Admired for his light-filled landscapes as much as for his impassioned portraits, Vincent van Gogh was an impetuous painter with a cavalier disregard for convention when it suited him. At the same time he was a sophisticated thinker, fluent in several languages, trained as an art dealer. Though often plagued by several doubts about his work, he was immensely ambitious and ultimately had a clear sense of his oeuvre as a whole and the place it was to take in the history of art. Such apparently contradictory positions define much of Van Gogh’s live and artistic output. They are also at the basis of this volume which explores Van Gogh’s oeuvre through two fundamental aspects of his artistic identity: his love for the countryside as a stable, never changing environment and his attachment to the city as the centreof fast moving, modern life.