Vincent van Gogh

Chapter 1 · Everything He Tried First

Art dealer, teacher, bookseller, preacher

1853 – 1880 · Zundert · London · Paris · The Borinage

Vincent van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Zundert, in the southern Netherlands, the son of a Dutch Reformed pastor. Exactly a year earlier, to the day, his parents' first son — also named Vincent — had been stillborn, and the child grew up walking past a gravestone with his own name and birthday on it.

At sixteen he was placed with Goupil & Cie, the international art dealers where his uncle was a partner, and worked in The Hague, London and Paris. He was good at it until he stopped caring, began telling customers that the paintings they wanted were bad, and was dismissed in 1876.

He tried teaching in England, worked in a bookshop, and then attempted the ministry. He failed the entrance examination for theology in Amsterdam and was rejected by a missionary school.

He went anyway. In 1878 he became a lay preacher in the Borinage, a Belgian coal district, and took the gospel literally: he gave away his money and most of his clothes, slept on straw, and lived in the same conditions as the miners he served. The church authorities dismissed him for undermining the dignity of the priesthood by excessive zeal.

He was twenty-seven, broke, and had failed at everything.

In 1880, in that district, he wrote to his younger brother Theo that he had decided to become an artist, and began teaching himself to draw from manuals and by copying Millet.

Theo, by then working for Goupil in Paris, agreed to support him. He did so for the next ten years, sending money monthly, and the correspondence between them — over six hundred letters from Vincent — is one of the fullest records any artist has left.

Why this matters

Van Gogh had ten years as an artist and spent the previous decade failing at other things — the whole of his painting career is the last third of a short life.

You have the failures. What would you ask him?

Ask Van Gogh

• “What was it like growing up with your own name on a grave?”
• “Why were you dismissed as an art dealer?”
• “What happened in the Borinage?”
• “Why decide to be an artist at twenty-seven?”
• “What did Theo agree to?”

Chapter 2 · From Brown to Colour

The Potato Eaters, and then Paris

1880 – 1888 · The Hague · Nuenen · Antwerp · Paris

Van Gogh's Dutch work is dark. He drew and painted peasants, weavers and labourers in browns, greys and heavy greens, deliberately rejecting prettiness. *The Potato Eaters* (1885) shows a family eating in lamplight, their hands and faces coarse; he wrote to Theo that he had wanted to show that these people, eating potatoes by the light of their lamp, had dug the earth with those same hands, and that the picture spoke of manual labour and of a meal honestly earned.

He was largely self-taught. Short spells at academies in Brussels and Antwerp went badly; he could not tolerate drawing from plaster casts and quarrelled with instructors.

In 1886 he moved to Paris to live with Theo, and everything changed within two years. He saw Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painting at first hand, met Pissarro, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Émile Bernard, and encountered Japanese woodblock prints, which he collected and copied. The prints taught him flat areas of strong colour, unusual cropping and bold outlines.

His palette exploded. Within a short period the browns disappeared and were replaced by blues, yellows and violets applied in visible, directional strokes.

He also drank heavily, argued constantly, and made himself difficult to live with; Theo wrote to their sister that it was as though there were two people in him, one marvellously gifted and gentle, the other selfish and hard-hearted.

In February 1888 he left for Arles in Provence, looking for stronger light and cheaper living, and hoping to found a community of artists working together.

Why this matters

Van Gogh's transformation in Paris — from Dutch browns to saturated colour in about two years — is one of the fastest and most complete stylistic changes in the history of painting.

You have the change. What would you ask him?

Ask Van Gogh

• “What did you want The Potato Eaters to show?”
• “What did Japanese prints teach you?”
• “Why could you not work at an academy?”
• “What was it like living with Theo in Paris?”
• “Why leave Paris for Provence?”

Chapter 3 · The Yellow House

Sunflowers, Gauguin, and nine weeks that ended badly

1888 · Arles

Arles was the most productive period of his life. He rented four rooms in a yellow house on the Place Lamartine and worked at extraordinary speed: orchards in blossom, the harvest, the night café, the drawbridge, his own bedroom, and the sunflowers — painted to decorate the room he was preparing for Paul Gauguin.

He wanted to found a Studio of the South, a working community of painters. Theo, who was Gauguin's dealer, arranged an agreement, and Gauguin arrived in October 1888.

The nine weeks that followed produced remarkable work from both men and were increasingly tense. They argued about painting — Gauguin insisted on working from imagination, Van Gogh on working in front of the subject — and about everything else. Gauguin was arrogant and controlled; Van Gogh was intense and needed him too much.

On 23 December, after a serious quarrel, Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear. He wrapped it and delivered it to a woman at a local brothel — long assumed to be a prostitute, though research indicates she may have been a young maid there named Gabrielle. How much of the ear was removed is disputed; a diagram drawn at the time by the treating doctor and published in 2016 suggests almost the whole ear rather than the lobe.

He was found unconscious and hospitalised. Gauguin left and never saw him again, though they resumed writing.

He recovered, returned to painting, and had further episodes. In March 1889 thirty of his neighbours signed a petition asking the mayor to have him confined, and the yellow house was closed by the police. He was, by then, frightened of himself.

“Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily to express myself more forcefully.”

— Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh, August 1888

Why this matters

The Arles year produced some of the most reproduced paintings in the world, and its ending shows how visibly Van Gogh's illness escalated within a matter of months.

