Vincent van Gogh, the painter who explained every canvas in writing and was misread for a century

Vincent van Gogh

Photo: Vincent van Gogh / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 30, 1853 Zundert
Died	July 29, 1890 (37)
Occupation	Painter

In a museum set inside a Dutch national park, eighty-eight paintings by Vincent van Gogh now hang together, and the arrangement ignores the order he painted them in. The curators at the Kröller-Müller have grouped them around faith, hope and love, three words a former lay preacher would have recognised. Walk the rooms and the familiar story about him starts to look thin. The man in the legend paints in fits of madness. The paintings on those walls were planned, repeated, revised and described in advance, often in letters to his brother Theo, which laid out what each canvas was meant to do before the paint was dry.

That gap between the method and the myth is the most interesting thing about him. Van Gogh wrote more than six hundred letters to Theo alone, explaining colour choices, prices of canvas, the books he was reading and the painters he was copying. The world read them and still preferred the version with the razor. More than a century later his pictures sell for tens of millions of dollars, museums restructure their buildings around them, and the question of who he actually was keeps returning.

A minister’s son who failed at everything else first

He was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, a village in North Brabant near the Belgian border, the eldest surviving son of Theodorus van Gogh, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. Art entered his life through the family trade rather than through talent spotted early. In July 1869 his uncle Cent found him a post at the art dealers Goupil & Cie in The Hague, and after his training he was sent to the firm’s London branch on Southampton Street, lodging in Stockwell. At twenty he was earning more than his father.

The career did not last. Transferred to Paris, increasingly absorbed by religion and indifferent to customers, he was dismissed in 1876. In April that year he went back to England to work, unpaid, as a supply teacher at a small boarding school in Ramsgate, then followed its owner to Isleworth, west of London. Teaching, he told Theo, was the easy part: “giving the lessons isn’t so difficult, but it’ll be more difficult to make the boys learn them.” The following year his family sent him to Amsterdam to prepare for the theology entrance examination under his uncle Johannes Stricker. He failed it.

In January 1879 he took a post as a missionary at Petit-Wasmes, in the coal-mining Borinage district of Belgium. He gave his comfortable room at a bakery to a homeless man and slept on straw in a hut. The church authorities dismissed him for “undermining the dignity of the priesthood.” By the summer of 1880 he was back in the Borinage, at Cuesmes, lodging with a miner and drawing the people around him, because Theo had suggested he take art seriously. Late that year he enrolled at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels to study anatomy and perspective. He was twenty-seven and had decided, finally, what he was.

The Hague and Nuenen: a painter of peasants in brown

His first real teacher was Anton Mauve, a successful painter of The Hague School and a cousin by marriage, who took him on as a student at the end of 1881 and introduced him to watercolour. The arrangement soured within months, partly over drawing from plaster casts and partly because Mauve learned that Van Gogh was living with Clasina Maria Hoornik, known as Sien, a pregnant woman who had worked as a prostitute, and her young daughter. That household broke up too. After a lonely stretch in Drenthe, in the north of the Netherlands, he moved in late 1883 to his parents’ new parsonage in Nuenen.

Nuenen is where the early Van Gogh took shape. He painted weavers at their looms and peasants in their cottages, completing nearly two hundred oil paintings in two years, almost all in dark earth tones. His model was Jean-François Millet, the French painter of rural labour, whom he admired with a convert’s intensity. His father died suddenly in March 1885. A few weeks later he sent Theo his first major work, The Potato Eaters, a dim interior of a family sharing a meal by lamplight. Theo’s answer was blunt: the pictures were too dark and nothing like the bright Impressionism that was selling in Paris. That August his work was shown in public for the first time, in the shop windows of a dealer in The Hague.

In November 1885 he moved to Antwerp, where he lived on bread, coffee and tobacco, studied Rubens in the museums and bought Japanese woodblock prints in the docklands. He enrolled at the city’s academy in January 1886 and quarrelled with his teachers almost at once. Asked to draw the Venus de Milo, he produced the torso of a Flemish peasant woman, and when the instructor corrected it hard enough to tear the paper, Van Gogh shouted back that a woman must have hips.

