The Ethics of Postimpressionism in the Epistolary Heritage of the Dutch Painter Vincent Van Gogh

The Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh left a rich epistolary legacy: it includes more than 900 letters to his brother Theodore, other relatives, and painter friends. The artistic value of the letters, which the philosopher and psychiatrist K. Jaspers classified as "exciting phenomena of the past", allows us to speak of their author as a person gifted with literary talent. In addition to the fact that this correspondence is a striking self-portrait of the painter, it is remarkable in that it reflects the state and phenomena of culture and art of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The article analyzes the elements of the ethics of postimpressionism, recorded in the statements of the epistolary discourse of the painter Van Gogh. The purpose of the study was to identify the dominant volume of statements with the author's formulations about the artistic techniques of the painter's work, highlighting among these statements the principles that later became the basis for the theoretical justification of the ethics of such an artistic movement as postimpressionism.