Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləɱ vɑŋ ˈɣɔχ] (
);[note 1] 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a post-Impressionist painter of Dutch origin whose work—notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty, and bold color—had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness,[1][2] he died aged 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found).[3][note 2] His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still.
Van Gogh began to draw as a child, and he continued to draw throughout the years that led up to his decision to become an artist. He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches, and prints. His work included self portraits; landscapes; still lifes; portraits; and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields, and sunflowers.
Van Gogh spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers, traveling between The Hague, London, and Paris, after which he taught for a time in England at Isleworth and Ramsgate. One of his early aspirations was to become a pastor, and from 1879 he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium, where he began to sketch people from the local community. In 1885, he painted his first major work, entitled The Potato Eaters. His palette at the time
consisted mainly of somber earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later work. In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. Later, he moved to the south of France and was influenced by the strong sunlight he found there. His work grew brighter in color, and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style that became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.
The extent to which his mental health affected his painting has been a subject of speculation since his death. Despite a widespread tendency to romanticize his ill health, modern critics see an artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence brought about by his bouts of illness. According to art critic Robert Hughes, Van Gogh’s late works show an artist at the height of his ability, completely in control and “longing for concision and grace”.[4]
Gauguin’s visit
When Gauguin agreed to visit Arles, Van Gogh hoped for friendship and for his utopian idea of a collective of artists. In anticipation, that August he painted sunflowers. When Boch visited again, Van Gogh painted a portrait of him, as well as the study The Poet Against a Starry Sky. Boch’s sister Anna (1848–1936), also an artist, purchased The Red Vineyard in 1890.[102][103] In preparation for Gauguin’s visit, Van Gogh bought two beds, on advice from his friend the station’s postal supervisor Joseph Roulin, whose portrait he painted, and on 17 September spent the first night in the still sparsely furnished Yellow House.[104][105] When Gauguin consented to work and live side-by-side in Arles with Van Gogh, he started to work on The Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most ambitious effort he ever undertook.[106] Van Gogh did two chair paintings: Van Gogh’s Chair and Gauguin’s Chair.[107]
After repeated requests, Gauguin finally arrived in Arles on 23 October. During November, the two painted together. Gauguin painted Van Gogh’s portrait The Painter of Sunflowers: Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, and—uncharacteristically—Van Gogh painted some pictures from memory (deferring to Gauguin’s ideas in this) as well as his The Red Vineyard. Notable amongst these “imaginative” paintings is Memory of the Garden at Etten.[108][109] Their first joint outdoor painting exercise produced Les Alyscamps, and was conducted at the Alyscamps.[110]
The two visited Montpellier that December, and viewed works in the Alfred Bruyas collection by Courbet and Delacroix in the Musée Fabre,[111] but their relationship began to deteriorate. Van Gogh greatly admired Gauguin, and desperately wanted to be treated as his equal, but Gauguin was arrogant and domineering, a fact that often frustrated Van Gogh. They quarreled fiercely about art; Van Gogh felt an increasing fear that Gauguin was going to desert him, as a situation he described as one of “excessive tension” reached crisis point.[112]
The precise chain of events that led to the celebrated incident of van Gogh slicing off his ear is not known reliably in detail. The only account attesting a supposed earlier razor attack on Gauguin comes from Gauguin himself some fifteen years later, and biographers agree this account must be considered unreliable and self-serving.[113][114][115] However, it does seem likely that, by 23 December 1888, van Gogh had realized that Gauguin was proposing to leave and that there had been some kind of contretemps between the two.[116] That evening, van Gogh severed his left ear (either wholly or in part; accounts differ) with a razor, inducing a severe haemorrhage.[note 12] He bandaged his wound, wrapped the ear in paper, and delivered the package to a brothel frequented by both him and Gauguin, before returning home and collapsing. He was found unconscious the next day by the police[note 13] and taken to hospital.[117][118][119] The local newspaper reported that van Gogh had given the ear to a prostitute with an instruction to guard it carefully.[120] In Gauguin’s later account, he implies that—in fact—van Gogh had left the ear with the doorman as a memento for Gauguin.[113] Van Gogh himself had no recollection of these events, and it is plain that he had suffered an acute psychotic episode.[121] Family letters of the time make it clear that the event had not been unexpected.[122] He had suffered a nervous collapse in Antwerp some three years before, and as early as 1880 his father had proposed committing him to an asylum (at Gheel).[123] The hospital diagnosis was “generalized delirium”, and within a few days van Gogh was sectioned.[122]
During the initial few days of his treatment, van Gogh repeatedly asked for Gauguin, but Gauguin stayed away. Gauguin told one of the policeman attending the case, “Be kind enough, Monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal for him.”[124] Gauguin wrote of Van Gogh, “His state is worse, he wants to sleep with the patients, chase the nurses, and washes himself in the coal bucket. That is to say, he continues the biblical mortifications.”[124][122] Theo was notified by Gauguin, and visited Van Gogh, as did both Madame Ginoux and Roulin. Gauguin left Arles, and never saw Van Gogh again.[note 14]
Despite the gloomy initial diagnosis, Van Gogh made a surprisingly speedy recovery. He returned to the Yellow House by the beginning of January, but was to spend the following month between the hospital and home, suffering from hallucinations and delusions that he was being poisoned. In March, the police closed his house after a petition by 30 townspeople (including the Ginoux family), who called him “fou roux” (the redheaded madman).[122] Paul Signac visited him in the hospital, and Van Gogh was allowed home in his company. In April, he moved into rooms owned by his hospital physician Dr. Rey after floods damaged paintings in his own home.[125][126] Around this time, he wrote, “Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant.” Two months later, he left Arles and entered an asylum (at his own request) in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.[127]
Local newspaper report dated 30 December 1888 recording Vincent’s self-mutilation.[100] “Last Sunday night at half past eleven a painter named Vincent Vangogh, appeared at the maison de tolérance No 1, asked for a girl called Rachel, and handed her … his ear with these words: ‘Keep this object like a treasure.’ Then he disappeared. The police, informed of these events, which could only be the work of an unfortunate madman, looked the next morning for this individual, whom they found in bed with scarcely a sign of life.
