Questions to ask Vincent van Gogh

Who Van Gogh was

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 at Zundert, in the south of the Netherlands, the eldest son of a pastor. He was an art dealer, a teacher, a bookshop assistant and a lay preacher before he decided, at 27, in 1880, to become an artist. In about ten years he made more than 800 paintings and over 1,000 drawings, moving through the Netherlands, Antwerp, Paris, Arles, the asylum at Saint-Rémy and finally Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris. His brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, supported him with money and letters throughout.

He suffered from recurring attacks of mental illness from December 1888, and died at Auvers on 29 July 1890, aged 37, after what most historians accept was a suicide attempt. If any of this topic affects you personally, talk to someone you trust or contact a local helpline.

The letters are your answer key

Almost every question below has an answer in a letter you can read for free at vangoghletters.org, the online edition by the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute, with the original letters, translations and notes. When you write his answers, quote or paraphrase a letter and give its date and place. That is what makes a Van Gogh project stand out.

To practise asking, you can talk by voice or text with an AI recreation of Vincent van Gogh on Yuga, built from his letters and the historical record. It is not Vincent, it can be wrong, and your work should cite the letters themselves.

Before he painted: dealer, teacher, preacher

In the letters: he joined the art dealers Goupil and Co. at 16 in 1869, working in The Hague, London and Paris, and was dismissed in 1876. He taught at a boarding school in Ramsgate, England, studied for the ministry in Amsterdam, and in 1879 worked as an evangelist among coal miners in the Borinage in Belgium, where the church did not renew his post. His early letters to Theo are full of Bible verses, books and pictures he loved.

1. What did selling art for Goupil teach you about pictures?
2. Why did you want to become a preacher?
3. What did you see among the miners of the Borinage?
4. Why did you decide in 1880 that you would be an artist?

Learning to paint: The Hague and Nuenen

In the letters: he taught himself largely from drawing manuals and copying prints, with a few lessons from his cousin by marriage, the painter Anton Mauve. In Nuenen, where his parents lived, he painted weavers and farm workers. The Potato Eaters (1885) was his first big figure painting; he told Theo he wanted to show that the people eating by lamplight had dug the earth with the same hands they put in the dish.

1. Why did you draw for so long before you started painting in oil?
2. Why did you choose peasants and weavers as your subjects?
3. What did you want people to feel when they looked at The Potato Eaters?
4. Why were your early paintings so dark?

Paris, 1886 to 1888

In the letters and the record: he lived with Theo in Montmartre, met painters including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard, Paul Signac and Paul Gauguin, and saw Impressionist and Pointillist work. His palette brightened. He bought hundreds of cheap Japanese woodblock prints and copied some of them in paint. There are few letters from these two years, because the brothers lived together.

1. What changed in your painting when you saw the Impressionists?
2. Why did you collect Japanese prints, and what did you learn from them?
3. Why did you paint so many self portraits in Paris?
4. Why did you leave Paris for the south?

Arles and the Yellow House

In the letters: he arrived in Arles in February 1888 and rented the Yellow House, hoping to start a “studio of the south” for artists. In August he painted the Sunflowers for Gauguin's room. In August 1888 he told Theo he wanted to use colour arbitrarily, to express himself more forcefully, rather than copy exactly what he saw. Gauguin stayed from late October to late December 1888. Their time together ended after a violent quarrel and a crisis on 23 December in which Vincent injured his own ear; he was taken to hospital.

1. What was the studio of the south supposed to be?
2. Why did you paint sunflowers again and again?
3. What do you mean by using colour arbitrarily?
4. What did you and Gauguin argue about?
5. How did the people of Arles treat you after December 1888?

On the ear: see did Van Gogh cut off his ear, which sets out the evidence, including the drawing by his doctor, Félix Rey, published by Bernadette Murphy in 2016.

Saint-Rémy, Auvers and Theo

In the letters: in May 1889 he entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy of his own accord and stayed a year, painting the garden, cypresses, olive trees and, in June 1889, The Starry Night. He wrote that he understood his attacks as an illness and that work was the best way to hold himself together. In May 1890 he moved to Auvers, where Dr Paul Gachet watched over him and where he painted about 70 pictures in about 70 days. Theo died in January 1891, six months after Vincent.

1. How did painting help you during your illness?
2. Why did you paint The Starry Night from memory and imagination, not from life?
3. What do the stars mean to you?
4. What would you want to say to Theo about everything he did for you?
5. How did you feel when a critic, Albert Aurier, praised your work in 1890?
6. You sold very little. Did you believe people would understand your work one day?
7. What would you tell a young artist who is told they have no talent?

Sample answers in Vincent's own words

Q: What do you need to be happy?

Q: Is loving nature the same as religious faith?

Q: Did you draw even when you were not an artist yet?

Q: What do the stars make you think of? In a letter from Arles in July 1888 he wrote, in substance, that looking at the stars always made him dream, and that just as we take a train to reach a town on the map, we might take death to reach a star. Paraphrase it, and read the full letter before you use it.

Questions to avoid, and how to ask about illness

He never knew he would become famous, that The Starry Night would hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or that his paintings would sell for record prices. He cannot confirm modern diagnoses: doctors have suggested epilepsy, bipolar disorder and other conditions, and none can be proven. Ask how he described his illness in his own letters instead. Avoid questions that treat suffering as the source of his talent; his letters show a hard working, well read painter who thought carefully about colour and technique.

Where to read and see his work

Read the letters at vangoghletters.org, searchable by date, place and person. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, founded on the collection kept by Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who first published the letters in 1914, has the largest collection of his work. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's Van Gogh: The Life (2011) is the longest biography; Martin Bailey's Studio of the South (2016) covers Arles. He also appears in famous painters in history and famous letters in history.