Vincent van Gogh

• 1. Introduction

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  Vincent van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime, was called a madman and a failure, and died at 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. Yet in just over a decade he made about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them crowded into his final two years. According to his brother Theo, his last words were: "The sadness will last forever." How does a man dismissed as le fou roux, the redheaded madman, become the figure where, as one description puts it, discourses on madness and creativity converge? What turned a failed art dealer, a rejected missionary, and a quarrelsome student into the painter of swirling skies and burning yellows? The answer runs through hundreds of letters, a severed ear, and a single brother who never stopped paying the bills.

• 2. The Letters To Theo

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  More than 600 letters survive from Vincent to his younger brother Theo, against around 40 going the other way. They were exchanged from 1872 until 1890, and they hold most of what is known of Vincent's thoughts and his theories of art. Theo kept everything Vincent sent him. Vincent kept only a few of the letters he received.

  Theo van Gogh was an art dealer who supplied his brother with money, emotional support, and access to influential people on the contemporary art scene. After both men had died, Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, arranged for some letters to be published. A few appeared in 1906 and 1913, and the majority came out in 1914.

  The correspondence reaches beyond Theo. There are 22 letters to his sister Wil, 58 to the painter Anthon van Rappard, and 22 to Émile Bernard, along with single letters to Paul Signac, Paul Gauguin, and the critic Albert Aurier. From Arles alone Vincent wrote around 200 letters in Dutch, French, and English. There is a gap in the record from his Paris years, because the brothers lived together and had no reason to write. Translator Arnold Pomerans said the letters add a fresh dimension to understanding Van Gogh, an understanding granted by virtually no other painter.

• 3. Before The Brushes

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  Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on the 30th of March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, in the heavily Catholic province of North Brabant. He carried the name of his grandfather and of a brother stillborn exactly a year before his birth. His father, Theodorus, was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, came from a prosperous family in The Hague.

  The young Van Gogh was serious, quiet, and thoughtful, and he later called his youth "austere and cold, and sterile." Sent to a boarding school at Zevenbergen in 1864, he felt abandoned and campaigned to come home. In July 1869 his uncle Cent secured him a position at the art dealers Goupil and Cie in The Hague. Transferred to Goupil's London branch, the 20-year-old earned more than his father, and his sister-in-law Jo later called it the best year of his life.

  That happiness did not hold. He became infatuated with his landlady's daughter, Eugénie Loyer, who rejected him because she was secretly engaged to a former lodger. He grew isolated and religiously fervent, and after a transfer to Paris he was dismissed in 1876. He turned to teaching, then to faith. In January 1879 he took a missionary post at Petit-Wasmes in the coal-mining Borinage district of Belgium. To show solidarity with his impoverished congregation, he gave up his comfortable lodgings to a homeless person and slept on straw in a hut. Church authorities dismissed him for "undermining the dignity of the priesthood." Only after Theo suggested he take up art in earnest did Van Gogh begin recording the people and scenes around him in drawings.

• 4. Rejection And Ruin

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  "No, nay, never," said Kee Vos-Stricker, in Dutch "nooit, neen, nimmer," when Van Gogh declared his love and proposed marriage in 1881. She was his recently widowed cousin, seven years older, with an eight-year-old son. He pursued her to Amsterdam, where her parents called his persistence disgusting. In despair he held his left hand in a lamp flame, saying, "Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame."

  A second relationship proved even more entangling. In late January 1882 he met Clasina Maria Hoornik, called Sien, an alcoholic prostitute who was pregnant and already had a young daughter. Van Gogh set up a household with her, and when his father discovered the arrangement he pressured his son to leave. By late 1883 Van Gogh abandoned Sien and the children, feeling family life was irreconcilable with his art. Sien drowned herself in the River Scheldt in 1904.

  A third woman nearly died for him. From August 1884, in Nuenen, a neighbour's daughter named Margot Begemann, ten years his senior, fell in love with him, and he returned the feeling less enthusiastically. When neither family approved of a marriage, she took an overdose of strychnine and survived only because Van Gogh rushed her to a hospital. On the 26th of March 1885 his father died of a heart attack, and that year Van Gogh produced his first major work, The Potato Eaters, painted in sombre earth tones with no sign of the vivid colour to come.

• 5. Finding The Colour

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  In Antwerp, in February 1886, Van Gogh wrote to Theo that he could remember eating only six hot meals since the previous May. Bread, coffee, and tobacco were his diet, and his teeth turned loose and painful, because he spent Theo's money on painting materials and models rather than food. There he studied colour theory, absorbed the work of Peter Paul Rubens, and broadened his palette to include carmine, cobalt blue, and emerald green. He also bought Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts in the docklands.