Paris: where the colour arrived

He arrived in Paris in March 1886 and moved in with Theo, first on the rue Laval and then at 54 rue Lepic in Montmartre. He studied briefly at Fernand Cormon’s studio, where he met Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who drew him in pastel. He bought paint from Julien “Père” Tanguy, whose portrait he painted more than once. Under the influence of the Impressionists, the Neo-Impressionist dot and the thick, jewelled surfaces of Adolphe Monticelli, the brown palette disappeared. He copied Japanese prints by Hiroshige in oil, and he painted himself again and again, because a mirror was cheaper than a model.

The two years in Paris turned a painter of peasants into a colourist. They also wore him out. By early 1888, drinking heavily and coughing, he left for the south.

Arles, the Yellow House and the Sunflowers

Van Gogh reached Arles in February 1888 and in roughly fifteen months produced around two hundred paintings and more than a hundred drawings and watercolours, among them orchards in blossom, harvests, the night café, Café Terrace at Night and The Red Vineyard. On 1 May he leased four rooms at 2 Place Lamartine for fifteen francs a month, the building he would paint as The Yellow House. He wanted it to become a studio of the south, a working community of painters, and he invited Paul Gauguin to be its first member.

The Sunflowers were painted to decorate Gauguin’s room. Van Gogh treated them as a deliberate series, repeating and varying the composition and later imagining two of them as wings flanking his portrait of Augustine Roulin, La Berceuse, wife of the postman Joseph Roulin, whose family he painted repeatedly. Gauguin arrived late in October. The two men painted the same motifs side by side, visited the Musée Fabre in Montpellier together and argued constantly.

On the evening of 23 December 1888, after a confrontation with Gauguin, Van Gogh went back to his room and severed his left ear, wholly or in part, with a razor. He wrapped it in paper and delivered it to a woman at a brothel the two men frequented. He was found unconscious the next morning; the hospital diagnosis was acute mania with generalised delirium. He later had no memory of the night. Gauguin left for Paris. Van Gogh recovered enough to paint Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear in January 1889, but in March thirty of his neighbours petitioned the police about “the red-headed madman,” and his house was closed.

Saint-Rémy and the night sky he thought had gone too far

On 8 May 1889 he entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, voluntarily, accompanied by a Protestant clergyman. He was allowed to work, first in the garden and later in the surrounding fields. Irises was probably his first painting there. In June he painted The Starry Night, the view from his window recomposed with a village and a flame-shaped cypress. He was not pleased with it. In a letter he wrote that this kind of abstraction had gone too far and that reality had receded too far into the background.

Short of subjects, he made copies of other artists’ work from black-and-white reproductions, including Millet’s The Sower and Noonday Rest, which he described as translations into colour, the way a musician interprets a score. This is the part of his output that the legend has the hardest time explaining: a supposedly frenzied painter sitting in an asylum, systematically reworking prints by a master he had admired for a decade.

Auvers-sur-Oise and the last seventy days

Recognition began while he was still alive. In January 1890 the critic Albert Aurier published an article in the Mercure de France calling him a genius. In February the Brussels avant-garde group Les XX showed his work, and the painter Anna Boch bought The Red Vineyard for 400 francs, the only sale during his lifetime that is documented beyond doubt. In March, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, Claude Monet said his paintings were the best in the show.

In May 1890 he left Saint-Rémy for Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, where the physician and amateur painter Paul Gachet agreed to keep an eye on him. In roughly seventy days he painted some seventy canvases, among them Portrait of Dr Gachet, the church at Auvers and Wheatfield with Crows, and made his only etching. On 27 July 1890 he shot himself in the chest with a revolver, either in a wheat field or in a barn, and walked back to the Auberge Ravoux, where he was lodging. Theo reached him the next morning. He died in the early hours of 29 July, aged thirty-seven. According to Theo, his last words were: “The sadness will last forever.”

In just over ten years he had made about 2,100 works, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life.

The madman, the martyr and the paperwork

The popular image of Van Gogh was built after his death, largely out of his own letters, and it bent them. Their publication in 1914 created the figure of the painter who suffered for his art. Irving Stone’s 1934 novel Lust for Life and Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film turned that figure into a Hollywood character, and Don McLean’s 1971 song “Vincent” fixed the soundtrack. The ear, the asylum and the gunshot became the plot, and the canvases became evidence of a breakdown.

