Episode #90: Art Fact and Fiction: Did Van Gogh Only Sell One Painting? (S10E07)
In our tenth season, we’re going at art history with a skeptical eye and a myth-busting attitude to uncover the fictions and facts about some of our favorite artists. We’re starting our season today with this controversial subject: was Van Gogh a completely failed artist with only one sale to his name?
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Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Additional research and writing by Shella Seckel. Additional music by Storyblocks.
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Episode Transcript
I know, I know. If you’re a longtime listener to our show, you’re probably thinking, another Van Gogh episode? And I totally hear you. Since this show’s premiere in 2016, I’ve featured him in two full episodes, including one that was so long in its original iteration that when I released it as part of a “Listener Favorites” season last year—when it was voted as one of your top favorites—I cut it down into two parts, because otherwise that single ep would have been over an hour long. I’ve also done bonus episodes on theme of “genius” that featured Vincent van Gogh as the main character. And naturally he’s been mentioned in many other episodes as a cultural touchstone and an inspiration for artists whom came after. Van Gogh is never really far from my mind, it seems, so he pops up again and again. And he’s popping up now, in the middle of our “Facts and Fictions” season of the podcast, because like Leonardo and Michelangelo, there just seem to be a lot of myths built around this single artist.
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. In this season, season 10, in which we’re going to dig deep on some great art historical facts--and fictions. In this episode, we’re returning to art history’s favorite tortured soul, Vincent Van Gogh, to ask: did he really only sell one work during his lifetime? This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
In that first-ever Van Gogh episode of ArtCurious, I began the show by discussing the myth of the tortured artist or tortured genius. Van Gogh’s biography has provided us, as storytelling humans, to enjoy the sincerest mythmaking—especially due to his unexpected and early death at the age of just 37. His death became the perfect catalyst for the elevation of Van Gogh the artist to the status of Van Gogh, the cultural icon. By and large, this apotheosis leaves us with a romanticized, aggrandized view of someone’s life and work. We love stories--and even if the juiciest parts of a story aren’t true, we don’t care. It’s so much more pleasurable for us to collectively think of Van Gogh, for example, and to sigh wistfully, wailing, “What a poor man. He was completely unappreciated and unloved during his lifetime.” Even if we are wrong--and we are!--we want to believe the myth--and thus, we carry it on.
It turns out that the myth of Van Gogh as a distressed genius sprang to life incredibly soon after his death. Art historian Nathalie Heinich notes that less than two years after his passing, the term “genius” was already being assigned to Van Gogh by art critics. Drawn to the facts of his mostly solitary existence and his suicide, it became very easy for experts and the general public alike to appoint various adjectives to describe him: disturbed, forsaken, tragic, mad, and, tortured. Once these descriptions began to take hold in the public imagination, there was really no stopping it. As early as the 1930s, some historians began to push back against the mythologizing of Van Gogh. In a 1936 article in the American Magazine of Art, Gertrude Benson proclaimed that the majority of information circulating about Van Gogh was:
“...a kind of unscrupulous muckraking that sensationalizes the frustration, the tragedy, and not the achievements, in a life that was obstinately dogged by misfortune.... At best, the emphasis was on the ‘poor fighter, the poor, poor sufferer’; at worst, literary hacksters spun a Poe-like tale of horror from the melodrama in his life or shed crocodile tears over a Christ-like hero who moved stumblingly but inevitably toward his crucifixion.”
Those are fightin’ words from Benson for sure, and it is helpful to note that Irving Stone’s sentimental embellishment of Van Gogh, Lust for Life, had been published only two years prior--and he’s undoubtedly the “literary hackster” to whom Benson refers--so Benson is probably reacting directly to Stone’s book in her article. But regardless of the circumstances, she was right. If there ever was an artist whose story was subjected to such hyperbole, it’s Vincent Van Gogh.
