Everything he tried first
Before he was a painter Vincent van Gogh was an art dealer's clerk in The Hague, London and Paris, then a teacher in England, a bookshop assistant in Dordrecht, a failed theology student and finally a lay preacher among coal miners in the Belgian Borinage. He gave away his clothes and slept on straw, and the mission board dismissed him for a zeal it found undignified. He was twenty-seven, unemployed and dependent on his family when he decided, in 1880, to become an artist instead.
What followed was not untutored genius but grinding self-instruction. He worked through Charles Bargue's drawing exercises, copied Millet, studied perspective frames and anatomy, took criticism from his cousin by marriage Anton Mauve in The Hague, and enrolled briefly at the Antwerp academy and at Fernand Cormon's Paris studio. The Potato Eaters of 1885, dark and deliberately coarse, was meant as proof that he could handle figures. His letters from these years read like a technical apprenticeship conducted mostly alone.
Paris, Arles, and a workshop that failed
In 1886 he moved in with his younger brother Theo, an established dealer in Paris, and the palette changed within months. He met Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard and Paul Signac, absorbed Impressionist colour theory and collected Japanese woodblock prints whose flat fields and cropped compositions reshaped his sense of design. Paris also exhausted him. In February 1888 he took a train south to Arles looking for stronger light and cheaper rooms, and rented four rooms in a building he painted yellow.
He wanted the Yellow House to become a working community of painters. Only Paul Gauguin came, in October 1888, partly because Theo subsidised the visit. Two strong-willed men in cramped quarters through a wet autumn produced arguments about theory and money, and in late December the arrangement collapsed when Van Gogh severed part of his own left ear. Gauguin left for Paris; a later account of a sword in the dark has never been supported by the contemporary evidence. Thirty neighbours petitioned to have Van Gogh removed.
The asylum, the wheatfield, and the widow who made him famous
In May 1889 he admitted himself voluntarily to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Remy. In roughly a year there he produced some of his most familiar work, including The Starry Night, painted from memory and imagination rather than from the window. His illness has never been diagnosed with confidence: epilepsy, bipolar disorder, the effects of absinthe, lead poisoning and porphyria have all been argued from the surviving letters and medical notes, and none can be confirmed at this distance.
He moved to Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890 under the care of Dr Paul Gachet, worked at extraordinary speed, and died on 29 July of a gunshot wound to the chest, generally judged self-inflicted though a minority of researchers dispute it. He was thirty-seven. Theo died six months later. It was Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who kept the paintings together, placed them in exhibitions and published the letters in 1914, building over decades the reputation that the myth of neglected genius now takes for granted.
