Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, a village in the southern Netherlands near the Belgian border, where his father Theodorus served as a Dutch Reformed pastor ^[1]. He carried the name of an elder brother, stillborn exactly one year earlier, a coincidence that later biographers have often noted. His mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, came from a prosperous family in The Hague and encouraged drawing at home, though nothing in Vincent's childhood suggested an artistic future ^[2].

The family was large, with six surviving children, and money was tight on a rural pastor's income. Vincent attended the village school, then boarding schools in Zevenbergen and Tilburg, where he studied languages and received some formal drawing instruction. He left school for good in 1868, at fifteen, without completing his education ^[1].

In 1869 his uncle secured him a position with Goupil and Cie, an international art dealership, at its branch in The Hague. The job introduced him to the picture trade and to the works of the Barbizon painters and the Hague School. Transfers to London in 1873 and Paris in 1875 followed, but his enthusiasm for dealing faded, and Goupil dismissed him in 1876 ^[2].

The years after Goupil were restless. Van Gogh worked as a teacher and lay preacher in England, clerked briefly in a Dordrecht bookshop, and in 1877 moved to Amsterdam to prepare for theology studies, an effort he abandoned within a year ^[1]. Religion held him with real force in this period. In 1878 he took a short evangelist course near Brussels, then went to the Borinage, a coal mining district in southern Belgium, as a missionary among the miners.

In the Borinage he gave away his possessions and slept in a hut, conduct the church authorities judged excessive, and his appointment was not renewed ^[3]. Left with little, he began to draw the miners and their families in earnest. Sometime in 1880, at 27, he resolved to become an artist. The decision was reinforced by his younger brother Theo van Gogh, an art dealer in Paris, who from then on sent Vincent money almost every month and became his closest confidant ^[2].

The correspondence between the brothers, more than 650 surviving letters from Vincent to Theo, records nearly every stage of his thinking about art, faith, poverty, and illness. These letters, published after both men died, remain one of the most complete self accounts any painter has left ^[4].

Van Gogh trained himself largely through copying, manuals, and brief spells of instruction. He studied briefly at the Brussels academy, worked in The Hague under his cousin by marriage, the painter Anton Mauve, and drew the weavers and peasants of Drenthe and Nuenen ^[1]. His Dutch period culminated in April 1885 with The Potato Eaters, a dark, earthen scene of a peasant family at their evening meal, which he considered his first major work ^[3].

A few months at the Antwerp academy followed, then a decisive move: in February 1886 he arrived in Paris and lodged with Theo in Montmartre. There he encountered impressionism and neo-impressionism at first hand, met Camille Pissarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, and Paul Gauguin, and studied Japanese woodblock prints, which he collected ^[2]. Within two years his palette shifted from browns and grays to saturated color, and his brushwork loosened into the broken, rhythmic strokes that became his signature.

City life wore him down. In February 1888 he left for Arles in Provence, hoping the southern light would sharpen his color and dreaming of a shared studio for artists, a "Studio of the South" ^[3].

The fifteen months in Arles were the most productive of his life. He painted around 200 canvases there, including the Sunflowers series, The Yellow House, orchards in blossom, the Langlois drawbridge, and night scenes such as Cafe Terrace at Night and Starry Night Over the Rhone ^[3]. Any account of Vincent van Gogh achievements begins with this astonishing output: in roughly ten years as an artist he completed about 900 paintings and more than 1,100 drawings and watercolors ^[5].

Gauguin joined him in Arles in October 1888, and for nine weeks the two painted side by side, arguing constantly about method. The collaboration collapsed on December 23, 1888, when van Gogh, in a breakdown, cut off part of his own left ear and delivered it to a woman at a local brothel ^[1]. He was hospitalized, and in May 1889 he committed himself voluntarily to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Illness did not stop the work. At Saint-Rémy he painted about 150 canvases, among them The Starry Night in June 1889, with its churning sky above a quiet village, along with irises, cypresses, olive groves, and copies after Millet and Delacroix rendered in his own color ^[6]. The Starry Night entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941 and is now among the most recognized paintings in the world ^[6]. Recognition had begun to stir before he died: the critic Albert Aurier published the first substantial article on his work in January 1890, and that February The Red Vineyard sold in Brussels to the painter Anna Boch, one of the few documented sales of a painting during his lifetime ^[5].

Van Gogh never married and his attachments brought him mostly grief. In 1881 he proposed to his widowed cousin Kee Vos-Stricker, who refused him flatly, a rejection that estranged him from parts of his family ^[1]. In The Hague he lived for over a year with Sien Hoornik, a pregnant seamstress who had worked as a prostitute, supporting her and her children until poverty and family pressure ended the arrangement in 1883 ^[2].

The one steady bond of his adult life was with Theo, who paid his rent, bought his paints, and answered his letters for a decade. Vincent's side of the correspondence mixes practical requests with long passages on color theory, literature, and the consolations of work, and it shows a writer of unusual power ^[4]. Whatever afflicted him, and modern authors have proposed diagnoses ranging from epilepsy to bipolar disorder without settling the question, the letters show a lucid mind between crises ^[5].

He was, by most accounts, a difficult companion: intense, quick to quarrel, indifferent to food and comfort, and given to working outdoors in all weather. He drank heavily at times, especially in Arles, and his health suffered from years of poor diet ^[3].

In May 1890 van Gogh left the asylum and traveled north to Auvers-sur-Oise, a village near Paris, to be closer to Theo and under the informal care of Dr. Paul Gachet, a physician and amateur artist sympathetic to painters ^[1]. The final seventy days were a last surge of production: about 70 paintings, roughly one a day, including the portrait of Dr. Gachet, the church at Auvers, and the turbulent Wheatfield with Crows ^[3].

On July 27, 1890, he suffered a gunshot wound to the chest, in the standard account self inflicted in a field outside the village, though no weapon was ever recovered. He walked back to his inn, was tended by Gachet, and died in the early hours of July 29 with Theo at his bedside. He was 37 ^[1]. Theo, devastated and already ill, died just six months later; in 1914 his remains were moved to Auvers, and the brothers lie side by side in the village cemetery ^[2].

A small number of scholars have questioned the suicide account, but the major institutions devoted to his work continue to present his death as self inflicted, consistent with his documented history of mental crisis ^[5].

The transformation of van Gogh's reputation after 1890 is one of the defining stories of modern art. Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, inherited hundreds of paintings and the letters, organized exhibitions, and in 1914 published the correspondence, work that did more than anything else to build his posthumous fame ^[4]. Memorial shows in the 1890s and a landmark 1905 retrospective at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum spread his influence across Europe.

That influence ran deep. The Fauves, led by Matisse, and the German expressionists took direct lessons from his color and handling, and few surveys of twentieth century painting begin without him ^[5]. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, opened in 1973 around the family collection, holds the largest group of his works anywhere, more than 200 paintings and 500 drawings, and draws millions of visitors ^[7]. Basic Vincent van Gogh facts have entered common knowledge: the ear, the sunflowers, the poverty, the prices. Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold at Christie's in New York in 1990 for 82.5 million dollars, then a record for any work of art at auction ^[8].

A century after a Vincent van Gogh biography would have interested almost no one, his life is among the most written about of any artist, the subject of the 1934 novel Lust for Life and its 1956 film, the fully painted feature Loving Vincent in 2017, and a continuing stream of scholarship. The judgment he feared, that his work counted for nothing, has been reversed as completely as any in the history of art ^[5].