And one of the most blown-out-of-proportion stories is the idea that Van Gogh only sold one work of art while he was alive. Sometimes you’ll even see this story taken up a notch, with some error-filled online postings claiming that Van Gogh sold no works during his lifetime. That’s a pretty dire statement, to be sure, but one that seemed to hit even harder from an emotional standpoint when, in 1990, his Portrait of Dr. Gachet—which we explored in episode #73—became the then-most-expensive work of art to ever be sold at auction. You can almost hear the handkerchiefs of the soft-hearted being pulled out of pockets and pocketbooks—dabbing at that single tear for poor, poor Vincent once again. We think, If only he knew. If only he had known.
Now, I don’t mean to make light of Vincent’s mental illnesses, his suicide and/or suicidal tendencies, nor how difficult he actually had it at different moments of his life, and a happy ending is an easy thing to wish for, especially in a situation where someone takes their own life—but these statements just make things seem so much worse for an already practically mythological person. And what’s more—it’s entirely possible that Van Gogh did sell more than one painting in his lifetime, even if it wasn’t a ton of works. To be able to fully understand this situation, we’ve got to come at it from a few different angles: and first is how the artwork of Vincent van Gogh—and others—were received during this time period. The second is that we need to consider what an artwork sale in this era really meant—and what it could consider.
Let’s begin by digging into the art of the last decade of the 19th century. By 1890, the Impressionists—a group of painters who sought to paint quickly, and even sometimes in the great outdoors, with pure, bright pigments often highlighted with a strong white base tone that brought a sparkly illumination to the surface. These pigments, which were rapidly built-up with thick and loose brushstrokes, were meant to convey the shifting and changing effects of light and atmosphere, as well as the fleeting, personal understanding of color (so, for example, what looks blue to one person might read as teal to another-- and that can make a big difference when you’re painting the ocean, for example). When Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and their cohort started the great Impressionist experiment in Paris in the early 1860s, they had to fight for attention, fight for their work to be seen at all, let alone understood. And at the outset, this didn’t go very well for many of them. If you’ve read my book, ArtCurious, you’ll know that this was so dire for Monet that he bemoaned his lot in life in a letter to a friend, noting about his rejection from the French Salon, the most important exhibition in Europe, quote, “ [the] fatal rejection has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth, and despite my expertly modest prices, dealers and art lovers are turning backs on me.” In short, he felt like an utter failure. By 1868, the situation had grown so critical that he attempted to commit suicide, throwing himself into the Seine River with hopes of drowning. Luckily, he didn’t drown—but this just shows you that even just a couple of decades prior to his own time, artists who, by the 90s, had been firmly established, rather popular, and even financially comfortable had struggled mightily. And a lot of that simply had to do with the tastes of the public at the time. And in France especially, that dang Salon set really set a lot of the standards for what was considered “good art.” If a painting was too different and broke from too many art-historical traditions, it would not be accepted for the official exhibition. Too weird, you can imagine a judge sniffing. Not traditional enough, another might say. If it didn’t meet the rather staid and academic predilections of the Salon, it wouldn’t get accepted for exhibition.
By the time Vincent van Gogh was trying to sell his works in the 1880s and early 1890s, he, and others like him, were taking the gains established by his Impressionist forebears and ran with it—their interest in thickly applied brushstrokes and an exploration of aspects of modern life. But every generation seems to reject parts of the one that came before, and the so-called Post-Impressionists--a term that actually groups together a number of different sub-styles—certainly gave the boot to a few of Impressionism’s big tenets. Instead of working swiftly to attain the just-so naturalism of a shifting ray of light or the change of colors in a sunset, the post-Impressionists sometimes used unnatural colors and moved to occasionally distort, rather than replicate, the world around them. And Van Gogh certainly did this with his art. Take The Starry Night, his most famous painting, as an example. With those whorls of color swirling around the stars and the moon, and great waves of wind spiraling across the sky, overcoming the little town below. It’s a scene of a real place, experienced through Van Gogh’s own eyes, and yet we know that no town looks exactly like this, that the wind doesn’t wave visibly over us in grand strokes of blue, black, and ochre. While he attempted to situate his works of art within what he called the “guise of observable reality,” and while he was overly critical of ultra-stylized paintings, it’s still evident that his own works do still carry their own stylization. A Van Gogh painting looks like a Van Gogh painting, and doesn’t look like a photograph.