The record is less cooperative. Doctors and historians have proposed dozens of retrospective diagnoses, from bipolar disorder to epilepsy, but the consensus is that his illness came in episodes separated by long periods of normal functioning, and that he rarely worked during the attacks themselves. The paintings belong mostly to the lucid stretches. Nor was he the unrecognised outcast of the story: by the last year of his life he had a serious critic in his corner, a sale at Les XX and Monet’s approval. Even his death has been disputed. A 2011 biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith argued he was shot accidentally by a local teenager, a theory that Julian Schnabel’s 2018 film At Eternity’s Gate adopted; the Van Gogh Museum’s researchers have rejected it and maintain suicide as the most likely account.

The money tells the same story from the other direction. Irises sold for 54 million dollars in 1987 to the Australian businessman Alan Bond, who could not pay for it; the Getty Museum later bought it privately. Orchard with Cypresses reached a record 117.2 million dollars at Christie’s New York in 2022. In November 2025 Parisian Novels, a still life of yellow-covered books from his Paris period, sold for 63 million dollars at Sotheby’s New York, the highest price yet for a work from those years. A painter whose brother could not sell him now sits among the most expensive artists ever auctioned, and the price is often justified by the same tragic narrative that the letters complicate.

Jo van Gogh-Bonger and the woman who built the reputation

Theo died in January 1891, six months after Vincent. His widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, was left with an infant son and several hundred paintings, drawings and letters that almost nobody wanted. She organised exhibitions, placed works with dealers, sold carefully and edited the correspondence that she eventually published. Without her there would be no reputation to argue about.

The paintings then did their own work. A large retrospective at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1901 excited André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck and fed directly into Fauvism. Group shows at the Sonderbund in Cologne in 1912 and the Armory Show in New York in 1913 carried him into German Expressionism and American modernism. In 1957 Francis Bacon painted a series of studies after The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, a Van Gogh self-portrait destroyed during the Second World War, quoting his line that real painters paint things as they feel them to be.

Most of the finest early purchases ended up in two Dutch collections. Helene Kröller-Müller bought the bulk of hers between 1908 and 1930 and built a museum to house them. The family estate passed to Theo’s son, Vincent Willem van Gogh, who negotiated with the Dutch state to create a foundation and a dedicated museum; the Van Gogh Museum, designed by Gerrit Rietveld and completed after his death by Kisho Kurokawa, opened in Amsterdam in 1973.

Van Gogh on screen

Cinema has returned to him more often than to almost any other painter. In Lust for Life, Kirk Douglas played Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn won an Oscar for his Gauguin. Loving Vincent, released in 2017, was made from thousands of oil paintings in his style and was nominated for the Academy Award for animated feature. In At Eternity’s Gate, Willem Dafoe, then in his sixties and decades older than Van Gogh ever got, played him and received an Oscar nomination. Each film reaches for the same handful of scenes, and each tends to cast the letters as voice-over for a tragedy.

Van Gogh in 2026

The year has given the work more room than the legend. At the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Van Gogh, All Our Paintings brings the museum’s eighty-eight canvases together for the first time since 1984, from 15 September 2026 to 3 January 2027. Director Benno Tempel told AFP he did not think so many had been shown together in this century, because some are usually on loan, in restoration or travelling. For most of the year a large group of them had been touring Japan, closing at the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo in August.

In Philadelphia, the Museum of Art paired its turquoise-background Sunflowers from January 1889 with the yellow-background version lent by the National Gallery in London, from June to 11 October, one of the rare occasions those pictures have travelled. In Amsterdam, the Van Gogh Museum opened the year with Yellow: Beyond Van Gogh’s Colour, built around its own January 1889 repetition, and the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch is showing Van Gogh’s influence on Jan Sluijters until 21 February 2027. The year also marks the 150th anniversary of his teaching months in Ramsgate and Isleworth.

The most consequential news concerns the building. On 8 October 2026 the Van Gogh Museum announced a settlement with the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, reached through mediation, over funding for a renovation of the more than fifty-year-old building. Work is planned to begin in the autumn of 2028, with the museum partially open and the permanent collection accessible throughout. “We are relieved and grateful to be able to move forward with this important project,” said its general director, Emilie Gordenker.

What the paintings continue to argue, read next to the letters, is that intensity and discipline were never opposites for him. The man who copied Millet in an asylum and the man who painted The Starry Night were the same worker, keeping accounts with his brother and trying to make each canvas say a little more than the last.

Tags: art, artists, painters, Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, Paul Gauguin

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