Artist

Vincent van Gogh — the artist who wrote as much as he painted

1853, Groot-Zundert — 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise

Post-Impressionism

Timeline

1853

Born in Groot-Zundert

1880

Decides to become a painter at age 27

1885

The Potato Eaters

1888

Arrives in Arles, color revolution

1890

Died in Auvers-sur-Oise

Auvers-sur-Oise, July 23, 1890. In a room rented at the Ravoux Inn, a thirty-seven-year-old man writes to his brother. He had already written the day before. He would write again the next day. The letter is unfinished—the final draft will never be sent. Four days later, he will go out for a walk in the fields with a revolver. He will return wounded. He will die on July 29, at the inn, in the arms of Théo, who had rushed there from Paris.

This last letter, found on his person, is part of a collection of 820 letters written in his own hand between 1872 and 1890. During his ten-year career as a painter, Vincent van Gogh wrote almost continuously. Mostly to his brother Theo—about 660 letters—but also to his sister Wilhelmine and his painter friends Anthon van Rappard, Émile Bernard, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Signac. This vast collection of words, together with some 860 oil paintings and more than 1,000 drawings, constitutes one of the most extensive bodies of work ever left by an artist on his own vocation.

This correspondence, which had long been poorly edited, was the subject of a monumental scholarly project between 1994 and 2009, led by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Huygens Institute in The Hague. The result—six volumes, 2,240 pages, 4,300 illustrations, with an authorized French translation published by Actes Sud—is now one of the most acclaimed critical editions in the history of art publishing. It received a Europa Nostra Grand Prize in 2010.

It is that voice—that of Van Gogh the writer—that can best tell the story of Van Gogh the painter. This article follows that thread.

The Rectory Child

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, a village in North Brabant, in the southern Netherlands. His father, Theodore, was a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church. His mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, was the daughter of a bookbinder to the Dutch court. The van Gogh family was an old bourgeois family that, over several generations, combined two traditions: that of Protestant ministers and that of art dealers. Three of Vincent’s uncles were art dealers; one of them—another Vincent van Gogh, known as “Cent”—was a partner in the Parisian art dealer Goupil & Cie.

Vincent is the eldest of the couple’s six surviving children. He would play a paradoxical role among his siblings: torn between the Protestant strictness of his father, whom he first revered and then defied, and the unwavering support of his younger brother Théodore—Théo —born in 1857. This brotherly bond, forged in adolescence, would serve as the emotional, financial, and intellectual backbone of Vincent’s entire life. Without Théo, there would be neither Van Gogh’s art nor any memory of Van Gogh.
At age sixteen, in 1869, Vincent began an apprenticeship at Goupil & Cie, the art gallery where his uncle Cent was already working. He worked successively in The Hague, London, and then Paris. For seven years, he experienced the art trade from the inside —selling prints, reproductions, and paintings by contemporary artists. This experience would leave a lasting mark on him. Later, he refused to view painting as a commodity, and it was precisely this refusal that led to his dismissal in 1876.

The Theological DetourThe Theological Detour

Between 1876 and 1880, Vincent van Gogh was not a painter. He was searching for something else. At first, he believed he had a religious calling. He prepared for theology exams, which he failed. He became a lay preacher in the Borinage, the mining region of Belgian Hainaut, among the underground miners. There he lived in extreme poverty, gave his clothes to the poor, and slept on straw. The church mission terminated his contract—he had “gone too far in imitating Christ.”

This episode, often dismissed in biographies as a strange digression, is in fact fundamental. It establishes three traits that would remain with Vincent for the rest of his life: a mystical connection to the peasant and working-class world, a radical identification with the humiliated, and a devotion to sincerity as a value superior to any career. When he began to paint, it was initially to depict peasants, weavers, and peat cutters.

It was precisely while in the Borinage, in 1880, at the age of twenty-seven, that he made the decision that would change his life: to become a painter.

He has ten years left to live.

The Dutch Period — The Potato Eaters

For five years, from 1880 to 1885, Van Gogh learned to draw and paint, mainly on his own. He briefly enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and took lessons from his cousin-in-law, the painter Anton Mauve, in The Hague, but he developed his skills primarily through observation and copying. He tirelessly copied the works of Jean-François Millet, whom he truly revered—a peasant painter whose depiction of the dignity of the humble he admired.

During those years, he lived in Etten with his parents, in The Hague, in Drenthe, and then in Nuenen, where his father had been posted. Theo, meanwhile, was in Paris, working for Goupil. He sent his brother a regular monthly allowance—about 150 francs a month—which constituted Vincent’s entire income. This financial dependence would be one of the recurring themes in their correspondence throughout the decade.

