Vincent van Gogh's decision to cut off his left ear in 1888 has long been attributed to a breakdown following a quarrel with Paul Gauguin, but a new account of the artist's life argues that family finances played a central role in the most notorious act of self-harm in art history. The story hinges on the relationship between Vincent and his younger brother Theo, a Paris art dealer who was the painter's only source of income.
Theo supported Vincent with a monthly allowance, and in exchange Vincent sent him paintings to try to sell. The arrangement, as it would in most families, placed an emotional strain on both brothers. Theo was not wealthy, and Vincent complained constantly about being broke, sometimes with barely enough money for food, and often practically begged his brother for more. Over a decade Vincent produced more than 800 paintings and 700 drawings in hopes of financial independence and commercial success. In his lifetime, Theo is known to have sold just one: «Red Vineyard at Arles.»
The generally accepted explanation for the ear injury is that Gauguin, who had been living and working with Vincent in the yellow house in Arles for several weeks, was threatening to leave, and the prospect of abandonment sent the mentally unstable Vincent into despair. But the account suggests that the dependence and the limits of love within the family also very likely played a part. Vincent shot himself in the chest in July 1890, believing himself a failure as an artist and a man. He was 37.
Six months after Vincent's suicide, Theo died from the effects of syphilis, leaving his young widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, with a baby to support, little money and an unusual inheritance: more than 400 of Vincent's paintings. They filled the walls of the couple's Paris apartment and were stored in closets, under beds and at a nearby art supply store. Works now celebrated as masterpieces — «The Potato Eaters,» «Irises,» «Sunflowers,» the self-portraits and «The Starry Night» — were then regarded as the unpolished output of a depressed, crazy man and commercially worthless.
Jo thought differently. She had no formal art training, but she loved Vincent's work and her instincts told her that he was a genius, as Theo had come to believe. She also inherited hundreds of letters Vincent wrote and received, most exchanged with Theo. Jo read and re-read them, initially to feel closer to her husband, but she was also captivated by what they revealed. Biographical details about her, drawn from her diaries and letters, have only recently been made public by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and they portray a determined woman to whom the art world owes a tremendous debt.
The research comes as «The Starry Night,» painted in June 1889 during the year Vincent spent in a mental asylum in the south of France, remains one of the most recognizable images in the world. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, visitors crowd around the painting, which hangs near Gauguin's «The Moon and the Earth.» The canvas does not depict an actual place but combines elements Vincent had seen at different times — a village, a starry sky, a moon, dark hills and a cypress tree. The sight of stars, he said, always made him dream.
The account traces how a painter who sold almost nothing in his lifetime became one of the world's most celebrated artists, and it places the credit less with the market that ignored him than with the family members who kept his work alive. The questions it sets out to answer — why Vincent mutilated himself, why he took his own life, and how he achieved fame after dying in obscurity — converge on the same household. Theo's money sustained the work; Jo's conviction, and the letters she preserved, carried it into public view.