There are more legends than facts about Vincent van Gogh. This list brings together twenty facts verified in the painter’s biography and letters, and ends with three myths that get repeated everywhere and are not true. If you want the full story, it’s in the Van Gogh biography.
Life and family
1. He was named after a stillborn brother
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in Zundert (the Netherlands) on March 30, 1853, the son of a Protestant minister. He was named after his grandfather and after a brother who had been stillborn exactly one year earlier, on March 30, 1852. He was not a twin, as is sometimes claimed.
2. He started painting at 27
Before becoming a painter he worked for the art dealers Goupil & Cie in The Hague, London and Paris (his uncle got him the job in 1869), as a teacher in England, a bookstore clerk and a lay preacher among the miners of the Borinage, in Belgium. There he gave his room to a vagrant and went to sleep on straw in a hut. The church authorities dismissed him for “undermining the dignity of the priesthood.” Only around 1880, at 27, did he decide to become an artist.
3. At 20 he earned more than his father
In London, working for Goupil, he did well and earned more than his father. Jo van Gogh-Bonger, his sister-in-law, later said it was the best year of his life. He fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, Eugénie Loyer, who turned him down because she was secretly engaged to a former lodger.
4. He wrote in three languages
He wrote his letters in Dutch, French and English (from Arles alone, some 200 letters in the three languages), and read the Bible in English, French and German.
5. He lived with a pregnant prostitute
In The Hague, in 1882, he moved in with Clasina “Sien” Hoornik, an alcoholic prostitute who had a five-year-old daughter and was pregnant. He looked after her, drew her and wanted to marry her; his family and his teacher Anton Mauve turned their backs on him for it.
6. He ate so poorly that he lost teeth
In Antwerp, in 1886, he wrote to Theo that he could remember having only six hot meals since the previous May; he spent his money on paint and models and lived on bread, coffee and tobacco. His teeth became loose and painful. In some self-portraits you can see his sunken mouth.
The work
7. About 2,100 works in ten years
In little more than a decade he created about 2,100 works, including some 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. In Arles, in fifteen months, he painted about 200 paintings and more than 100 drawings and watercolors; in Auvers, more than 70 oil paintings (76 according to Hulsker’s catalog) in the 70 days he lived there.
8. More than 40 self-portraits
He painted more than 43 self-portraits between 1885 and 1889, mainly because he had no money to pay models: in Saint-Rémy, in September 1889, he wrote that he was working on two portraits of himself “for want of another model.” All the Saint-Rémy self-portraits show the side of his head with the intact ear: since he painted himself in a mirror, it looks like the left one in the painting, but it is the right. You can see the main ones in the one with the gray hat, the one with the bandaged ear and the one at the Orsay (in Spanish).
9. The Sunflowers were meant to decorate a room
He painted the Arles Sunflowers in August 1888 to decorate the Yellow House before Gauguin arrived: “Nothing but large Sunflowers,” he wrote to Theo. There are two series: the Paris one (1887), with cut flowers lying on the ground, and the Arles one, with bouquets in a vase.
10. He collected hundreds of Japanese prints
He began buying Japanese ukiyo-e prints in the port of Antwerp in 1885, and in Paris he gathered hundreds of them. He copied some in oils and hung them in the background of several portraits. His idea of looking for a “Japanese” light in the south of France comes from there; you’ll find the details in Van Gogh’s style (in Spanish).
11. He copied Millet, Delacroix and Rembrandt
In the Saint-Rémy asylum, unable to go out and paint, he made dozens of color “translations” of black-and-white prints by his favorite painters: The Siesta after Millet, the Pietà after Delacroix, The Raising of Lazarus after Rembrandt. Copying, he told Theo, “teaches and above all sometimes consoles.”
12. He used a perspective frame
To draw vanishing lines accurately, he built himself a “perspective frame” in The Hague, a grid of stretched threads that he set up between himself and the landscape, and he kept using it in Arles: he painted The Langlois Bridge with it.
