Vincent's Choice: Van Gogh's musee imaginaire Chris Stolwijk, Sjraar van Heugten, Leo Jansen and Andreas Bluhm Thames & Hudson, 320pp, £36 ISBN 0500238065

This year is the 150th anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh's birth, and as part of the celebrations a major exhibition is at present taking place at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Displaying his work alongside the paintings that inspired him, the show is based on the idea of the musee imaginaire - the notional collection that Van Gogh himself might have assembled, including all the works that were important to him. Because it includes reproductions of items not in the exhibition, this book - a collection of essays by Chris Stolwijk and his colleagues at the museum, with more than 200 fine colour reproductions - comes even closer to that ideal inventory.

The popular image of Van Gogh is that of the archetypal tormented genius, largely ignored in his time, devoted to his own talent and originality, and suffering for them before dying at his own hand. But Van Gogh was also very much preoccupied with what had gone before him in the history of art. We know from his correspondence with his art dealer brother, Theo, which paintings he did and didn't like, with more than 1,100 individual works mentioned. Vincent's letters reveal what fascinated him in the art of the past, and how he overcame tradition to create new work of his own.

The earliest major influence traced here is that of the Dutch masters - Frans Hals, Carel Fabritius and, above all, Rembrandt, the "magician of magicians", whose "infinitely sympathetic" work Van Gogh had seen in the newly opened Rijksmuseum.

Rembrandt was to inspire some of Van Gogh's most striking and perceptive writing on art. He wrote of Rembrandt's self-portrait of 1669, now in the National Gallery, that he "paints a supernatural angel with a da Vinci smile behind that old man who resembles himself".

Van Gogh emerges first and foremost as a Dutch painter, then happy to represent solid, everyday objects, and depict people looking dignified and unadorned. Indeed, writing from the asylum of Saint-Remy de Provence, when he was troubled by frightening hallucinations, Vincent was to describe the stability and serenity of Rembrandt's sitters as an ideal to cling on to.

In depicting simple objects and natural scenes, Van Gogh seems to give them a mysterious significance, primarily through his expressive use of colour. "Colour drove him mad," a contemporary noted. He admired the vibrancy of Japanese ukiyo-e prints - "visions of the floating world" - many of which are reproduced in this book. And after moving to Paris in 1886, his palette brightened under the influence of Impressionism. But the real master for Van Gogh in his use of colour was Delacroix (especially in his Christ Asleep During the Tempest). Following Delacroix's example, Van Gogh attempted to "paint men and women with something of the eternal, whose symbol used to be the halo, and that we try to achieve through radiance itself, through the vibrancy of our colouring".

Finally, there was the influence of Millet, whose iconic depictions of agricultural labourers (The Sower in particular, that parable in paint) had an obsessive quality for Van Gogh. Like Millet, Vincent was content to live humbly among the poor - as a lay preacher among the Belgian miners of the Borinage district, and later while working on The Potato Eaters, and other empathetic depictions of peasant life.

Van Gogh retained a near-mystical sense of the connectedness between rural communities and the land, and the yearly cycle of labours associated with it. He had once hoped to be a minister, and the humane, compassionate spirit of the Gospels remained a personal article of faith.

The essays here vary greatly in quality, but together they show very well how Van Gogh created an art that was at once original and rich in influence. He incorporated, for instance, many elements from paintings he admired and continually copied, creating striking hybrids of famous works made over in his own style. A favourite technique was to produce a colour painting from a black-and-white reproduction of Delacroix or Millet: "I improvise colour on it, not, you understand, altogether being myself, but searching for memories of their pictures."

Van Gogh's dying words - "la tristesse durera toujours" (the sadness never ends) - offer a sense of the misery of his life. At least, the work of his heroes showed him "an art that offers consolation for broken hearts".

Matt Shinn is a speechwriter for a cabinet minister

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