Anthon van Rappard

For about five years, Anthon van Rappard was one of Vincent van Gogh's closest friends. They met as students in Brussels around 1880, and they wrote to each other all through Van Gogh's early Dutch years, the period when he was first teaching himself to be an artist. Those letters survive, and they are one of the richest records we have of how Van Gogh thought and worked before he ever reached Paris.

Van Rappard came from a wealthy Utrecht family and had a real feeling for the poor and the working people he drew, blind men in an institution, brickmakers, factory hands.

The friendship broke in 1885. Van Gogh sent him a print of his first big composition, The Potato Eaters, a dark scene of peasants at supper, and Van Rappard wrote back sharply criticising the drawing in it. Van Gogh was wounded, the letters cooled, and the two never fully repaired it. Van Rappard kept working in the Dutch realist manner until his own early death in 1892, at 33.