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\u2014the 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 Th\u00e9o, who had rushed there from Paris. <\/p>\n\n
This last letter, found on his person, is part of a collection of 820 letters written in his own hand<\/strong> between 1872 and 1890. During his ten-year career as a painter, Vincent van Gogh wrote almost continuously<\/strong>. Mostly to his brother Theo\u2014about 660 letters\u2014but also to his sister Wilhelmine and his painter friends Anthon van Rappard, \u00c9mile 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. <\/p>\n\n 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<\/strong> and the Huygens Institute in The Hague. The result\u2014six volumes, 2,240 pages, 4,300 illustrations, with an authorized French translation published by Actes Sud\u2014is now one of the most acclaimed critical editions in the history of art publishing. It received a Europa Nostra Grand Prize in 2010. <\/p>\n\n It is that voice\u2014that of Van Gogh the writer\u2014that can best tell the story of Van Gogh the painter. This article follows that thread. <\/p>\n\n 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<\/strong> that, over several generations, combined two traditions<\/strong>: that of Protestant ministers<\/strong> and that of art dealers<\/strong>. Three of Vincent\u2019s uncles were art dealers; one of them\u2014another Vincent van Gogh, known as \u201cCent\u201d\u2014was a partner in the Parisian art dealer Goupil & Cie. <\/p>\n\n Vincent is the eldest of the couple\u2019s 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 Th\u00e9odore\u2014Th\u00e9o<\/strong> \u2014born in 1857. This brotherly bond, forged in adolescence, would serve as the emotional, financial, and intellectual backbone<\/strong> of Vincent\u2019s entire life. Without Th\u00e9o, there would be neither Van Gogh\u2019s art nor any memory of Van Gogh. Between 1876 and 1880, Vincent van Gogh was not a painter<\/strong>. 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<\/strong>, 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\u2014he had \u201cgone too far in imitating Christ.\u201d <\/p>\n\n This episode, often dismissed in biographies as a strange digression, is in fact fundamental<\/strong>. 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<\/strong>, a radical identification with the humiliated<\/strong>, and a devotion to sincerity<\/strong> as a<\/strong> value superior to any career. When he began to paint, it was initially to depict peasants, weavers, and peat cutters. <\/p>\n\n 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n He has ten years left to live.<\/p>\n\n For five years, from 1880 to 1885, Van Gogh learned to draw and paint, mainly on his own<\/strong>. He briefly enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and took lessons from his cousin-in-law, the painter Anton Mauve<\/strong>, in The Hague, but he developed his skills primarily through observation and copying<\/strong>. He tirelessly copied the works of Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet<\/strong>, whom he truly revered\u2014a peasant painter whose depiction of the dignity of the humble he admired. <\/p>\n\n 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<\/strong>, working for Goupil. He sent his brother a regular monthly allowance\u2014about 150 francs a month\u2014which constituted Vincent\u2019s entire income<\/strong>. This financial dependence would be one of the recurring themes in their correspondence throughout the decade. <\/p>\n\n Van Gogh\u2019s 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<\/strong>: *The Potato Eaters<\/em>*. 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<\/strong>, painted in shades of dark copper, which brings to a close ten years of reflection on peasant dignity. <\/p>\n\n Vincent is convinced that it is with this painting that he has just become a painter<\/strong>. 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. <\/p>\n\n 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Paris in 1886: the year of the last Impressionist exhibition<\/strong>. It was a time of great excitement during the final years of Manet\u2019s life (he died in 1883), marked by the rise of Seurat and Neo-Impressionism, and the arrival of Japanese prints in avant-garde circles. Th\u00e9o worked for the Boussod, Valadon & Cie gallery (successor to Goupil) and socialized with all the painters<\/strong>: Pissarro, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, \u00c9mile Bernard, and Gauguin. Vincent met them all. <\/p>\n\n His color palette bursts forth. The browns of Nuenen fade away<\/strong>. Under the influence of Pissarro, who introduced him to Divisionism; Signac, who painted with him in Asni\u00e8res; and above all, Japanese prints<\/strong> \u2014of which he began to build a collection (482 pieces, now in the Van Gogh Museum)\u2014 Vincent went from painting in somber tones to creating works bursting with vivid colors in just two years<\/strong>. The views of Montmartre, the portraits of Father Tanguy\u2014his paint supplier\u2014and his numerous self-portraits\u2014 nothing was the same as before<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n But Paris was wearing him out. The noise, the hustle and bustle, the alcohol, the arguments with Th\u00e9o. At the end of the winter of 1888, he decided to head south. He was searching for the Japanese sunshine<\/strong> he imagined he would find in Provence. <\/p>\n\n Van Gogh arrived in Arles on February 20, 1888. He would remain there for fifteen months<\/strong>, until May 1889. These fifteen months were the most productive period of his life<\/strong>: