The heads did it for me, at The Royal Academy’s magnificent exhibition, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters. I loved the portraits, to the creation of which the artist himself attached the utmost importance. “What I am most passionate about, much more than all the rest in my profession – is the portrait, the modern portrait,” he wrote to his sister Willemien in 1890.

Proceeding in amazement, admiration and, I own, some emotional turmoil, through the seven galleries at Burlington House, I was delighted to come across once again his Portrait of Alexander Reid (pictured), a work I had last encountered three years ago at Compton Verney’s show Van Gogh and Britain: Pioneer Collectors.

This study of an influential Scottish art dealer was for many years considered to be a Van Gogh self-portrait until the publication of a catalogue in 1928 led McNeill Reid to exclaim: “That’s my dad!” (or words to that effect).

Comparison with the painting below (Self-portrait of an Artist, 1888), which is also at the Academy, shows how the mistake could have arisen.

Chiefly, of course both have red hair. I suppose this is fairly unusual, as I thought on Saturday while watching the excellent student production of The Magic Toyshop for which the directors had managed to recruit no fewer than three ginger-nuts to play members of a tightly knit (not to say incestuous) Irish family.

As Van Gogh wrote to Willemien: “Here’s an impression of mine, which is the result of a portrait that I painted in a mirror, and which Theo [the artist’s brother, and recipient of most of his letters] has: a pink-grey face with green eyes, ashcoloured hair, wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth, stiffly wooden, a very red beard, quite unkept and sad.”

Too red, as Prince Harry is alleged to consider his hair in his and brother Prince William’s new portrait by Nicky Philipps. You might think so; Van Gogh doesn’t say.

Other highlights for me – and this is not an art review, merely an excuse to print some excellent pictures – were the 1888 study The Zouave (pictured) and Portrait of a Peasant Girl in Straw Hat (pictured) of two years later.

The first shows what Van Gogh told Theo was a soldier with “a small face, the neck of a bull, the eye of a tiger”. Shortly before starting the second, he wrote to Willemien that he “would like to do portraits which would look like apparitions to people a century later”. He succeeded here.

His descriptions of his approach to work, which the letters on show provide, confound those who still think of Van Gogh as a ‘mad genius’ who dashed off work in a demented fury. True he worked fast – an astonishing 70-plus works in the last 70 days of his life – but always with forethought and detailed planning, as the curator of the show, Anne Dumas, told us at a dinner I was privileged to attend the night before it opened.

This was just up the road from Burlington House, at the superbly comfortable Athenaeum Hotel. For anybody wishing to share the experience, a special package is available priced from £180 for two for an overnight stay and tickets for the exhibition. (Tel: 0207 499 3464 – www.athenaeumhotel.com).