Vincent van Gogh is, without argument, one of the best-known and most-revered artists in Western art history—and an important part of what everyone knows about him is that in his own time, his career as an artist was, at least financially, a failure.
The story of how van Gogh went from that failure, and his tragic end, to today’s fame and extraordinary prices, is well-told in an exhibition currently on display at the Amsterdam Museum that bears his name. The exhibition doesn’t hide its subject: Vincent’s Path to Fame. It’s an excellent appetizer for the museum itself.
The exhibition weaves together the roles of four family members, each with a critical role in the story. In front, in this construction by the Museum, is Vincent the painter, in the only known photograph of him. Just behind him, his brother Theo and Theo’s wife, Johanna, or Jo Bonger-Van Gogh, and behind them, another Vincent van Gogh, known as ‘Engineer Vincent.’
Vincent was one of six children in the family of a Protestant minister and his wife, a talented amateur watercolorist who encouraged the artistic ambitions of her sons Vincent and Theo, who became inseparable as adults, with Theo often supporting Vincent financially as well as artistically.
Any look at Vincent van Gogh’s career quickly comes up with the startling fact of how short it was—barely 10 years of art, despite an output of hundreds of paintings and drawings, including nearly 300 paintings in the last year of his life. As startling, perhaps is the abrupt change in his work after he moved from the Netherlands to France and a whole new world of art and artists.
Largely self-taught, van Gogh constantly studied works by his predecessors and contemporaries. He and Theo collected hundreds of cheap prints, and sometimes based paintings on them. The cabinet below, made by their grandfather, is where Theo stored them and Vincent’s letters.
In Paris, he and Theo lived in Montmartre and began friendships with many fellow artists. Vincent and other artists traded ideas, drawings and paintings with each other, and often painted each other. Quite a few of those exchanges are in the Van Gogh Museum’s collection, including these by Emile Bernard, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Frank Myers Boggs, Paul Gauguin and John Russell.
Meanwhile, while Vincent moved south to Arles, hoping to form an artist colony with Gauguin and going through mental turmoil, including a year of treatment at an asylum—during which he continued painting—Theo and Johanna Bonger, a long-time friend, married and nine months later had a son, named Vincent Willem after his uncle. The painting ‘Almond Blossoms’ was a gift to mark the child’s birth.
But the tumult in the Van Gogh family’s life wasn’t over: within six months, Vincent was dead, and six months after that Theo died, leaving Jo as a widow with limited funds, a young child, and nearly the entire work of her brother-in-law’s career. As devoted to that career as her husband had been, she began the work of turning it into the legend it has become.
Jo was determined to keep the collection largely intact, while carefully selling enough pieces both to support herself and young Vincent, and to guarantee attention to van Gogh’s work. One major breakthrough was a large and successful exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1905.
In 1901, she married again, to Johan Cohen Gosschalk, who helped her with the work, and made these portraits of Jo and Vincent. Vincent was 17 at the time, and about to begin engineering studies. He had a successful career as an engineer and started one of the Netherlands’ first consulting practices, but always had an eye on the future of the collection as well. He was widely known as “Engineer Vincent” to avoid confusion with his now-famous uncle.
In 1960, now the sole owner of the family’s huge collection, he transferred it to a newly-formed foundation, and began negotiations with the Dutch state. His offer was to transfer ownership to the Netherlands if the government would provide an appropriate museum for it. The deal was made, the city of Amsterdam donated the land, the government built the museum. The museum was opened in June 1973 by Queen Juliana and Engineer Vincent, who took an active part in it until his death in 1978.
For best appearance, some of my photos have been replaced with images from the Rijksmuseum website
