Vincent van Gogh: the painter the world found too late

By the Magna Bureau Encyclopedia Desk

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) painted for only about ten years, produced roughly nine hundred paintings and eleven hundred drawings, sold almost none of them, and died at thirty-seven believing himself a failure. Within a generation he was the most famous painter in the world, and he has remained so ever since. His Sunflowers hang in museums on three continents, The Starry Night draws crowds in New York, and his letters to his brother Theo are among the most widely read documents in the history of art. Van Gogh's life is a story of devotion, illness, poverty and a brother's loyalty, and his paintings are the record of a man who looked at ordinary things, a chair, a pair of boots, a field of wheat, and saw them burning with life.

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, a village in the southern Netherlands, the eldest surviving child of Theodorus van Gogh, a Protestant minister, and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. He was named after an elder brother who had been stillborn exactly a year earlier, a fact that has fed much speculation about his identity but that he himself rarely mentioned. His younger brother Theo, born in 1857, became the closest relationship of his life: a bond that survived quarrels, distance and illness, and that is preserved in more than six hundred letters Vincent wrote to him. Those letters, careful, funny, furious and tender by turns, are the main source for everything we know about the painter.

Vincent did not start as an artist. At sixteen he went to work for the art dealers Goupil and Cie in The Hague, and he did well enough to be posted to London and then Paris. He loved literature, Shakespeare, Dickens, the Bible, and he loved a landlady's daughter in London who did not love him back. By 1876 the art trade had lost him: he was dismissed, taught briefly in England, and then decided that his calling was the church. He studied theology, failed the examinations, and went as a lay preacher to the Borinage, the coal-mining district of Belgium, where he lived among miners, gave away his clothes and food, and was eventually dismissed by the church authorities for excessive zeal. It was in the Borinage, drawing miners and their families, that he understood what he wanted: to make images of working people.

In 1880, aged twenty-seven, he announced to Theo that he would become an artist. Theo, who had himself become an art dealer in Paris, agreed to support him with a monthly allowance, an arrangement that lasted for the rest of Vincent's life and that made his entire career possible. Vincent taught himself to draw, copying from manuals and from the prints he collected, and he worked in The Hague, in the peasant village of Nuenen, and in Antwerp, drawing and painting the poor: weavers at their looms, peasants eating potatoes, labourers in the fields. The Potato Eaters of 1885, his first major painting, shows a peasant family at supper in a dark cottage, their faces rough and honest, painted in the earthy browns he favoured. It is a sombre picture, and it already contains the conviction that would drive all his later work: that the life of ordinary people is worthy of art.

In March 1886 Vincent joined Theo in Paris, and the city changed his eyes. Theo introduced him to the Impressionists and to the younger generation of painters who were pushing past them: Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard. Vincent had painted in the dark tones of the Dutch school; in Paris he discovered colour. He painted in Montmartre, copied Japanese woodblock prints, whose flat planes and bold cropping he admired, and began to use the bright, broken brushwork of the Impressionists and the dots of the Pointillists. His palette exploded into yellows, blues and greens, and his brushstroke, once careful, became the swirling, energetic mark that is now instantly recognizable.

Paris was also a social education. Vincent met the art dealer Julien Tanguy, whose little shop was a meeting place for the avant-garde, and painted his portrait twice. He quarrelled with almost everyone he met, drank too much, and lived in Theo's small apartment in a state of mutual devotion and mutual exhaustion. Theo later said that the two years in Paris were the hardest of his life. But the work of those two years shows a painter transforming himself at speed: the self-portraits, painted because he could not afford models, show a man testing every style he met, from the sober browns of The Hague to the blazing complementary colours of his Paris experiments. By early 1888 Vincent was exhausted by Paris, by its noise and by its quarrels, and he decided to go south, to Provence, where the light, he believed, would be Japanese in its clarity.

The Paris years matter because they explain the speed of what followed. Van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888 as a painter who had mastered the new colour and the new brushwork, and who had, for the first time, a subject worthy of them: the sun, the wheatfields, the orchards and the people of Provence. The two years that followed, in Arles, Saint-Rémy and Auvers, produced almost all the paintings for which he is famous. He had only about twenty-seven months left to live.

Arles in February 1888 was cold and covered in snow, but by spring Vincent was painting orchards in blossom, the bridge at Langlois, the cafés of the town and the harvest fields under a sun he described as sulphur yellow. He rented the Yellow House on the Place Lamartine and dreamed of founding a Studio of the South, a community of painters working together in Provence as the Impressionists had worked in Paris. He painted the Sunflowers to decorate the house for the arrival of Paul Gauguin, whom Theo had persuaded to join him. The Sunflowers, painted in a few days in August 1888, are among the most famous paintings in the world: thick, sculptural paint, yellow on yellow, flowers that droop and blaze at the same time. Vincent painted seven versions in all, and they were, for him, an emblem of gratitude and of friendship.