All this to say that, even in comparison with the brushiness and bluster of the Impressionists, Van Gogh’s works of art were bright and bold—and though our modern eyes might be totally used to him, the potential buyers for his artworks… weren’t. But not selling gobs of artworks to collectors also isn’t the same as being unloved or unappreciated. In fact, we know that not only did Van Gogh show his works in multiple exhibitions during his lifetime, especially in France and in Belgium, but alongside artists who would also make it into our art history textbooks: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent’s great frenemy, Paul Gauguin. When he joined the Société des Artistes Indépendants (the Society of Independent Artists) in 1888, whose annual counter-Salon exhibitions showcased numerous Van Gogh works for the next four years, including 1891, the year of his death. And apparently it was through these higher-publicity exhibitions that his works caught the attention of none other than Claude Monet, who had met Van Gogh upon the latter’s move to Paris in the mid-1880s. Both Monet and Paul Signac, another Post-Impressionist painter, vocally championed Van Gogh’s works during his lifetime.
But we’re not here to talk popularity or even acceptance into the artsy it-crowd in Paris at the end of the 19th century. We’re here to talk money! Sales! Cold hard cash! And that’s coming up next, right after this break. Come right back.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
So, yeah, Van Gogh had his fair share of support and enthusiastic artist-backers during his lifetime. But having Paul Signac proclaiming your greatness doesn’t equal art sales, now does it? But giving you all of this background about his stature within the avant-garde art world allows us to consider that Van Gogh’s works weren’t as neglected as you might have been told, at least not by the his artistic community. Van Gogh was known; he was shown; and yes, he was sold, too. One of the best resources that Vincent Van Gogh had was his younger brother, Theo Van Gogh, who worked as an art dealer. And what some occasionally forget is that Vincent once worked as an art dealer, too. Both Van Gogh boys came by this naturally, with a family connection: their uncle, Cent, short for Vincent, who was both Vincent’s namesake and potential business mentor. By the time Vincent was five years old, Uncle Cent had already established himself as a successful art dealer associated with the firm Goupil & Company, which had branches in Paris, London, New York, Brussels, and beyond. It appears that Cent had much to do with the opening of the dealership’s branch in the Hague, which he ran beginning in 1861. Vincent began working there as a clerk in 1869, and then was later transferred first to the London branch and then the Parisian outpost before ultimately deciding to opt out of the art world as a dealer in 1875. From all accounts, Uncle Cent was saddened by his nephew’s decision, but supportive nevertheless: Cent, who never had children, treated his nephew lovingly and as, perhaps, a surrogate son and business successor. But it turned out to be Theo who thrived in the art dealership—Theo joined Goupil in Brussels in 1873, then the Hague, and onward to Paris. And his career thrived—a success that would end up being so integral for his brother’s career, because it was Theo who supported Vincent, both emotionally and financially, so he could follow his dream of being a painter.
In terms of Van Gogh’s sales figures, let’s circle back to that part—the dream of becoming a painter, because it’s an important element that needs to be taken into consideration here. Vincent didn’t decide to pursue a career as an artist until 1880, when he was 27 years old. Nowadays, it’s pretty cool to not know or even worry about what you’re going to do with the rest of your life, and the ability and opportunity for self-reinvention and career change is common (exhibit A: me, right here and right now.) But it was far more worrisome back in the late 19th century, with Van Gogh seeming to flail about in search of his life’s goal and its meaning. After he left Goupil and Company, he worked briefly as a schoolteacher in London before moving back to the Netherlands to work as a preacher. Becoming an artist is something he opted to do only in the last ten years of his life, and it was his fourth big career move. Remember, too, that while he had been exposed to the arts since he was a boy, he didn’t have a lot of artistic training, so several of those early years of the 1880s were spent not necessarily creating sale-worthy works, but learning, making mistakes, trying new things. And though the number of artworks he did create during his relatively short career—almost 900 paintings and 1,300 works on paper—was obviously a lot, much of that was essentially practice for this self-taught artist, and not, necessarily, marketable. Remember that Monet and the Impressionists had had the same problems with the slow recognition for their works. The difference between Monet and Van Gogh is, sadly, a simple one: Monet’s suicide attempt didn’t work, and he went on to eventually garner huge (and ongoing) accolades. Van Gogh’s attempt, unfortunately, succeeded. How exponential would his sales have been, or could have been, had he lived.