  Moving to Paris in 1886, Van Gogh shared Theo's apartment and studied at Fernand Cormon's studio, where he met Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who painted his portrait in pastel. After seeing a portrait by Adolphe Monticelli, he took up a brighter palette and a bolder attack. In Asnières he came to know Paul Signac and adopted elements of Pointillism, applying small coloured dots that blend at a distance and set complementary colours like blue and orange into vibrant contrast.

  The defiance that marked his life surfaced in the classroom too. At the Antwerp academy, asked to draw the Venus de Milo, Van Gogh produced the limbless torso of a Flemish peasant woman. When his teacher Eugène Siberdt corrected the work so vigorously that he tore the paper, Van Gogh shouted that a woman must have hips and a pelvis in which to carry a baby. In February 1888, worn out by city life and having painted more than 200 pictures in two Paris years, he left for the south of France.

• 6. The Yellow House

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  On the 1st of May 1888, Van Gogh signed a lease for four rooms at 2 Place Lamartine in Arles, the building he immortalised as The Yellow House. The unfurnished rooms cost 15 francs a month and had stood empty for months. He wanted a gallery to display his work and began a series for its walls, including Bedroom in Arles, The Night Cafe, Cafe Terrace at Night, and Starry Night Over the Rhone. Of The Night Cafe he wrote that he tried to express the idea that a cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.

  Arles appeared exotic to him at first. He described it as a foreign country full of Zouaves, brothels, and an Arlesienne going to her First Communion, people who seemed like creatures from another world. The local countryside and light energised him, and his works there grew rich in yellow, ultramarine, and mauve. The period was one of his most prolific, with 200 paintings and more than 100 drawings and watercolours.

  His hopes centred on Paul Gauguin and a dream of an artists' collective. Preparing for Gauguin's arrival, Van Gogh painted four versions of Sunflowers in a single week, writing that he wanted nothing but large sunflowers to decorate the studio. He bought two beds on the advice of the station's postal supervisor, Joseph Roulin, whose portrait he painted. After much pleading, Gauguin arrived on the 23rd of October 1888.

• 7. The Razor And The Ear

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  The exact sequence that led to the mutilation of Van Gogh's ear is not known. Gauguin and Van Gogh quarrelled often, with Van Gogh admiring his guest and wanting to be treated as an equal, while Gauguin was arrogant and domineering. Van Gogh described the mood as one of excessive tension and feared Gauguin was preparing to desert him. Heavy rain shut the two men inside the Yellow House.

  After an altercation on the evening of the 23rd of December 1888, Van Gogh returned to his room, seemingly heard voices, and severed his left ear with a razor. He wrapped the ear in paper and delivered it to a woman at a brothel he and Gauguin both frequented. The art historian Bernadette Murphy later identified her as Gabrielle Berlatier, known as Gaby, a 17-year-old cleaning girl who died in Arles in 1952 at the age of 80. A policeman found Van Gogh unconscious the next morning and took him to hospital, where the young doctor Felix Rey decided too much time had passed to reattach the ear.

  The hospital diagnosis was acute mania with generalised delirium. Gauguin notified Theo, who rushed by night train to Arles and arrived on Christmas Day to comfort his brother. Gauguin fled Arles, never to see Van Gogh again, asking a policeman to tell Van Gogh he had left for Paris because the sight of him might prove fatal. In March, 30 townspeople signed a petition calling Van Gogh le fou roux, and the police closed his house. Two months later he voluntarily entered an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence.

• 8. Posthumous Fame

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  Octave Mirbeau wrote in 1892 that Van Gogh's death was an infinitely sad loss for art, lamenting that poor Vincent had gone to his death as obscure and neglected as he had lived. He had been buried on the 30th of July 1890 in the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise, the funeral attended by Theo, Émile Bernard, Julien Tanguy, Paul Gachet, and about twenty family members, friends, and locals. Theo, suffering from syphilis, survived his brother by only six months and died on the 25th of January 1891.

  The burden of the legacy fell to Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, a Dutchwoman in her twenties who suddenly held several hundred paintings, letters, and drawings, plus an infant son. Gauguin would not help promote the work, and the critic Aurier, an early supporter, died of typhoid fever in 1892 at the age of 27. Still, the reputation grew. In April 1894 the Durand-Ruel Gallery agreed to take ten paintings on consignment from the estate.

  New painters carried him forward. In 1896 the unknown art student Henri Matisse visited John Russell, a close friend of Van Gogh, who gave him a Van Gogh drawing, after which Matisse abandoned earth tones for bright colour. A large retrospective in Paris in 1901 excited Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck and fed the rise of Fauvism, while German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde acknowledged their debt. His fame reached its first peak in Austria and Germany before the First World War, aided by the publication of his letters in three volumes in 1914, the same year Jo had Theo's body moved from Utrecht to rest beside Vincent at Auvers-sur-Oise.