approximately 350 paintings and 200 drawings<\/strong> \u2014half of his total output, produced in just fifteen percent of his career. <\/p>\n\n 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<\/strong> on Place Lamartine and dreamed of establishing a \u201cMidi\u201d studio<\/strong> there that would bring together the painters of his generation. The Sunflowers<\/em> were painted to decorate the bedroom of Gauguin, whom he invited to join him. Gauguin arrived on October 23, 1888. <\/p>\n\n The nine weeks the two painters spent together in Arles would end in disaster<\/strong>. Clashing temperaments, irreconcilable aesthetic theories, alcohol, exhaustion. On December 23, 1888, after a violent argument\u2014the details remain partly unclear, as the two protagonists\u2019 accounts differ\u2014Vincent cut off his left ear<\/strong> and brought it, wrapped in a cloth, to a local prostitute. Gauguin left Arles the next day. They would never see each other again<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n Vincent was hospitalized. He suffered a series of severe episodes<\/strong> over the following months. On May 8, 1889, at his own request and with Theo\u2019s consent, he was admitted to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole<\/strong> asylum in Saint-R\u00e9my-de-Provence<\/strong>, directed by Dr. Th\u00e9ophile Peyron. He would remain there for a year. <\/p>\n\n The asylum was not a creative failure. On the contrary\u2014Van Gogh painted 150 more paintings<\/strong> there, including some of his absolute masterpieces: *The Starry Night<\/em> * (June 1889), *Irises<\/em>*, and *Wheat Fields<\/em>*. It was during this period, in a letter to Theo dated September 5 or 6, 1889, that he wrote this now-famous sentence: <\/p>\n\n “It is difficult to know oneself\u2014but it is not easy to paint oneself either.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n \u2014 Letter 800, to Th\u00e9o, Saint-R\u00e9my-de-Provence<\/em><\/p>\n\n What is the exact diagnosis of Van Gogh\u2019s illness? The question remains a subject of debate among historians and doctors<\/strong>. Temporal lobe epilepsy, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, tertiary syphilis, lead poisoning from paints, acute alcoholism\u2014each of these hypotheses has been put forward by reputable specialists, and there is no consensus on any of them<\/strong>. What the letters document is Vincent\u2019s acute awareness<\/strong> of his own condition. He was not an inarticulate madman. He was a man who described, in great detail, what he called his \u201cseizures\u201d and the constant struggle he waged to remain able to paint. <\/p>\n\n On May 19, 1890, Vincent left the asylum in Saint-R\u00e9my. He joined Theo in Paris for a few days, then settled on May 20 in Auvers-sur-Oise<\/strong>, a village northwest of the capital. Theo and Pissarro had recommended a local doctor to him: Dr. Paul Gachet<\/strong>, a homeopath, amateur painter (who signed his works under the pseudonym Van Ryssel), and a friend of the Impressionists. Vincent stayed atthe Ravoux Inn<\/strong> on Place de la Mairie for a modest fee. <\/p>\n\n The seventy days<\/strong> in Auvers would prove, proportionally, even more productive than those in Arles: about 80 paintings and 60 drawings<\/strong> 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\u2014some 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. <\/p>\n\n And finally, recognition began to come his way<\/strong>. In January 1890, an article by the critic Albert Aurier<\/strong> appeared in the *Mercure de France*<\/em>, 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<\/strong> purchased *La Vigne rouge*<\/em> for 400 francs\u2014 the only painting Van Gogh sold during his lifetime<\/strong>, contrary to a persistent legend that claims he sold several others. <\/p>\n\n But Th\u00e9o is in a vulnerable state<\/strong>. His health is declining (he has syphilis), his newborn son\u2014Vincent Willem, the godson of his painter uncle\u2014is 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<\/strong> and returns feeling unsettled. <\/p>\n\n On July 27, 1890, in the late afternoon, Vincent went out into the fields with a revolver\u2014which, 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\u201329, 1890, shortly after 1:00 a.m. He was thirty-seven years old. <\/p>\n\n The accepted version is that it was a suicide<\/strong>. This is what Vincent himself is said to have told the doctor who came to see him, and it is what official historiography\u2014including, today, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam\u2014has always maintained. An alternative theory<\/strong>, published in 2011 by American biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith<\/strong>, suggests that Vincent may have been accidentally injured by two teenage boys from the village\u2014the Secr\u00e9tan brothers\u2014who 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<\/strong> that the scientific community acknowledges but does not validate. <\/p>\n\n Th\u00e9o, devastated, died of syphilis six months later<\/strong>, on January 25, 1891. He is buried next to his brother in the small cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise. <\/p>\n\n 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<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n The 820 letters written in his own hand<\/strong> constitute what the editors of the critical edition have called an \u201cideal autobiography<\/strong> \u201d\u2014a text that spans eighteen years without being conceived as a book, and yet, letter by letter, offers the reader an intimate understanding<\/strong> of an artist\u2019s life unlike any other painter has ever left behind.