When we hear of the apparent single painting that Van Gogh sold during his lifetime, we hear it as this: The Red Vineyard, a painting from 1888, was purchased in Belgium in early 1890 by Anna Boch, an artist herself, and the sister of Eugène Boch, one of Van Gogh’s friends. In fact, the same year that he painted The Red Vineyard, Eugène visited Vincent in Arles, where Vincent painted his friend’s portrait. So it seems most likely that Anna Boch learned of Vincent and his works from her brother, and she sought out his works at the 1890 exhibition in Brussels. From what we know from Van Gogh’s letters—he was a prolific letter-writer—it was he who suggested to Theo that they send six canvases to Brussels to be exhibited alongside works by a group of artists known as the Vingtistes, signified as “XX”—the equivalent of saying that the group was called “The Twenty,” for example. The Red Vineyard was one of the six sent, and caught Anna’s eye, which she purchased for 400 Belgian francs—probably the equivalent of something around 1 or 2 thousand dollars in today’s currency. Theo reported the news back to Vincent, who shared it with his mother in a letter from February 1890, writing, quote: “yesterday… Theo informed me that they’d sold one of my paintings in Brussels for 400 francs. In comparison with other prices, including the Dutch ones, this isn’t much, but that’s why I try to be productive in order to be able to keep working at reasonable prices. And if we have to try to earn our living with our hands, I have an awful lot of expenses to make up for.” Unquote.
Eventually The Red Vineyard would make its way to Russia, where it is housed today in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and it’s this single painting that keeps getting repeated, over and over again, as the only painting Van Gogh ever sold during his lifetime. But it’s not a totally accurate statement. And we’ve had challenges to the veracity of this statement for more than fifty years now. In the late 1960s, art historian Marc Edo Tralbaut published one of this first major biographies of the artist, simply titled Vincent van Gogh, in which he writes, quote, “ "On October 3, 1888, Theo wrote to the London art dealers, Sulley & Lori. In this letter he said: 'We have the honour to inform you that we have sent you the two pictures you have bought and duly paid for: a landscape by Camille Corot [and] ... a self-portrait by V. van Gogh.'” Unquote. This, I’ll have you note, is a full fifteen months before the sale of The Red Vineyard in Brussels. But here's where things get a bit touchy because… semantics! And I admit, sometimes I really don’t like semantics. But let me just say that several historians have quibbled with Theo’s use of the word “pictures” here. Typically, and I can speak from experience on this one, that when people in the art world, even today, call something a “picture,” they are usually speaking about a painting. But to be fair, “picture” can mean any 2D work of art, really. So what are the chances that the London self-portrait by Van Gogh was a drawing, and not a painting? We actually have a pretty logical answer to this one. In an article in the Baltimore Sun from October 1998, journalist John Dorsey notes that the catalogue raisonné of Van Gogh’s works—or the complete catalogue of all known Van Gogh paintings, drawings, and prints—was published by Van Gogh scholar Dr. Jan Hulsker in 1996, wherein Hulsker notes that there were, in ’96, 37 identified Van Gogh self-portrait paintings, and four self-portrait drawings. As Dorsey writes, quote:
“All four of the drawings belong to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam, which owns the collection that descended in the van Gogh family (and that is now in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). So they were not sold, and the picture that went to London must have been a painting.” Unquote.
