Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh was the son of a Dutch Reformed Church minister, Theodorus van Gogh, and before he painted anything he tried, seriously and at length, to enter his father's profession. He worked for the art dealers Goupil and Cie in The Hague, London and Paris from 1869, was dismissed in 1876, then trained briefly for the ministry in Amsterdam and failed the entrance requirements. In 1878 he took unofficial evangelist work among coal miners in the Borinage, a mining district of southern Belgium, living in conditions as poor as the men he was sent to serve.

He was dismissed from that post in 1879, officially for a want of preaching eloquence, in practice because his superiors judged his identification with the miners' poverty excessive and undisciplined. He did not abandon the religious cast of mind that had taken him there; he redirected it. He told Theo, in the correspondence that is now the primary source for nearly everything known about him, that painting had become his way of doing the same work by other means. He took up drawing seriously in 1880, at twenty-seven, with almost no formal training, and had ten years left to live.

Nothing in Van Gogh's career happened without his younger brother Theo, who worked for most of his life as a dealer at Boussod, Valadon and Cie in Paris, the successor firm to Goupil where both brothers had trained. From 1880 until Vincent's death, Theo sent money every month, without which there would have been no paint, no canvas and no rent. The arrangement was not charity in one direction only: the surviving letters record Vincent treating the paintings he sent to Paris as partial repayment, and Theo treating his brother's work as a professional investment he believed in years before anyone else did.

The relationship extended to the trade itself. Julien Tanguy, a Paris paint supplier known as Pere Tanguy, regularly accepted paintings in exchange for pigments and canvas rather than cash, and displayed the work of young painters, Van Gogh among them, in his shop window on the Rue Clauzel. Van Gogh painted three portraits of him. This was the actual commercial floor Van Gogh's work traded on in his lifetime: barter with a colour merchant and subsidy from a brother, not sales to collectors.

The claim that Van Gogh sold exactly one painting in his lifetime is close to the documented truth, though not perfectly exact: there is fragmentary evidence that a self-portrait was bought by the London dealers Arthur Sulley and William Lawrie, a transaction too thinly recorded to build a claim on. The one sale that is fully documented is The Red Vineyard, shown at the Les Vingt exhibition in Brussels in 1890 and bought there by the Belgian painter and collector Anna Boch for 400 francs, a few months before Van Gogh's death.

The picture's later history is itself a measure of how completely the market reassessed him after 1890. In 1909, not twenty years later, it sold again for 30,000 francs to the Moscow textile manufacturer and collector Ivan Morozov, seventy-five times what Boch had paid. It hung in Russia through the revolution and nationalisation of Morozov's collection and remains there today, in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow: the only painting Van Gogh is reliably documented to have sold while he lived is also one that has not left Russia since 1909.

Van Gogh moved to Arles in the south of France in February 1888, renting the building he called the Yellow House with the plan of founding a working colony of painters. Paul Gauguin, whom he had met in Paris in November 1887, arrived to join him in October 1888. The two men worked together for nine weeks in a partnership that deteriorated into open conflict.

On the night of 23 December 1888, following a confrontation with Gauguin, Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear with a razor and delivered it, wrapped, to a woman at a brothel in the town. He was hospitalised, Gauguin left for Paris the next day and the two men never met again, though they continued to correspond. Van Gogh committed himself voluntarily to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Remy-de-Provence in May 1889, where he remained a year, painting between episodes of illness whose exact diagnosis is still argued over by his biographers and by physicians who have retrospectively proposed epilepsy, bipolar disorder, porphyria and other conditions without settling on one.

Van Gogh left Saint-Remy in May 1890 and settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, under the informal medical supervision of Dr Paul Gachet, an amateur painter and physician with existing connections to the Impressionist circle. In the roughly seventy days between his arrival and his death he produced about seventy-four paintings and more than thirty drawings, a rate of output the Van Gogh Museum itself has called without precedent in his career, let alone in painting generally.

He died on 29 July 1890, two days after being found with a gunshot wound to the chest in a wheatfield near Auvers, aged thirty-seven. The wound was fatal but not immediately so; he walked back to his lodgings and lived for roughly thirty hours, during which, by Theo's own later account, he stated that he had shot himself and that no one else was to be blamed. Theo died six months later, on 25 January 1891, of complications related to syphilis; his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, inherited both men's estates and with them the task of making Vincent's reputation, which she then spent the rest of her working life building.