You have the yellow house. What would you ask him?

Ask Van Gogh

• “What was the Studio of the South meant to be?”
• “What did you and Gauguin actually disagree about?”
• “What is actually known about the night of 23 December?”
• “Why did you paint sunflowers for Gauguin's room?”
• “How did it feel when your neighbours petitioned against you?”

Chapter 4 · The Asylum

A barred window, and The Starry Night

1889 – 1890 · Saint-Rémy-de-Provence · Auvers-sur-Oise

In May 1889 Van Gogh admitted himself voluntarily to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy. He stayed a year. He had episodes lasting days or weeks during which he could not work and once swallowed paint; between them he was lucid and painted constantly, eventually being given a second room as a studio and allowed out under supervision.

*The Starry Night* was painted in June 1889. The view is partly the one from his barred window before sunrise, with the hills and the morning star, and partly invention — the cypress and the village church are not what was there. He was, in this case, painting from memory and imagination, which is what Gauguin had argued for.

He also painted the irises in the garden, the olive groves, the wheatfields inside the asylum walls, and a series after Millet and Delacroix, working from prints because he had no models.

His diagnosis has never been established. Contemporary doctors recorded a form of epilepsy. Later proposals have included bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, acute intermittent porphyria, lead poisoning from his paints, and the effects of absinthe. His own letters describe the episodes as attacks that came without warning and left him ashamed.

In May 1890 he moved north to Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, to be closer to Theo and under the care of Dr Paul Gachet, a homeopath and amateur painter. In seventy days he produced more than seventy paintings, including the portrait of Gachet and the wheatfield with crows.

On 27 July 1890 he walked into the fields and shot himself in the chest. He returned to the inn on foot and died two days later, on 29 July, with Theo beside him. He was thirty-seven.

A 2011 biography argued he was accidentally shot by local boys and protected them. Most scholars, including the Van Gogh Museum, do not accept it.

Why this matters

The Starry Night was painted from a barred asylum window by a man who had admitted himself for treatment — a fact usually left out of the reproductions.

You have the asylum year. What would you ask him?

Ask Van Gogh

• “Why did you admit yourself to the asylum?”
• “What is real and what is invented in The Starry Night?”
• “What did the attacks feel like?”
• “How did you paint seventy pictures in seventy days?”
• “How certain is it that you shot yourself?”

Chapter 5 · The Woman Who Made Him Famous

Jo van Gogh-Bonger, and four hundred exhibitions

1891 and after · Bussum · Amsterdam · Paris

Theo van Gogh collapsed within months of his brother's death and died in January 1891, aged thirty-three, of an illness related to syphilis. He left a widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, aged twenty-eight, with a baby son, hundreds of unsold paintings, stacks of drawings and a box of letters.

Her family advised her to get rid of the pictures. She did the opposite.

Jo moved to a village outside Amsterdam, opened a boarding house to support herself, hung the paintings on the walls, and set about building a reputation. She taught herself the art world, lent works to exhibitions across Europe, cultivated critics and dealers, sold selectively rather than cheaply to keep prices and interest rising, and organised the first major retrospective in Amsterdam in 1905.

Most importantly, she edited and published the letters. Vincent's correspondence with Theo appeared in Dutch in 1914, and it created the figure the world knows: the letters are articulate, self-critical and moving, and they gave the paintings a voice. She translated them into English herself.

Without her, the work would very likely have been dispersed and forgotten.

The posthumous story is now familiar: Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime — *The Red Vineyard*, bought by the Belgian painter Anna Boch in 1890, is the best-documented sale — and his paintings later became among the most expensive ever sold.

The romantic myth that grew around him — the mad genius who suffered for art — is worth resisting. He was ill and it interrupted his work; he painted between episodes, not during them. He read constantly, thought hard about colour theory, wrote about technique with precision, and worked with enormous discipline. The illness is part of the story. The skill and the labour are the rest of it, and they are the part the myth tends to erase.

Why this matters

Van Gogh's fame is a documented case of an artist's reputation being built deliberately by someone else — and of how much depends on who inherits the work.

You have the afterlife. What would you ask him?

Ask Van Gogh

• “What did Jo van Gogh-Bonger actually do?”
• “Why did publishing the letters matter so much?”
• “How many paintings did you actually sell?”
• “What does the mad genius myth get wrong?”
• “What did you think about while choosing colours?”

What Van Gogh changed

Van Gogh's use of colour and expressive brushwork to convey feeling rather than appearance made him a founding figure of Expressionism and modern painting. His letters are among the most important artistic documents of the nineteenth century, and his work is now among the most recognised and valuable in the world.

A debate that continues

His diagnosis has never been settled, the circumstances of his death have been challenged by a minority of researchers, and art historians continue to argue about how far the romantic myth of the suffering genius distorts an artist of great technical deliberation.

Keep exploring — ask Van Gogh

• “What were you trying to do with colour that description could not?”
• “What did writing to Theo every week do for your work?”
• “What would you have painted next?”

Related lives

• Michelangelo — Il Divino · Sculptor of the Sistine
• Friedrich Nietzsche — Philosopher with a Hammer
• Ludwig van Beethoven — Master of the Symphony

Related themes

Post-Impressionism and modern art · Colour and expression · Art, illness and reputation