The poor man was taken to hospital without delay.”[101]
Death
On 22 February 1890, Van Gogh suffered a new crisis that was “the starting point for one of the saddest episodes in a life already rife with sad events,” according to Hulsker.[139] From February until the end of April he was unable to bring himself to write, though he did continue to draw and paint,[139] which follows a pattern begun the previous May, in 1889. For a year he “had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, and in between them, long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy.”[151]
On 27 July 1890, aged 37, Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself in the chest with a revolver (although no gun was ever found).[152] There were no witnesses and the location where he shot himself is unclear. Ingo Walther writes that “Some think Van Gogh shot himself in the wheat field that had engaged his attention as an artist of late; others think he did it at a barn near the inn.”[153] Biographer David Sweetman writes that the bullet was deflected by a rib bone and passed through his chest without doing apparent damage to internal organs—probably stopped by his spine. He was able to walk back to the Auberge Ravoux, and there was attended by two physicians; however, without a surgeon present the bullet could not be removed. After tending to him as best they could, the two physicians left Van Gogh alone in his room, smoking his pipe. The following morning (Monday), Theo rushed to be with Van Gogh as soon as he was notified, and found him in surprisingly good shape, but within hours Van Gogh began to fail due to an untreated infection caused by the wound. Van Gogh died in the evening, 29 hours after he supposedly shot himself. According to Theo, his brother’s last words were: “The sadness will last forever.”[152][154]
Van Gogh was buried on 30 July in the municipal cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise at a funeral attended by Theo van Gogh, Andries Bonger, Charles Laval, Lucien Pissarro, Émile Bernard, Julien Tanguy, and Dr. Gachet, amongst some 20 family and friends, as well as some locals. The funeral was described by Émile Bernard in a letter to Albert Aurier.[155][156] Theo suffered from syphilis and his health declined rapidly after Vincent’s death. Weak and unable to come to terms with Vincent’s absence, he died six months later, on 25 January, at Den Dolder.[157] The original burial plot was leased for 15 years; the intention was to bury Vincent alongside Theo. Vincent’s remains were exhumed on 13 June 1905, in the presence of Jo Bonger, Dr. Gachet, and others, and relocated, eventually for Theo to be buried beside him. The precise location of the original grave is no longer known. In 1914, the year she had Van Gogh’s letters published, Jo Bonger had Theo moved from Utrecht and reburied with Vincent.[158]
While many of Van Gogh’s late paintings are somber, they are essentially optimistic and reflect his desire to return to lucid mental health right up to the time of his death. Yet some of his final works reflect his deepening concerns. Referring to his paintings of wheatfields under troubled skies, he commented in a letter to his brother Theo: “I did not have to go out of my way very much in order to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness.” Nevertheless, he adds in the same paragraph: “these canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words, that is, how healthy and invigorating I find the countryside.”[159][160]
There has been much debate over the years as to the source of Van Gogh’s illness and its effect on his work. Over 150 psychiatrists have attempted to label its root, with some 30 different diagnoses.[161] Diagnoses include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, temporal lobe epilepsy, and acute intermittent porphyria. Any of these could have been the culprit, and could have been aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia, and consumption of alcohol, especially absinthe.
In Van Gogh: the Life, a biography published in 2011, authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith argue that Van Gogh did not commit suicide. They contend that he was shot accidentally by two boys he knew who had “a malfunctioning gun”.[162] Experts at the Van Gogh Museum remain unconvinced.[163]
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