A late vocation
Vincent Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in the rectory of Groot Zundert, Brabant. The son of a Calvinist pastor and the nephew of three uncles who were art dealers, he was destined for the art trade, and so made his debut at the Goupil gallery in The Hague (1869), London (1873-1874) and Paris (1874-1875). An anguished and deeply mystical figure, in 1878 he took on an evangelical mission among the miners of the Borinage coalfield, a mission that ended in painful failure: his generosity, his fraternal approach to the miners, whose living conditions upset him, and his rather free interpretation of the Gospels provoked the ire of the authorities. In 1883, Van Gogh began to study painting with the material help of his brother Theo and the psychological support of his cousin Anton Mauve, a well-known painter of the Hague School, whose studio he joined. But Mauve and Van Gogh soon quarreled, partly because of Vincent's relationship with Sien Hoornik, a pregnant prostitute who already had an illegitimate child. Van Gogh painted a few pictures in The Hague, but drawing remained his main passion. He drew from live models whenever he could.
Van Gogh's apprenticeship
In September 1883, he decided to break off relations with Sien and follow in the footsteps of artists such as Van Rappard and Mauve, trying his luck in the picturesque province of Drenthe. After three months, however, lacking drawing materials and models, he was forced to leave. He moved back in with his parents, who had settled in the village of Nuenen, in North Brabant, near Eindhoven. In Nuenen, Van Gogh began to paint regularly, inspired mainly by the French painter Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), famous throughout Europe for his rural scenes of peasant life. Van Gogh set to work with an iron will, depicting the lives of villagers and humble workers. He also produced numerous scenes of weavers. In May 1884, he moved into premises rented from the priest of the local Catholic church, which he used as a studio. By the end of 1884, he was busy painting and drawing a major series of peasant heads and hands in preparation for a large, complex painting. In 1885, feeling the need for proper artistic training, Van Gogh enrolled at the Antwerp Academy. He found the classes tedious, but was greatly impressed by the city and its museums. He fell under the spell of Peter Paul Rubens' palette and brushwork, and discovered Japanese prints.
His first Dutch masterpieces
In April 1885, these studies culminated in the masterpiece of his Dutch period, The Potato Eaters, which Van Gogh himself always considered his best painting. Under a single oil lamp, at nightfall, a peasant family gathers around a table, sharing a dish of potatoes and a hot black beverage. Although the faces are close to caricature, the scene is very sober, and Van Gogh succeeds in giving dignity to the precariousness of these peasants. During the summer, he continued his studies of the peasants' work in the fields. Van Gogh could no longer find models, as the priest forbade his parishioners to pose for him. He turned instead to landscape painting, inspired in part by a visit to Amsterdam's recently inaugurated Rijksmuseum. Joining his brother in Paris, Van Gogh took classes at the Atelier Cormon, where he met Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, among others, and also discovered the recent work of Impressionists Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet. He found that the dark palette he had developed in Holland was outdated. To brighten it up, he began painting still lifes of flowers. His search for his own language led him to experiment with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques. He befriended Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Paul Signac and Georges Seurat. This was the period in which he produced a number of self-portraits, using very light colors and fragmented brushstrokes.
The Arlesian period, illness and death
Settled in Arles, Van Gogh worked feverishly: Vue d'Arles aux iris, Les Tournesols, Les Barques sur la plage, L'Arlésienne... His painting takes a turn. Van Gogh lets the light of southern France swirl around the objects and figures he paints. The vibrancy of these canvases becomes totally mastered, and his style, with its lively, moving strokes, remains inimitable. He freed himself from traditional representation in favor of a simplification of forms and a palette of brilliant tones. It was at this time that his relationship with Gauguin, who had come to join him in Arles, became tumultuous. In a fit of delirium, he cut off a piece of his ear. This was followed by two stays at the Saint-Rémy nursing home, where he continued his work: Les Blésjaunes au cyprès, Champs d'oliviers. In 1890, he returned to Paris, then settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, under the supervision of Dr. Gachet, a friend of Pissaro and Cézanne. La Mairie à Auvers and Le Champ deblé aux corbeaux, in which he expresses his dramatic lyricism, date from this period. He shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died two days later. Theo, who had stored most of Vincent's work in Paris, died six months later.
Van Gogh's posterity
In February 1891, Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger (1862-1925), returned to Holland with the collection of works by her brother-in-law, Vincent van Gogh, and was determined that he should receive the recognition he deserved. Two hundred paintings made up the collection, which she had insured. In all, they are valued at 2,600 florins. She worked relentlessly to show his works and gather together his important correspondence with his brother Theo. The year 1891 remains an important date for the artist's recognition, as her letters to Émile Bernard are published in the Mercure de France. Meanwhile, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger succeeded in organizing several significant exhibitions of the artist's work in Holland (The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam), so much so that by the beginning of the twentieth century, there were more than 20 Van Gogh exhibitions in his native country. The 1901 Salon des Indépendants marked a decisive date for the artist's posterity. It was there that he was spotted by two great art collectors, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin. The artist Edgar Degas was one of the first buyers of Van Gogh's paintings. In 1914, Van Gogh's correspondence with Theo found a publisher, again thanks to Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who wrote an introduction to the book. Thanks to her, seventy paintings and some thirty drawings joined the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, when, a few years later, the National Gallery in London bought a still life of sunflowers from her for 15,000 florins in 1924, five times the initial price of the entire collection of the sister-in-law, who finally died in 1925. Another woman followed in Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger's footsteps, art critic Jacob Baart de la Faille, who published a catalog raisonné in 1928. This posthumous commercial success would never be denied, and was mirrored by art lovers: in 1930, over 120,000 people flocked to New York's Museum of Modern Art to admire Van Gogh's paintings!
The creation of the Van Gogh Museum and the media success of today
Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger had not said her last word. She religiously preserved her most precious Van Gogh masterpieces, and half a century after his death, her son Vincent Willem, heir to the family fortune, founded the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1973. Today, we can admire the works that the artist painted in the most destitute conditions: The Potato Eaters, the famous sunflowers and other self-portraits, including the one he painted after cutting off his ear. A precursor of the Fauves and Expressionism, this visionary, almost ignored by his contemporaries, became a legendary figure in the 20th century. His work, which he intended to express the terrible passions of humanity, has found an audience today rarely equaled. In 2011, Van Gogh: The Life calls into question his death by suicide and sheds new light on the artist's life. A must-read biography, recommended by the Van Gogh Museum itself. In 2016, Bernadette Murphy's book Van Gogh's Ear: the True Story unravels the mystery of the ear episode, with supporting evidence. Recently, the Van Gogh Museum formally contested the authenticity of the "unpublished" drawings published by Le Seuil. The museum celebrated its 50th anniversary in spring 2023.
