VISUAL ART: PAULA MURPHYreviews Vincent's Gardens: Paintings and Drawings by Van GoghBy Ralph Skea Thames Hudson, 112pp. £12.95

YOU COULD MAKE an argument for buying this slim volume for its cover alone. With its brilliant violet spine and its front and back covers bearing richly colourful details of two of Van Gogh’s paintings, the book begs to be taken down from the shelf or lifted from the coffee table. Beautifully produced, the book is particularly visual, with more concentration on images than on text.

Van Gogh’s representations of gardens, from his early stark and brooding Dutch drawings to his late vibrant and intense French paintings, are all included. The images are reproduced as complete works and as details. The former, inevitably but nonetheless unfortunately, are often spread across two pages. It is the details of individual paintings that work best, bursting forth from the page and clearly revealing the passionate nature of Van Gogh’s handling of paint while demonstrating the development of his technique over his short career.

This book is not the work of an art historian, nor even of a Van Gogh scholar. Its author, the Scottish academic Ralph Skea, has a background in urban studies, which necessarily include the garden. Formerly a lecturer in European urban conservation at the University of Dundee, he has worked as an architect and town planner and has taken a particular interest in the conservation of Scotland’s historic gardens. While teaching undergraduates, however, Skea took time out to paint, which will surely have afforded him a certain sensitivity to the art of Van Gogh.

This is one of several Van Gogh-related books from Thames Hudson, notably including the superb publication of his letters in six volumes in 2009, after which almost anything else on him tends to seem superfluous.

The letters are captivating. Van Gogh’s writing is at once deceptively simple and utterly compelling. His use of words is every bit as heartfelt as his brush strokes. It might also be worth mentioning here, for those who have not already discovered the website, that his letters are available to be perused online. At vangoghletters.org the individual texts can be viewed both in facsimile, with their naturally occurring sketches, and in print, in their original language and in translation, with the sketches as add-ons.

The advanced search engine on the website facilitated the discovery in seconds that the word “garden” appears in 171 of Van Gogh’s letters. In one of the earliest, written in London in 1873, he notes the way in which “a small garden with flowers or a couple of trees” is positioned in front of every house. The last, written at Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, less than a week before he died, includes a pencil sketch of a painting he had done of the late Charles Daubigny’s garden and an accompanying description in which he details the positioning of the different colours. Skea has elicited a small number of garden quotes and sketches from these letters.

Van Gogh had not yet commenced his short decade as a practising artist when he was observing gardens in London, so Vincent's Gardensstarts with images of his Dutch experience in the first half of the 1880s in the familiar garden of the parsonage at Nuenen, where his father was a minister. Other gardens in which Van Gogh spent time sketching and painting in the course of the decade were alternately public and private. The fact that he never owned a garden perhaps made him cherish these patches of contained nature even more. Certainly Skea makes much of the contrast between his experience of enclosed and open spaces, concluding that the former had a calming effect that helped him "to maintain the mental equilibrium so necessary for his work".

The book proffers an outline of the familiar story of Van Gogh’s life and career, told through his relationship with gardens in Nuenen, Etten, The Hague, Paris, Arles, St Rémy and Auvers. There is no new information about the artist, nor new works, and the publication suggests no new interpretation of the oeuvre. The press handout describes it as a “gift book”, which confirms the author’s non- academic approach to his subject.

Skea refers to the artist throughout the text as Vincent, perhaps in the light of Van Gogh occasionally signing his paintings thus. This is uncomfortably familiar, however, somehow suggesting homely insights, of which there are none, rather than academic distance. This is indeed a gift book, but, feast for the eyes that it is, one which, once purchased, might prove difficult to part with.

Paula Murphy lectures in art history at University College Dublin. Her book Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture: Native Genius Reaffirmedwas published by Yale University Press last year