Thank you to NetGalley, author and the publisher for an eARC.

A quick life summary and journey to how we know of the painter Vincent Van Gogh. It is not detailed but nicely done. This is something you can read if you want to refresh your memory on life of the famous painter. I personally really enjoyed this one.

“Vincent painted despite his illness, not because of it” this line really stood out to me. I feel like a lot of people relate his struggle with mental illness with his art and romanticise it. I think it’s important to remember that even though his struggle was genuinely painful it still didn’t define him or his love for painting.


Moreover, I’m glad more people are talking about the woman behind his success. I’m surprised it took them long enough.
Plus it’s no shocker that a woman is behind all that because there is no way a man from 1800’s would’ve read his letters and conveyed his feelings through them and related it with his art. Only a woman is capable of such depth.

Lastly. I find it so wholesome that all of this happened because of love.

The whole thing looks like it was entirely created on MS Paint. It was so ugly. I'm so sorry. It also read like a 12 year old's school report. I was expecting more. Maybe not a full deep dive into his life, but more than a sentence here, a blurb there, and poorly drawn illustrations.

I love van gogh for a while, his painting is so touching, and significant... When i was younger in my class we study the life of vicent, and it was amazing and kinda sad to know the life beyond the artist. But with this comic we get to know vicent's family, and their history. I like that about the graphic, but the illustrations per say, is kinda poor... i wish that the artist could put a little more effort in the drawing

Vincent: A graphic biography tells the story of Vincent Van Gogh's life with his sister-in-law as narrator. I think the book did a great job with the illustrations. They were reminiscent of Vincent's style & fit it well.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel like the text was very engaging. Vincent Van Gogh is very interesting to me, but this was a very dry book & I feel like it could have been presented better. I usually finish a graphic novel in one sitting, but I kept putting this one down.

That being said, I did learn about Vincent's life story & still really enjoyed this book! Definitely check it out, if only for the illustrations.

Thanks to NetGalley, Simon Elliott, and Quarto Publishing for the chance to read & review!

I deeply adore the art off Vincent van Gogh and ever since learning a bit about his life I felt connected to him and his passion and vast sadness and unrest.

In this book the life of Vincent is retold through the voice of Jo, his sister-in-law, the wife of his favourite brother Theo, who died shortly after Vincent.
She was the one who then spent most of her life reading and translating the brothers‘ correspondences and taking care of Vincents paintings. After all he only sold one during his lifetime, through Jos and her son Vincents work then became very widely known and popular.

However, this graphic novel does a decent work of retelling his life, albeit leaving out the newer research and more recent view on the circumstances of his death. That problaby has not been a suicide but rather an unfortunate accident involving children playing with a gun and him covering them by saying it was a suicide attempt.

This is one thing that bothered me, but that‘s the only thing, regarding the content of the text.

What really striked as a wasted chance to make this a really great book is the quality of the drawings.
They feel lazy, stiff and mostly loveless. The only ones that were somewhat good were those depicting Vincents actual artworks. The rest has flat colours and thick linings that make most expressions weird.
The positioning of the drawings and the chosen subjects were good, the style just doesn‘t seem to fit.

Maybe my opinion and view on this is rooted in the love I have for Vincents story and art so that these drawings don‘t align with my expectations and other readers don‘t get bothered at all by them or maybe like the style.

Overall I would recommend reading it, if only for the concise summary of this artists life.

Vincent: A Graphic Biography is a simple, accessible introduction to the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh. The art is pleasant to look at without ever coming across as showy, and the prose makes the biographical information easily understandable for any reader. Though it was sometimes simplistic, Vincent: A Graphic Biography is an easy recommendation for anyone wishing to learn some "broad strokes" about the artist's life.

Vincent Van Gogh's life is depicted from his sister-in-law's perspective in this book. Unfortunately, the artwork is underwhelming, with the baby on page 5 resembling a goblin and everything else. The text is minuscule, making it difficult to read. Overall, my experience with the book was not enjoyable.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Quarto Publishing Group – White Lion for providing an ARC of this graphic novel for reviewers.