The standard account, resting on Theo's contemporary letters and the near-universal reading of Van Gogh scholarship since, is that Van Gogh shot himself. It is not, however, unanimous. In their 2011 biography Van Gogh: The Life, the American writers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith argued that Van Gogh was shot accidentally, or was killed, by Rene Secretan, a sixteen-year-old Parisian on a summer visit to Auvers who owned a malfunctioning revolver and who, with friends, had a documented habit of taunting Van Gogh. Naifeh and Smith's case rests on circumstantial and forensic points: the awkward angle and range of the wound for a self-inflicted shot, the fact that the gun and Van Gogh's painting equipment were never recovered from the field, and Secretan's own later evasiveness when asked about that summer.

The theory has not been accepted by the Van Gogh Museum or by the majority of specialists who have examined it, who point to the weight Theo's contemporaneous letters carry as first-hand testimony and to the absence of any period source naming Secretan. It has not, either, been disproved. This page states both positions and their proponents rather than adopting one, because the underlying evidence, a bullet wound with no recovered weapon and a hundred and thirty-five years of distance, does not currently support a closed answer.

In January 1928 the Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer exhibited a group of newly surfaced Van Gogh paintings supplied by a young art impresario named Otto Wacker, who told buyers the works came from an anonymous Russian aristocrat too fearful of Soviet reprisal to be named. The exhibition coincided, by design, with the publication of the first catalogue raisonne of Van Gogh's work by the Dutch scholar Jacob Baart de la Faille, who had initially accepted the Wacker pictures into his catalogue.

Specialists denounced the paintings as fakes almost as soon as they went on public view. De la Faille withdrew his acceptance in an addendum and in 1930 published Les Faux Van Gogh, listing 174 works he now regarded as forgeries, the Wacker group among them. Wacker was tried in Berlin in April 1932, convicted of fraud, and sentenced to nineteen months in prison, though the court found that only eleven of the paintings could be definitively proven forgeries, a gap between the criminal standard of proof and the connoisseurship standard that has never fully closed. The episode is generally credited, alongside the surge in Van Gogh's posthumous prices in the same period, with making him one of the two or three most forged painters in history: The Art Newspaper's own 1997 investigation estimated at least forty-five paintings then in circulation as Van Goghs were not genuine.

Attribution on Van Gogh has not settled into a fixed list. In September 2013 the Van Gogh Museum authenticated Sunset at Montmajour, a large landscape that had sat in a Norwegian collector's attic for over sixty years after the museum's own predecessor institution declined to confirm it in 1991. The 2013 reversal used a technique developed with Cornell University that matches a canvas's weave pattern to the bolt of cloth it was cut from, combined with a letter in which Van Gogh described painting the exact scene on 4 July 1888. It was the first full-size Van Gogh painting newly confirmed since 1928, the same year Wacker's fakes surfaced.

The movement has not run only one way. In October 2024 Van Gogh Museum researchers published findings in The Burlington Magazine reattributing three works long treated as genuine: a copy of Interior of a Restaurant identified by anomalous brushwork and a pigment, manganese blue, not patented until 1935; a watercolour, The Wood Gatherer, shown to have been copied from a photograph rather than drawn from life; and, most consequentially, a painting called Head of a Woman that the Van Gogh Museum had itself authenticated and that sold at Christie's in 2011 for 993,250 US dollars. A museum's own prior authentication is not, on this evidence, the end of the question.

Three sales define Van Gogh's auction history and all three date from a five-year window at the top of the late-1980s art boom. In each case the coverage that followed the hammer moved on to the next record within months, and in each case what happened to the picture afterward is at least as informative as the price.

Portrait of Dr Gachet still holds the nominal auction record for a Van Gogh, sold at Christie's New York on 15 May 1990 to the Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito for a hammer price of 75 million US dollars plus a ten percent buyer's premium, a total of 82.5 million dollars. Saito later said in public that he wished the painting cremated with him when he died; he denied it was a serious intention, but after his death in 1996 the picture disappeared from public view. It was sold privately, after his death, to the Austrian financier Wolfgang Flottl, and from Flottl, after his own financial collapse, to an Italian collector resident in Switzerland who has since died; his family, which manages the estate privately, has not made the painting's location public. No independent institution has confirmed sighting it since 1990.

