate view of the artist's life, art, and philosophy, the book is illustrated with reproductions of several of Van Gogh's most characteristic works, including portraits and landscapes.