As many others, I love Van Gogh's works. And I believe that most of this love comes from knowing his story, we love stories of tormented geniuses who weren't appreciated in their times, so we enjoy reading about Vincent. But the most interesting thing in this comic book is not the Van Gogh's story but Jo's - his sister-in-law who spent her life promoting his works and making sure that they're understood. I wish her part of the story was longer.
Vincent: A Graphic Biography is a quick read telling us all the most important events in the painter's life, a big plus for me was not omitting Van Gogh's behavior towards women, there's no judging, but also the author didn't make him the perfect person who had some issues.
Overall a good comic book for people who enjoy art and Van Gogh, through the art could be a little better.

Vincent Van Gogh's biography from birth to death in graphics had as much info as any full length biography will have. I expected this to be similar to "Little Prime, BIG DREAMS" series which was more precise and intriguing than this. Maybe fans of Van Gogh's who are not interested in reading pages of biography would be interested in this but even then I did not find the graphics/illustrations to be justifying. Since the target audience is not very young, pictures could've been mature.
Thanks to NetGalley and Publisher for providing the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

2.75 stars
🌕🌕🌖

🎯 Target Audience
- Folks who want to know the details of Vincent Van Gogh’s life
- People who don’t like reading dry words and prefer graphics

🧠 My thoughts
The book was concise and packed with a good amount of details of Van Gogh’s life. It was a nice and informative book.

However, although it’s a graphic novel, everything felt super dry to me. There were also too many words with a small amount of graphics. One thing after another. The color palette that was chosen for this book was a bit too strong. There were mostly primary colors, no subtle hue, it just hurt my eyes.

Thanks NetGalley, Quarto Publishing Group, and the authors for a great advance copy of the book in exchange for my honest review!

This book has way too much content and history packed into it to be interesting or relevant to the grades I’m shopping for (K-8)

Even as an adult reader I found the history to be too much. It has nearly every move and detail of his life (and his extended family?) in this edition.

The text is small and the images seem off brand for this type of graphic novel. I wish it were more concise.

Not the graphic novel we needed, but the picture book we wanted.

This book tells the story of Vincent Van Gogh, the famous Dutch painter, who unfortunately died far too early in his life.
The book goes through his early life, his religious works, his loves, and his working life. Giving you as much details as possible.

The downside to the book is that it doesn't follow his art style at all, which I think was a missed opportunity for an Artist's Life graphic novel.
Unfortunately it also doesn't hit the Graphic Novel mark, as it is laid out more like a picture book.
There are also parts in the intro that kind of repeat themselves.

Those things aside, it's a beautiful book and a great story. It shows Vincent's life from start to finish - including all his turmoil and mishaps which history regularly forgets.

"Vincent: A Graphic Biography" by Simon Elliott tells the story of the life of Vincent Van Gogh from his childhood in the Netherlands all the way up to his tragic end. Rather uniquely this story is told through the eyes of his sister-in-law Johanna, who was married to his beloved brother Theo. The epilogue tells in more detail how Johanna played the key role in building Vincent's legacy after he and Theo both died within a few months of each other, leaving her an impoverished, widowed single mother with not much besides a huge collection of Vincent's art that she knew deserved more recognition and could eventually be worth a fortune. Learning more about her dedication to ensuring his art would live on was my favourite part of the book! I also enjoyed the way that the art style used throughout the book often mimicked Vincent's distinctive brushstrokes.

My only drawback with the reading experience is that I do wish that this book would have taken more advantage of exploring the graphic novel format to have comic-strip storytelling with dialogue bubbles etc. This is more of a heavily illustrated biography in that each page has a few essay-esque paragraphs of Vincent's story and is accompanied by corresponding illustrations.

Despite the colourful artwork potentially appealing to children, I would not recommend this to an audience any younger than high school age because of the frank descriptions and illustrations of Vincent's mental health struggles and suicide attempts as well as one page that includes nudity in a sexual context.

If you are looking for an easy-to-read introduction to the life of one of the most famous painters in the world, I think this book is a fantastic starting point! I particularly enjoyed learning more about the first half of his life... I feel like I know quite a bit about his later, more artistically prolific, years after visiting numerous exhibits of his work including the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. However, I did not know many details about his childhood and time spent as a teacher and missionary, so I found that quite fascinating.