Gauguin arrived in October 1888, and the two months that followed were among the most productive and most destructive of both men's lives. They painted together, argued about art, about money and about everything else, and Vincent's letters to Theo describe both admiration and despair. On the night of 23 December 1888, after a violent quarrel, Vincent cut off part of his left ear, wrapped it in newspaper and took it to a woman at a local brothel. He was found the next morning in his bed, nearly dead from blood loss. Gauguin left Arles the next day and the two men never met again, though they continued to write. The exact course of the quarrel is still debated, and the famous version in which Vincent threatened Gauguin with a razor comes from Gauguin's own later account, which scholars treat with caution.

What happened next is often told as a story of madness, and it should be told more carefully. Vincent was taken to the hospital at Arles, where he was treated by Dr. Félix Rey, and he recovered enough to return to painting within weeks. He suffered further crises in the following months, and the people of Arles, frightened by his behaviour, signed a petition asking for him to be confined. In May 1889 he entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence voluntarily, asking for treatment and for a studio. The diagnosis of his illness has been debated ever since: epilepsy, bipolar disorder, Ménière's disease, poisoning from paints and alcohol, and several other conditions have all been proposed by doctors reviewing the letters and the hospital records. No diagnosis is certain, and the honest account is that Vincent suffered recurrent crises whose nature remains unclear, that he sought help, and that he kept painting through them.

The year in Saint-Rémy, from May 1889 to May 1890, was one of the most productive of Vincent's life. Confined to the asylum but allowed to paint in a studio and, later, to walk in the grounds, he painted the view from his window, the cypresses and olive trees of Provence, the enclosed wheatfield, and, in June 1889, The Starry Night, with its swirling sky over the sleeping town. He painted portraits of the hospital staff, copies after Millet and Delacroix, and the great series of olive trees and cypresses that made those trees, for the rest of art history, Van Gogh's trees. He wrote to Theo that the work was his only way to hold on, and the letters from this period are among his most lucid and most moving.

In May 1890 Vincent left Saint-Rémy and moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north of Paris, to be near Theo and under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet, a physician and amateur artist who had treated other painters. The last ten weeks of his life were a frenzy of work: more than seventy paintings, including the portraits of Dr. Gachet, the Daubigny garden, the church at Auvers, and the wheatfields that surround the village. Wheatfield with Crows, painted in July 1890, with its black birds over a stormy field and its paths that lead nowhere, has often been described as a suicide note in paint. That reading is too simple. Vincent painted wheatfields all his life, and the painting's power does not depend on it being a farewell. It is a picture of a landscape he loved, painted with the same urgency he brought to everything.

On 27 July 1890 Vincent went out into the fields and shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He walked back to the inn where he lodged, and died two days later, on 29 July, with Theo at his bedside. His last words, as Theo reported them, were that the sadness would last forever. He was thirty-seven. Theo, broken by grief and by his own illness, died six months later, and the two brothers are buried side by side at Auvers. The story is unbearably sad, and it is also true that Vincent died at the height of his powers, in the middle of a body of work that was still growing. The paintings of the last weeks show no decline. They show a painter who had found, at last, exactly what he wanted to say.

Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime. The famous claim that he sold only one painting, The Red Vineyard, to the Belgian painter Anna Boch in 1890, is close to the truth: a handful of works changed hands, mostly gifts and exchanges, and he lived entirely on Theo's allowance. The fame came after his death, and it came because of a woman: Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo's widow. After Theo's death in January 1891, Johanna was left with an apartment full of unsold paintings, hundreds of letters and a baby son named Vincent. She returned to the Netherlands, opened a boarding house, and devoted the rest of her life to her brother-in-law's reputation. She organized exhibitions, lent paintings, published the letters, and sold, carefully and strategically, enough pictures to keep the work visible without flooding the market.

The strategy worked. The first major exhibition, at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1901, introduced Van Gogh to a new generation. A large retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1905 drew crowds, and by the 1920s Van Gogh was a European celebrity, his paintings reproduced in books and newspapers, his life retold in plays and films. The German collector Helene Kröller-Müller bought dozens of his paintings, which became the core of the Kröller-Müller Museum. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, opened in 1973, holds the largest collection in the world, including hundreds of paintings and drawings and the letters. The prices followed: in 1990 the Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for what was then a world record, and the Sunflowers, the Irises and the Bedroom are now treated as national treasures wherever they hang.

