Vincent van Gogh: Ten Years, Some 900 Paintings

Van Gogh came to painting late, and from the side. At 16 he was apprenticed to the art dealers Goupil & Co., where his uncle was a partner, and he worked for the firm in The Hague, London and Paris.¹

Seeing paintings every day trained his eye, especially for Rembrandt, Frans Hals and the French painters Millet and Corot. But he disliked selling art.¹

He tried teaching, then a bookshop, then the church. As a lay preacher among coal miners in the Borinage, in Belgium, he gave away his belongings and was dismissed for taking Christian teaching too literally. In 1880, penniless, he began to draw seriously.¹

In the village of Nuenen, where his parents lived, he painted three kinds of subjects, all tied to the hard lives of peasants: still lifes, landscapes and figures. Émile Zola's novel Germinal, about a mining region, struck him deeply.¹

He was also teaching himself by looking. From Frans Hals he learned to catch the freshness of a first impression. From Veronese and Delacroix he learned that color can express something on its own.¹

That idea sent him to Antwerp, where he could see more paintings by Rubens than anywhere else. He enrolled at the academy there, refused to follow its rules, and left after three months, in 1886, to join Theo in Paris.¹

In 1886 Van Gogh joined Theo in Paris. Through his brother he met Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat; he also got to know Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin.¹ He had already discovered Japanese prints and the painting of the Impressionists.¹

Within a year his palette changed completely. By the summer of 1887 he was painting in pure colors, with broken, sometimes dotted brushstrokes.¹

He also painted himself, again and again. A model who is always available and costs nothing has its advantages: thirty-nine self-portraits survive, paintings and drawings, most of them made in Paris.⁵

In February 1888 he left Paris for Arles, in the south of France, longing “to look at nature under a brighter sky.” The twelve months that followed were his first great period: orchards in blossom, the postman Roulin and his friends, his bedroom, his house.¹

He rented and decorated a house there, hoping to found a community of artists he called the Studio of the South. Gauguin arrived in October 1888. The two men worked side by side for two months, but they disagreed about almost everything.¹

After a heated argument on 23 December 1888, Van Gogh cut off part of his left ear. Exactly what happened that night is still debated by historians. He was taken to hospital, and Gauguin left for Paris.¹

At the end of April 1889, afraid of losing his ability to work, Van Gogh asked to be admitted to the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He stayed twelve months, painting the asylum garden, cypresses, olive trees and the Alpilles mountains. The Starry Night dates from this time.¹

Shut in for long periods, with little choice of subject, he fought against having to paint from memory. He softened the blazing colors of Arles and tried to make his painting calmer, but his lines grew stronger and his skies more alive: Britannica calls the best of the Saint-Rémy pictures “bolder and more visionary” than those of Arles.¹

In May 1890 he moved north to Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, where Dr. Paul Gachet kept an eye on him. He painted wheat fields, cottages, the church and the town hall, in cooler, fresher colors.¹

On 27 July 1890 he shot himself; he died two days later, on 29 July, at 37. Theo died six months after him. The brothers lie side by side in the small cemetery at Auvers, under identical headstones.¹

Van Gogh almost always signed with his first name. Part of the reason was family tension; part was practical. In March 1888 he asked Theo to change how his name appeared in an exhibition catalog:⁶

It is one of the best-known stories in art, and it isn't quite true. The Van Gogh Museum says nobody knows exactly how many paintings he sold, “but in any case, it was more than a couple.”²

His uncle Cor, an art dealer, ordered nineteen views of The Hague. The Paris paint seller Julien Tanguy bought a painting; Theo sold another to a London gallery; and Anna Boch, the sister of a friend, bought The Red Vineyard. Van Gogh also traded many works for food and painting supplies.²

In his last two years, Van Gogh's work had begun to be noticed by the avant-garde and shown in Paris and Brussels. When Theo died, his widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, took over the task: she sold works, lent others to exhibitions and, above all, published Vincent's letters to Theo.³

Those letters are now part of the legend. About 820 of them survive, most written to Theo, about art, his progress, his moods and his family.⁷ They are the reason we know him so well.