Van Gogh’s color palette during those years was somber: browns, blacks, sienna, and deep shadows. He painted peasants, weavers, and humble still lifes. In 1885, in Nuenen, he completed what he would long consider his early masterpiece: *The Potato Eaters*. Five peasants seated around a table by the light of a kerosene lamp, sharing a dinner of potatoes. A scene with the solemnity of a religious fresco, painted in shades of dark copper, which brings to a close ten years of reflection on peasant dignity.

Vincent is convinced that it is with this painting that he has just become a painter. Theo, who is hosting him in Paris, is less enthusiastic. He finds the work too dark, too austere for the market. This is one of the first major aesthetic disagreements between the brothers.

Paris or the Color Revolution

In February 1886, Vincent arrived in Paris unannounced. He moved in with Theo on Rue Lepic in Montmartre. He was thirty-three years old. Everything will change in two years.

Paris in 1886: the year of the last Impressionist exhibition. It was a time of great excitement during the final years of Manet’s life (he died in 1883), marked by the rise of Seurat and Neo-Impressionism, and the arrival of Japanese prints in avant-garde circles. Théo worked for the Boussod, Valadon & Cie gallery (successor to Goupil) and socialized with all the painters: Pissarro, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard, and Gauguin. Vincent met them all.

His color palette bursts forth. The browns of Nuenen fade away. Under the influence of Pissarro, who introduced him to Divisionism; Signac, who painted with him in Asnières; and above all, Japanese prints —of which he began to build a collection (482 pieces, now in the Van Gogh Museum)— Vincent went from painting in somber tones to creating works bursting with vivid colors in just two years. The views of Montmartre, the portraits of Father Tanguy—his paint supplier—and his numerous self-portraits— nothing was the same as before.

But Paris was wearing him out. The noise, the hustle and bustle, the alcohol, the arguments with Théo. At the end of the winter of 1888, he decided to head south. He was searching for the Japanese sunshine he imagined he would find in Provence.

Arles — fifteen months, three hundred fifty paintings

Van Gogh arrived in Arles on February 20, 1888. He would remain there for fifteen months, until May 1889. These fifteen months were the most productive period of his life: approximately 350 paintings and 200 drawings —half of his total output, produced in just fifteen percent of his career.

For him, Arles was a revelation. The sun. The light. The colors he had known only from Japanese prints and which he now discovered in real life. He rented the Yellow House on Place Lamartine and dreamed of establishing a “Midi” studio there that would bring together the painters of his generation. The Sunflowers were painted to decorate the bedroom of Gauguin, whom he invited to join him. Gauguin arrived on October 23, 1888.

The nine weeks the two painters spent together in Arles would end in disaster. Clashing temperaments, irreconcilable aesthetic theories, alcohol, exhaustion. On December 23, 1888, after a violent argument—the details remain partly unclear, as the two protagonists’ accounts differ—Vincent cut off his left ear and brought it, wrapped in a cloth, to a local prostitute. Gauguin left Arles the next day. They would never see each other again.

Vincent was hospitalized. He suffered a series of severe episodes over the following months. On May 8, 1889, at his own request and with Theo’s consent, he was admitted to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, directed by Dr. Théophile Peyron. He would remain there for a year.

The asylum was not a creative failure. On the contrary—Van Gogh painted 150 more paintings there, including some of his absolute masterpieces: *The Starry Night * (June 1889), *Irises*, and *Wheat Fields*. It was during this period, in a letter to Theo dated September 5 or 6, 1889, that he wrote this now-famous sentence:

“It is difficult to know oneself—but it is not easy to paint oneself either.”

— Letter 800, to Théo, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

What is the exact diagnosis of Van Gogh’s illness? The question remains a subject of debate among historians and doctors. Temporal lobe epilepsy, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, tertiary syphilis, lead poisoning from paints, acute alcoholism—each of these hypotheses has been put forward by reputable specialists, and there is no consensus on any of them. What the letters document is Vincent’s acute awareness of his own condition. He was not an inarticulate madman. He was a man who described, in great detail, what he called his “seizures” and the constant struggle he waged to remain able to paint.

Auvers, Last Summer

On May 19, 1890, Vincent left the asylum in Saint-Rémy. He joined Theo in Paris for a few days, then settled on May 20 in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village northwest of the capital. Theo and Pissarro had recommended a local doctor to him: Dr. Paul Gachet, a homeopath, amateur painter (who signed his works under the pseudonym Van Ryssel), and a friend of the Impressionists. Vincent stayed atthe Ravoux Inn on Place de la Mairie for a modest fee.

The seventy days in Auvers would prove, proportionally, even more productive than those in Arles: about 80 paintings and 60 drawings in less than ten weeks. Van Gogh painted the village, the church, the portrait of Dr. Gachet, the wheat fields surrounding the town, and the thatched-roof cottages. His brushwork becomes more turbulent, more rhythmic—some art historians see in it the urgency of a man who knows he is in danger, while others see simply the accelerated maturation of a painter at the height of his power.