But what’s fascinating and frustrating is that Dr. Hulsker, the author of the Van Gogh catalogue, the Van Gogh expert, was guilty of pushing forward the myth of “Van Gogh, the artist who only sold one work of art. As he wrote of The Red Vineyard, quote, “It has achieved the rather sad distinction of being the only painting of Vincent's that found a buyer during his lifetime (namely at an exhibition in Brussels in February 1890)." Unquote. So weird, right? He had the chance—and the evidence—in his own catalogue to disprove this myth.
Luckily, though, we are able to note that it wasn’t just this self-portrait painting that Van Gogh sold as an addition to that lonely Red Vineyard. Louis van Tilborgh, who is today the Senior Researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, and a Professor of Art History, specializing in Van Gogh, at the University of. Amsterdam, believes that there are a few sales, according to Van Gogh’s surviving letters. For example, early in his career, as Van Tilborgh notes, his uncle, Cornelius Marinus, commissioned drawings—specifically, 12 cityscapes of The Hague—from Van Gogh, probably as a gesture of support and kindness. It’s really sweet, actually—that one of his first sales, perhaps, came from his loving family. And Vincent, thrilled, mentions this in a March 1882 letter to his brother, writing, quote, "Theo, it’s almost miraculous!!! ….C.M. comes, orders 12 small pen drawings from me, views of The Hague, having seen a few that were finished for a rijksdaalder apiece, the price set by me. With the promise that if I make them to his liking he’ll order 12 more,10 but for which he’ll fix the price higher than I do. …So, it’s fine – it’s going well – it’ll get even better!” Unquote.
But then there’s more. As van Tilborgh notes, quote, "Somewhere in his own letters he mentions that he sold a portrait to somebody," though we don’t know whose portrait it is—but it wasn’t a self-portrait, that much is known. And we also know that he sold at least one work the Parisian paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy, and potentially more came to Tanguy in exchange for painting supplies. That’s also something Vincent, especially in his younger, poorer years—though by no means was he ever financially comfortable—did often: he traded his works, sometimes to other artists as a kind of creative exchange, and sometimes to local merchants so he could afford food and drink. It’s not an uncommon tale, and depending on how you want to think about it, this bartering could be considered a kind of art sale. And the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam actually mentions this specifically on their fantastic website, where they say that they believe that this constitutes quite a lot of sales on Van Gogh’s part. But whether or not you, dear listener, consider a trade of a canvas for some bread and wine a sale is a personal choice. I can tell you this, though, from my perspective: it does make me feel a little bit better for our poor, poor Vincent. Though we might not be able to call him a successful artist during his lifetime, even with all of these sales or semi-sales, it’s certainly better than nothing: and better, of course, than only one sale. It’s not just The Red Vineyard anymore, and it never was. And now we know better, so the next time you’re at one of those Immersive Van Gogh exhibitions and you hear someone tut-tutting about Van Gogh’s lack of art sales, you can set them straight—and commiserate that, regardless, Vincent did deserve better.
We’ve got one more episode left in this season of ArtCurious, and in our first episode this season, we began with Leonardo da Vinci. And we’re circling back to him, and another of his most mythologized artworks, for the next show. Leo is book-ending this season for us—and that is coming in two weeks: don’t miss it.
Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal. Thanks to Shella Seckel for her awesome research help. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com. Our podcast services are provided by our friends at Kaboonki. Subscribe now to their show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies. Season 1 is available in its entirety now—please visit subgenrepodcast.com for more details. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.
The ArtCurious Podcast is also fiscally sponsored by VAE Raleigh, a 501c3 nonprofit creativity incubator, which means you can donate tax-free to “ArtCurious” to show your support. To find the donation links and for more details about our show, please visit our website: artcuriouspodcast.com. We’re also on Twitter and Instagram at artcuriouspod. And we have podcast merchandise! Check out the link to our TeePublic store in the show notes on this episode, or on our website.
Check back with us soon as we explore the facts, and the fictions, of the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in art history.