Version safety matters as much for Van Gogh's own work as for any other artist represented more than once on this archive. Van Gogh painted two versions of Portrait of Dr Gachet at Auvers in June 1890. The version Saito bought in 1990 was first sold by Van Gogh's sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger in 1897 and was acquired in 1911 by the Stadel museum in Frankfurt, where it hung until 1933. In 1937 the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda confiscated it from the Stadel as part of the campaign against what the regime called degenerate art; Hermann Goering's agent Sepp Angerer subsequently sold it in Paris to the collector Franz Koenigs, and it passed through several further hands before reaching Saito in 1990. It is, in other words, a Nazi-confiscated deaccession before it was ever an auction record.

The second version was never on the market in the same sense. Van Gogh gave it directly to Dr Gachet, whose children Paul and Marguerite Gachet gave it to the French state in 1949; it hangs today at the Musee d'Orsay, accessioned RF 1949 16. The two paintings are close in composition but are two different physical objects with two entirely different twentieth-century histories, and captions or reproductions that do not specify which version they show are a live source of the confusion this archive exists to correct.

Two Van Gogh paintings have been stolen from public museums in the last twenty-five years with outcomes that could not be more different. Poppy Flowers, also called Vase with Viscaria, was cut from its frame at the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo on 21 August 2010; Egyptian police initially announced a recovery at Cairo airport within hours and then retracted the claim as based on false information. It has not been recovered and its whereabouts remain unknown; this archive holds a separate record for that specific painting.

View of the Sea at Scheveningen and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on 7 December 2002. They surfaced fourteen years later, in September 2016, when Italian anti-mafia police raided a farmhouse near Castellammare di Stabia belonging to the family of Raffaele Imperiale, a fugitive figure in the cocaine-trafficking Amato Pagano clan of the Camorra. Imperiale was later reported to have paid around 350,000 euros for the paintings in 2003 and, on his eventual arrest in Dubai, claimed he had bought them for their artistic value rather than as a financial instrument. Both paintings were restored to the Van Gogh Museum and are back on public display.

Van Gogh collected Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints in large numbers from his time in Antwerp and Paris in the mid-1880s, organised a public exhibition of them at the Cafe du Tambourin in Paris, and copied several directly, including Utagawa Hiroshige's Plum Park in Kameido and Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge. He never travelled to Japan. What he built instead, documented at length in his letters to Theo and to Gauguin, was an imagined Japan he treated as a working model: flat, saturated colour applied in unmodulated fields rather than European tonal gradation, compositions cropped and tilted the way the prints cropped and tilted their own subjects, and an idea of Japanese artists as a community of craftsmen sharing techniques rather than competing individual geniuses, which is explicitly how he wanted the Yellow House colony in Arles to work.

The debt is visible without needing to be argued for: the diagonal, cropped composition of The Sower, the flattened perspective of Almond Blossom, painted for his newborn nephew in 1890, and the outlined, poster-like colour blocks of the Pere Tanguy portraits, which include miniature ukiyo-e prints as background detail, stating the source inside the picture itself.

Van Gogh worked in thick, often unmixed paint applied directly from the tube, frequently with visible directional brushstrokes that function as part of the image's structure rather than as texture alone; his letters describe deliberately pursuing complementary colour contrast, blue against orange, yellow against violet, in terms drawn from Eugene Delacroix's colour theory, which he studied seriously rather than absorbing casually. The technique is diagnostic enough that connoisseurs and, more recently, technical imaging use brush rhythm and paint application as primary evidence in attribution disputes, including the 2024 Van Gogh Museum reattributions.

The chrome yellow pigment central to that palette is chemically unstable in one of its common forms. Synchrotron X-ray studies published in 2016 identified two chrome yellow types in the Van Gogh Museum's Sunflowers: a lightfast lead chromate and a sulfur-substituted variant prone to photo-induced reduction, in which hexavalent chromium converts to a trivalent form and the paint's bright yellow shifts toward brownish green. The change is not yet visible to a visitor's eye but has been measured directly in the paint layer, and conservators now manage light exposure on the affected works specifically because of it: a nineteenth-century colour choice is still actively degrading in twenty-first-century museum conditions.