The letters
13. More than 600 letters to Theo survive
Theo kept all of his brother’s letters: more than 600 from Vincent to Theo, about 40 from Theo to Vincent, 22 to his sister Wil, 58 to the painter Anthon van Rappard, 22 to Émile Bernard and individual letters to Gauguin, Signac and the critic Aurier. Many include sketches. They are all there, translated and annotated, in the Van Gogh Museum edition (vangoghletters.org), the standard edition of the letters.
14. His sister-in-law saved the paintings and published the letters
Theo died six months after Vincent, in January 1891. It was his widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who kept the paintings and the letters, organized exhibitions and published the correspondence (most of it in 1914). That same year she had Theo’s remains moved to Auvers to be buried next to Vincent. Her son, Vincent Willem, later created the foundation that gave rise to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Success, money and death
15. He did sell a painting in his lifetime (and exhibited more than people think)
The Red Vineyard was bought in 1890 by the Belgian painter Anna Boch at the Les XX exhibition in Brussels. But he did not live in total obscurity: he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, at the Théâtre Libre alongside Seurat and Signac, and in January 1890 the critic Albert Aurier published an article in the Mercure de France that called him “a genius.”
16. A duel over his honor
At the opening dinner of Les XX, in 1890, the painter Henry de Groux insulted his work; Toulouse-Lautrec challenged him to a duel and Signac (in Spanish) declared that he would carry on fighting for Van Gogh’s honor if Lautrec surrendered. De Groux apologized and left the group.
17. He cut off his ear, but not the way Gauguin tells it
On the night of December 23, 1888, he cut off his left ear (all of it or part of it, depending on the source) and took it to a young woman at an Arles brothel who turned out to be a 17-year-old cleaning girl, Gabrielle Berlatier. The story that he chased Gauguin with a razor was told by Gauguin fifteen years later and no one has confirmed it. The full story is in Van Gogh’s ear.
18. His doctor used a portrait to patch up a chicken coop
Van Gogh gave Dr. Félix Rey, who treated him at the hospital in Arles, his portrait. Rey didn’t like it and used it to repair a chicken coop before giving it away. Today it is in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and in 2016 it was valued at more than 50 million dollars.
19. His paintings are among the most expensive in the world
The Portrait of Dr. Gachet, the Portrait of Joseph Roulin and Irises have each sold for more than 100 million dollars in today’s money, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York paid 57 million in 1993 for a version of Wheat Field with Cypresses. In 2014 a Chinese collector paid 61.8 million for Vase with Daisies and Poppies.
20. Theo outlived him by only six months
Vincent shot himself in the chest on July 27, 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise and died two days later, at 37; Theo had arrived in time to be with him. Theo, devastated, died on January 25, 1891. The two brothers are buried side by side in the Auvers cemetery.
Three myths that aren’t true
“He painted The Starry Night in one night”
No. He painted The Starry Night in mid-June 1889 at the Saint-Rémy asylum, during the day and in his ground-floor studio: he reproduced the view he had watched from his bedroom window before dawn (and added an imaginary village), because the asylum staff did not let him paint in his bedroom.
“He was a self-taught painter who never studied”
Half true. He never completed formal academic training, but he studied at the Brussels Academy in 1880, took lessons from his cousin by marriage Anton Mauve in The Hague, enrolled at the Antwerp Academy and in Cormon’s studio in Paris, and studied color theory in depth through Delacroix and the drawing manuals of the time.
“He saw yellow because of digitalis” and other medical theories
It has been suggested that his love of yellow came from treatment with digitalis, or from absinthe, or from an eye disease. None of these hypotheses has been proven, and his own letters explain yellow as a deliberate color choice, tied to the sun of Provence and to the theory of complementary colors. Specialists don’t agree on his illness either (temporal lobe epilepsy, bipolar disorder, porphyria or something else).
Sources: Wikipedia, “Vincent van Gogh” and “Portraits of Vincent van Gogh”; Van Gogh’s letters at vangoghletters.org (Van Gogh Museum).