Vincent Van Gogh was as vivid a writer as he was a painter. That’s the premise of the wonderful exhibition of original letters and related paintings and drawings now at the Royal Academy in London.

With over 35 original letters, rarely exhibited in public due to their fragility, and 65 paintings and 30 drawings including important loans from abroad and from private collections, all beautifully displayed in the main galleries on walls painted the colours of Van Gogh’s palette, this is an outstanding exhibition. It is as absorbing and exciting a journey into the complex mind of Vincent van Gogh as we’re ever likely to make.

The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters — a collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam — gives us the man, not the myth.

“The letters reveal a different Van Gogh to the one of popular myth,” says Ann Dumas, curator of the exhibition. They refute the idea that he was a reckless, mad genius, and allow us a unique opportunity to get to know him as the clear-thinking professional he was, a man who spoke and read three languages, was well read, and as eloquent about the works of other artists as about his own.

Van Gogh, Dumas says, although he worked with great energy, intensity and speed, really thought about the work he produced.

Born in the southern Netherlands in 1853, the eldest son of a Protestant pastor, he only began painting in 1880, aged 27, but during the ten years of his artistic career, which ended in his suicide in 1890, Van Gogh produced 800 paintings and 1,200 drawings.

He was an avid correspondent, writing long letters, often illustrated, mainly to his art-dealer younger brother Theo, who supported him, but also to other family members and fellow artists such as Anton van Rappard, Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin.

In one letter to his sister, Willemien, from January 1888, he decides “to see if I can’t make my own portrait in writing” and describes the man in Self-Portrait as an Artist, 1888, as “pink-grey face, with green eyes, ash-coloured hair, wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth, stiffly wooden, a very red beard, quite unkempt and sad, but the lips are full, a blue smock of coarse linen...a palette with lemon yellow, vermillion, Veronese green, cobalt blue...”, adding “you’ll say it’s like the face of death”.

Vincent’s letters to Theo often were ‘progress reports’ on his development as a (largely self-taught) artist.

In 1882, considering himself proficient as a draughtsman, he decided to try watercolours.

He wrote to Theo: “I’ve attacked that old giant of a pollard willow and I believe it has turned out the best of watercolours... a sombre landscape, the dead tree beside a stagnant pond covered in duck weed.”

The letter, displayed beside the indeed sombre finished painting, helps us see it through his eyes.

The picture labels include quotes translated from the letters.

The curators intend us to feel “as if Vincent is taking us round the exhibition himself”.

He tells us about everything, from his finances, what he ate and where, to his materials (a “soft and better” type of pencil; brushes he wanted from Theo, their sizes sketched in the letter) to his thoughts on life and death, literature and art.

More than 800 letters survive, newly edited and published last autumn (a copy is in the exhibition). One thing that stands out is his ability to ‘paint’ word pictures.

He was bowled over by the colours of the South of France, its sun and strong light, for example. He vividly described the Yellow House “under a sulphur sky, under a cobalt blue sky...” and his feelings about the huge cypress trees he saw in Arles, “like an Egyptian obelisk”, their green having “such a distinguished quality”, “interesting dark notes” in “a sun-drenched landscape.”

I loved his excitement discovering “the sea of purple irises” surrounding the little town of Arles.

“What a subject,” he wrote. The countryside “covered in yellow and purple flowers” and the flat tones and strong colours that reminded him of the Japanese woodblock prints he loved. “A Japanese dream,” he called it.

I could share all this through his written description, ink study, colour annotated sketch, and the finished View of Arles with Irises in Foreground — all uniquely together in the show.

“What a subject,” he wrote. What an artist, what a writer, what a man, we might now write after seeing this marvellous exhibition. It’s on until Sunday, April 18.

The RA advises booking now and if possible going early or late in the day.