And finally, recognition began to come his way. In January 1890, an article by the critic Albert Aurier appeared in the *Mercure de France*, hailing Van Gogh as one of the great painters of his generation. The following month, at the Les XX exhibition in Brussels, the painter Anna Boch purchased *La Vigne rouge* for 400 francs— the only painting Van Gogh sold during his lifetime, contrary to a persistent legend that claims he sold several others.

But Théo is in a vulnerable state. His health is declining (he has syphilis), his newborn son—Vincent Willem, the godson of his painter uncle—is ill, and he is considering leaving his gallery to strike out on his own. Vincent, who sees himself as both protected by and dependent on his brother, perceives these uncertainties as an existential threat. He visits Paris in mid-July 1890 and returns feeling unsettled.

On July 27, 1890, in the late afternoon, Vincent went out into the fields with a revolver—which, according to one account, he had borrowed from the innkeeper Ravoux to scare away the crows. He returned with a gunshot wound to the chest. He walked to the inn, went up to his room, spoke with the local doctor, and refused surgery. Theo arrived from Paris the next day. Vincent died during the night of July 28–29, 1890, shortly after 1:00 a.m. He was thirty-seven years old.

The accepted version is that it was a suicide. This is what Vincent himself is said to have told the doctor who came to see him, and it is what official historiography—including, today, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam—has always maintained. An alternative theory, published in 2011 by American biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, suggests that Vincent may have been accidentally injured by two teenage boys from the village—the Secrétan brothers—who had been harassing him for weeks. According to this hypothesis, he took the blame to protect them. This theory was examined by the Van Gogh Museum but was not accepted due to insufficient evidence. It remains a minority hypothesis that the scientific community acknowledges but does not validate.

Théo, devastated, died of syphilis six months later, on January 25, 1891. He is buried next to his brother in the small cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise.

The Van Gogh of Literature — A Painter-Writer

This is where we need to go back to the beginning. Van Gogh wasn’t just a painter. He was a man who spent eighteen years writing.

The 820 letters written in his own hand constitute what the editors of the critical edition have called an “ideal autobiography ”—a text that spans eighteen years without being conceived as a book, and yet, letter by letter, offers the reader an intimate understanding of an artist’s life unlike any other painter has ever left behind.

What these letters reveal about the myth of the “cursed artist ” is striking. The Van Gogh of these letters is erudite: he quotes passages from the Bible, Zola, Dickens, and Carlyle by heart. He is deeply knowledgeable about painting: he discusses Rembrandt, Hals, Millet, Delacroix, and Monticelli with the precision of a connoisseur. He is in constant dialogue with the artistic world of his time. He writes superbly in three languages (Dutch, French, and English), and some of his passages rise to the level of true literature.

He is also—and above all—a painter who conceives his paintings in words before creating them. In his letters to Theo, he describes the paintings before they are painted—in terms of colors, compositions, and intentions. He also describes them afterward, explaining them, defending them, and commenting on them. Van Gogh’s painting is not a silent cry. It is a work commented on by its creator from within, day after day.

Regarding the significance of this correspondence itself, Vincent wrote in 1888 from Arles:

“It might be interesting to keep the artists’ correspondence.”

— Letter 589, to Théo, Arles, 1888

He didn’t know just how much. It was precisely this correspondence—preserved by Theo and later by his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger—that made the posthumous revival of his work possible. Without Johanna, who published the letters as early as the 1900s and organized the first exhibitions, the Van Gogh legend would never have existed.

The final word belongs to Vincent himself. In the last letter found on him on the day of his death—an unsent draft addressed to Theo—he writes:

“Well, as for my work, I risk my life for it, and it has driven me half mad.”

— Letter 902, to Théo, Auvers-sur-Oise, July 23, 1890

That is what it means to read Van Gogh in his own words: to no longer see a madman who painted, but a man who, right up until his last day, was able to describe exactly what he was doing.

Leading Modern Studies

Jan Hulsker, *The New Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches*, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1996. A standard catalog raisonné.
Jacob Baart de la Faille, *The Works of Vincent van Gogh: A Catalog Raisonné*, 4 volumes, Van Oest, Brussels-Paris, 1928.
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, *Van Gogh: The Life*, Random House, 2011 (the biography that presents an alternative theory about his death; read with a critical eye).

To view his works

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam : the world’s largest collection—approximately 200 paintings and 500 drawings by Van Gogh, plus his complete collection of letters, Japanese prints from his personal collection, and a permanent scientific research department.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris: *Starry Night (on the Rhône)*, *Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles*, *The Church at Auvers-sur-Oise*, and several self-portraits.
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (Netherlands): the world’s second-largest collection, featuring, among other works, a version of *The Potato Eaters*.
Auvers-sur-Oise: the Ravoux Inn (where he died; open to visitors), the cemetery where he is buried next to Théo, and the church he painted in June 1890.