Vincent van Gogh

An unannounced arrival, March 1886

Vincent van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, in the southern Netherlands. Before painting he had failed at art dealing, teaching, and evangelism; he took up drawing seriously around 1880, and everything he painted in the Netherlands — peasant heads, weavers, The Potato Eaters — was built on brown and grey.

In late February or early March 1886 he sent his brother Theo, an art dealer with the firm Boussod, Valadon & Cie, a note announcing that he was already in Paris and would meet him in the Louvre's Salon Carré. Theo had not invited him. The two moved into Theo's small apartment on the rue Laval in lower Montmartre, where there was not even room to set up an easel, and in June 1886 they took a larger third-floor flat at 54 rue Lepic, on the hill itself.[2]

Cormon's studio and the painters he met there

In April and May 1886 he worked in the teaching studio of Fernand Cormon, a history painter whose atelier on the boulevard de Clichy took in students for drawing from casts and models. The teaching mattered less than the neighbours at the easels: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, then twenty-one, Émile Bernard, then eighteen, and the Australian painter John Russell, who painted Van Gogh's portrait that year.

Toulouse-Lautrec's 1887 pastel of Van Gogh leaning over a café glass is one of the few portraits of him by another artist's hand. Through Theo, whose gallery handled the Impressionists, Vincent also met Camille Pissarro, who explained broken colour to him — building a picture from small, separate strokes of pure colour rather than blended tones — and in the autumn of 1887 Paul Gauguin, newly back from Martinique. The two exchanged pictures. Their friendship would end violently in Arles two years later — the story is told below — but it began as an ordinary Paris acquaintance.[1]

The palette changes

Paris gave him three things at once: the Impressionists in the flesh, the pointillism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and Japanese woodblock prints, which he bought by the hundred from the dealer Siegfried Bing and pinned to his walls. His answer to all three was painted across some two dozen self-portraits, because models cost money and his own face was free.

Set the winter 1887–88 Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat beside The Potato Eaters of 1885 and the two years explain themselves: the strokes have become short, separate and directional, and the colour has gone from earth to orange against blue. He painted more than 200 pictures in Paris — a fifth of everything he ever made — and almost none of them were for sale.[1] Theo's apartment filled with canvases.

Le Tambourin

On the boulevard de Clichy stood Le Tambourin, a café whose tables were shaped like tambourines, run by Agostina Segatori, an Italian former artists' model who had sat for Corot and Manet. In 1887 Van Gogh and Segatori had an affair, documented in his own letters to Theo.[2] He ate there, paid in paintings, hung an exhibition of his Japanese prints on its walls, and painted Segatori at one of her own tambourine tables with the prints visible behind her.

The affair ended badly, the café went bankrupt, and the pictures he had left there were sold off in a bundle. Later tellings improved the story in every direction; what the letters actually establish is the relationship, the exhibition, and the loss of the paintings.[2]

After Paris: Arles, the asylum, Auvers

City life and drink wore him down, and in February 1888 he left for Arles, in Provence, looking for the stronger light and colour the Paris pictures had been reaching toward. The sunflowers, the Yellow House, and the bedroom all followed within the year. In October 1888 Paul Gauguin came to live and work with him — the arrangement the brothers had planned in Paris — and after nine weeks it collapsed: on 23 December 1888, following a quarrel with Gauguin, Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear.

He committed himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in May 1889 and painted through the year he spent there, The Starry Night among the pictures. In early 1890 his The Red Vineyard sold in Brussels for 400 francs to the Belgian painter Anna Boch — one of the few sales of his life.[3][4]

In May 1890 he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north-west of Paris, to be near Dr Paul Gachet, a physician and collector recommended by Pissarro. He painted roughly a canvas a day there for seventy days.[5] On 27 July 1890 he shot himself in the chest in a field outside the village; he died two days later, on 29 July, with Theo beside him, aged thirty-seven. The money, work and worry of those years had run through Theo too: he outlived his brother by six months. The two are buried side by side in the cemetery at Auvers.[5]

How Van Gogh worked

Van Gogh painted thickly and fast. He pushed paint onto the canvas straight from the tube and worked it wet into wet, often finishing a picture in a single sitting rather than building it up in layers over weeks. The ridges the brush and the tube left behind hold the light, which is why his surfaces look different in a gallery from the way they look in reproduction, where they flatten out.

The colour was deliberate rather than instinctive. He had read the colour theory of Charles Blanc and studied Eugène Delacroix, and his letters to Theo work through the pairings again and again: blue against orange, red against green, yellow against violet. Setting two complementary colours side by side makes each look stronger, and much of what people describe as the intensity of his late pictures is that principle applied at full strength.[2]

He also drew constantly, and at Arles he took up the reed pen, cut from riverbank reeds and dipped in ink. It gave a stroke that broke and thickened as the nib wore down. He used it to make drawings after his own paintings, partly so he could send Theo a record of what he had done without shipping the canvas.[2]

Almost all of it was made in front of the subject rather than in a studio. In Provence he pegged his easel into the ground against the mistral, the wind that comes down the Rhône valley for days at a time, and went on painting in it.

How Van Gogh became famous

Van Gogh was almost unknown when he died in 1890. His brother Theo had supported him for a decade and was the one person placing his work, and Theo died six months later, on 25 January 1891, of the late effects of syphilis. The estate — hundreds of paintings and the whole correspondence between the brothers — passed to Theo's widow.

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger had married Theo on 17 April 1889 and was widowed at twenty-eight with a baby son, Vincent Willem, born in Paris on 31 January 1890. She had known Vincent slightly and had no standing in the art trade. She spent the rest of her life on his reputation.

She lent to exhibitions rather than dumping the estate on the market, and sold slowly and selectively so that the work spread instead of flooding. In 1905 she assembled 484 of his works at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the show that established him in his own country. In 1914 she published the letters between Vincent and Theo in three volumes, which gave readers the painter's own account of what he was attempting and did as much for his standing as any exhibition.

That same year she had Theo's remains moved from Utrecht to Auvers-sur-Oise and reburied beside his brother, so that the two graves stand together under ivy in the village cemetery. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger died in 1925. Her son kept the collection together, and it became the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which opened in 1973.