*DISCLAIMER: I received an eARC of this book from Quarto Publishing Group – White Lion | Frances Lincoln through NetGalley for the purposes of providing an unbiased review.*

It is very easy to recommend this graphic biography of Van Gogh. I so enjoyed reading the biography and seeing the illustrations. Told by Vincent’s sister in law, readers learn about his and brother Theo’s early life, Vincent’s art works, personal life and struggles. It is a wonderful resource.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Quarto Publishing Group for this title. All opinions are my own.

I enjoyed the premise of this book but it wasn’t exactly the graphic novel I was expecting. The images were all quite simplistic and the text was hard to read making it difficult to appreciate the story.

This was formatted more like a picture book than a graphic novel. The art style itself was not for me; it would have been cool if it had mimicked Vincent's own style, but it was instead lots of flat colors with no shading or lighting effects, rather odd perspectives, and oddly drawn people. One could argue that this is "experimental" and parallels one of the themes of the biography but it just looked poorly done. There was also some info conveyed in art but not in text that I severely felt needed clarification. Like pages 30-31 with Vincent and Eugenie. (Art looks pretty problematic and I am not a fan of biographies that refuse to acknowledge a person's wrongs in life, especially if it is going to allude to them. Just spell it out!)

Which leads to the whole framing of this story. It's told through Jo's point of view, who was Vincent's sister in law. I don't really understand why this decision was made, as it caused the whole narrative to be quite biased in Vincent's favor. Again, I am of the sentiment that history should be conveyed as objectively as possible, especially with such famous people as Vincent Van Gogh. We don't need to glorify his life or garner sympathy for his memory--that memory is doing just fine. I would have appreciated a more honest and objective depiction of his life and works rather than the weird fiction of claiming Jo's voice. (This narrative choice might have made sense if this were a graphic novel adaption of her own words regarding Van Gogh, but the while the credits mention online archives of her diaries, nothing is directly cited throughout the entire novel so that it's impossible to know what is actually her voice shining through, and what is fiction from the author.)

As much as I wanted to feel sorry for him, I kind of hated him by the middle of the novel and then was just ready for the story to be over by the end. His entitlement and lack of consideration for other people was boggling and infuriating, and I imagine led to the worsening of his mental illness. Again, if this had been told more objectively, this would have been a unique opporunity to showcase the history of how mental health has been treated and the flaws in that treatment, and how doctors just throw around treatments when they don't understand the actual issues. There's just ... sooo much they could have done there. But NO.

Anyway. Thus ends my mild rant.

Thank you to NetGalley for the free review copy.

I wanted to love this book - I love Vincent Van Gogh and his art. The Vincent episode of Doctor Who nearly had me in tears and I rarely cry.

I felt the choice to frame the biography from his widow's perspective to be an odd choice - one that I personally didn't like. Vincent isn't someone who has to be view from the eyes of his spouse to be appreciated.

I also felt that the graphics were overly simplistic - perhaps that was intentional in order for Vincent's art to stand out more readily? Others may like that, but I didn't care for it.

Where this book stood out to me are the pages where Vincent's art was portrayed as standing out to him as these bright and beautiful spots amongst the endless gray of his mental health battles. That imagery was beautiful.

Thank you, Net Galley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Loved this graphic biography of Vincent Van Gogh and how his sister-in-law worked so hard to honor both his ands brother's memories.

This was an interesting read. The information was presented neatly and flowed well. The illustrations were helpful in creating a visual narrative of Vincent. My son who doesn’t like to read sat down and finished it in one shot. The illustrations also seemed to fit Vincent’s personal styles, the artwork that was included from his own work blended well with the art of the illustrator. Whether that was intentional or not I don’t know but I love the little details like this.

I’m a big fan of Vincent Van Gogh’s art. I know a little bit about him, but not near enough. So when I found this book I was super excited to read it.
I loved the way it was written. The fact that it was a graphic biography made it so much more fun to read. I believe graphic biographies are a good way to get younger readers interested in art and artists.