Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in the south of the Netherlands, the son of a country pastor. For most of his twenties he looked like a man who would never find his place. He tried to make a living as an art dealer and was dismissed; he tried teaching; he tried the church, training as a preacher and working among poor miners in Belgium with such fierce, self-punishing zeal that his superiors decided he was unsuitable. One by one, the doors he pushed against closed. To almost everyone who knew him, he was a misfit — intense, awkward, impossible to settle.

It was only at the age of twenty-seven, after all of this, that he finally decided to become an artist. He had no formal training to speak of and very little money, but he threw himself into drawing and then painting with extraordinary discipline. And from the very start there was one person who believed in him: his younger brother, Theo, an art dealer in Paris. Theo sent money, paints and encouragement, month after month, year after year. The two wrote hundreds of letters, and it is in those letters — frank, searching, often beautiful — that we hear Vincent thinking aloud about art, about loneliness, and about what he was trying to do.

Without Theo's devotion, there would simply be no Van Gogh. He paid for the brushes, the canvases and the rent; he kept his brother alive. Vincent knew it, and the debt weighed on him. He was producing work nobody wanted, on money he had not earned — and he was painfully aware that the person paying for his great experiment was the brother he loved most.

Once he had found painting, Van Gogh worked at a pace that is hard to imagine. In roughly a decade he made around two thousand works of art — drawings, sketches and some nine hundred paintings — among them the blazing Sunflowers and, later, The Starry Night. Few artists have ever been so prolific, and fewer still have changed so fast, his colour growing bolder and stranger with almost every month.

In 1888 he moved to Arles, in the south of France, drawn by the light and the colour of the landscape. He rented rooms in a small house and painted it yellow — the famous "Yellow House" — and dreamed of turning it into a community where artists could live and work together. He persuaded the painter Paul Gauguin to join him. For a few intense weeks they painted side by side, but the two strong, difficult men clashed constantly, and the dream curdled into tension. In December 1888, after a bitter quarrel, Van Gogh suffered a severe breakdown and, in his distress, cut off part of his own ear. Gauguin left. The community was over before it had truly begun.

What followed was a long struggle with his mental health. The next year he admitted himself to an asylum at Saint-Rémy, where his illness came in waves — periods of darkness broken by periods of astonishing clarity. And in those clear stretches he painted some of his greatest work, including The Starry Night, with an intensity that seemed only to deepen as his life grew harder. Through all of it, almost nobody was buying. He had given the world a flood of masterpieces, and the world had barely noticed.

In 1890 Van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a village near Paris, to be closer to Theo and under the eye of a sympathetic doctor. He was still painting furiously. But in July of that year he received a gunshot wound and died two days later, at the age of thirty-seven. It has traditionally been ruled a suicide, and that remains the most widely accepted account; some historians have since questioned the details, and the exact circumstances are still debated. What is certain is that a brilliant, exhausted man died believing himself a failure, having sold almost nothing in his lifetime.

Theo was devastated, and never recovered. He died only six months later, in early 1891. It seemed, for a moment, as though the whole story might simply vanish — two brothers gone, a stack of unsold canvases, a bundle of letters. But it did not vanish, and the reason was a single, determined woman.

Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, inherited hundreds of Vincent's paintings and the brothers' letters. Almost everyone advised her to let it go. Instead she made it her life's work to champion him. She lent the paintings to exhibition after exhibition, built relationships with dealers and critics, and edited and published the letters so the world could meet the man behind the work. Slowly, then suddenly, recognition came. Within a few decades Van Gogh was one of the most famous and beloved artists who had ever lived — and today his paintings sell for tens of millions. It is a profound irony: the man who could not sell a canvas to feed himself became, after his death, beyond price. The fame he longed for arrived in full — but only once he was no longer there to feel it.