<\/p>\n\n What these letters reveal about the myth of the \u201ccursed artist<\/strong> \u201d is striking. The Van Gogh of these letters is erudite<\/strong>: he quotes passages from the Bible, Zola, Dickens, and Carlyle by heart. He is deeply knowledgeable about painting<\/strong>: he discusses Rembrandt, Hals, Millet, Delacroix, and Monticelli with the precision of a connoisseur. He is in constant dialogue<\/strong> with the artistic world of his time. He writes superbly<\/strong> in three languages (Dutch, French, and English), and some of his passages rise to the level of true literature<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n He is also\u2014and above all\u2014a painter who conceives his paintings in words before creating them<\/strong>. In his letters to Theo, he describes the paintings before<\/strong> they are painted\u2014in terms of colors, compositions, and intentions. He also describes them afterward<\/strong>, explaining them, defending them, and commenting on them. Van Gogh\u2019s painting is not a silent cry. It is a work commented on by its creator from within<\/strong>, day after day. <\/p>\n\n Regarding the significance of this correspondence itself, Vincent wrote in 1888 from Arles:<\/p>\n\n “It might be interesting to keep the artists’ correspondence.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n \u2014 Letter 589, to Th\u00e9o, Arles, 1888<\/em><\/p>\n\n He didn’t know just how much. It was precisely this correspondence\u2014preserved by Theo and later by his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger<\/strong>\u2014that 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. <\/p>\n\n The final word belongs to Vincent himself. In the last letter found on him on the day of his death\u2014an unsent draft addressed to Theo\u2014he writes: <\/p>\n\n “Well, as for my work, I risk my life for it, and it has driven me half mad.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n \u2014 Letter 902, to Th\u00e9o, Auvers-sur-Oise, July 23, 1890<\/em><\/p>\n\n 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<\/strong> what he was doing.<\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n \u2014 M<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2014the final draft will never be sent. Four days later, he will go out for a walk in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1577,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"salle":[],"class_list":["post-1576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"acf":[],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":33,"label":"Artists"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/960px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project-842x1024.jpg",842,1024,true],"author_info":{"display_name":"admin5462","author_link":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/author\/admin5462\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":33,"name":"Artists","slug":"artists","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":33,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":44,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":33,"category_count":44,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Artists","category_nicename":"artists","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":false,"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/960px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg",960,1167,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/960px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/960px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project-247x300.jpg",247,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/960px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project-768x934.jpg",768,934,true],"large":["https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/960px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project-842x1024.jpg",842,1024,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/960px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg",960,1167,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/960px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg",960,1167,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"admin5462","author_link":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/author\/admin5462\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"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\u2014the final draft will never be sent. Four days later, he will go out for a walk in the...","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1579,"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions\/1579"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"salle","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/salle?post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Rectory Child<\/h2>\n\n
The Theological DetourThe Theological Detour<\/h2>\n\n
The Dutch Period \u2014 *The Potato Eaters*<\/h2>\n\n
Paris or the Color Revolution<\/h2>\n\n
Arles \u2014 fifteen months, three hundred fifty paintings<\/h2>\n\n
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Auvers, Last Summer<\/h2>\n\n
The Van Gogh of Literature \u2014 A Painter-Writer<\/h2>\n\n
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Further Reading<\/h2>\n\n
Primary sources cited in this article<\/h3>\n\n
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Leading Modern Studies<\/h2>\n\n
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To view his works<\/h2>\n\n
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Also check out on Hors Cadre<\/h2>\n\n
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