Johanna also published the letters. The correspondence between Vincent and Theo, edited and published in 1914, gave the world not only a biography but a self-portrait in prose: the painter explaining his pictures, his colour, his failures and his hopes, in language as vivid as the paintings. The letters are the reason Van Gogh is not only admired but loved. They show a man who was difficult, lonely and often ill, but who was also generous, funny, widely read and fiercely intelligent. They are the reason the legend of the mad genius, though it contains some truth, is an insult to the real man, who was a working artist of extraordinary discipline and thought.

Van Gogh matters because his paintings changed what painting could do. Before him, colour was used to describe the world; after him, colour could express feeling directly. The yellow of the Sunflowers is not the yellow of a flower observed, it is the yellow of joy and of heat. The blue of The Starry Night is not the blue of a night observed, it is the blue of awe. The Expressionists, the Fauves and generations of painters after him took that permission and built new art on it. His brushwork, too, became a language: the swirling strokes, the thick impasto, the paint laid on like sculpture, all became ways for a painter to show that a picture is made by a human hand, in a particular place, at a particular moment, and that the making is part of the meaning.

He matters, too, because his life has become a warning and a promise. The warning is that a society that cannot recognize its greatest artists while they live will pay for the failure in grief and in money. The promise is that work done in poverty, illness and obscurity can outlive everything that opposed it. Van Gogh painted for ten years and died believing he had failed. His paintings now hang in the greatest museums of the world, his letters are read by millions, and his name is known to people who have never seen a gallery. He wanted, he wrote, to make paintings that would console, and that would say something comforting to the heart. They do.

• 1853 – Born on 30 March in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands, eldest surviving child of a Protestant minister.
• 1869 – Joins the art dealers Goupil and Cie in The Hague at sixteen; later posted to London and Paris.
• 1876 – Leaves the art trade; teaches briefly in England, then tries to become a preacher.
• 1879 – Works as a lay preacher in the Borinage coal district of Belgium, living among the miners.
• 1880 – Decides to become an artist; Theo agrees to support him with a monthly allowance.
• 1885 – Paints The Potato Eaters in Nuenen, his first major work, in dark, earthy tones.
• 1886 – Joins Theo in Paris; discovers Impressionism, colour and Japanese prints.
• 1888 – Moves to Arles in February. Paints the Sunflowers in August for Gauguin's visit.
• 1888 – On 23 December, after a quarrel with Gauguin, cuts off part of his left ear. Gauguin leaves Arles.
• 1889 – Enters the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy voluntarily in May.
• 1889 – Paints The Starry Night in June, and the great series of cypresses and olive trees.
• 1890 – Moves to Auvers-sur-Oise in May under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet; paints more than seventy pictures in ten weeks.
• 1890 – Shoots himself on 27 July; dies on 29 July, aged thirty-seven, with Theo at his bedside.
• 1891 – Theo dies in January. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger begins her life's work of publishing the letters and exhibiting the paintings.
• 1973 – The Van Gogh Museum opens in Amsterdam, holding the largest collection of his work in the world.

Van Gogh's legacy is the colour and brushwork of modern painting. The Expressionists, the Fauves and generations of painters after him took from him the idea that colour could express feeling directly, and that the painter's hand could be visible in the picture. His paintings are the most reproduced images in art, and The Starry Night, the Sunflowers and the Bedroom are known to people who have never entered a gallery.

His letters, published by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, are among the most widely read documents in the history of art, and they have shaped the way the world sees him: not as a mad genius, but as a disciplined, generous and fiercely intelligent working artist. His life is also a warning about how societies treat their artists, and a proof that work done in obscurity can outlive everything that opposed it.

• Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life (Random House, 2011), the fullest modern biography, drawing on the complete correspondence.
• Vincent van Gogh, The Letters, in the edition of the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute, the primary source for his life and thought.
• Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger, Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings (Taschen, 1993), the catalogue of the paintings with commentary.
• The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, holder of the largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings, drawings and letters.
• The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, holder of the great collection formed by Helene Kröller-Müller.
• Martin Bailey, Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum (White Lion, 2018), on the Saint-Rémy year and the making of The Starry Night.
• Deborah Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), on the Arles months and the quarrel.
• Louis van Tilborgh and others, Van Gogh and the Roulins and the Van Gogh Museum catalogues, for the dating and provenance of the works.