The Colours of a Tortured Soul
Free with an account
The EPUB is free. Create a HistorIQly account and it downloads straight to your device.
Sign in to downloadCreate a free accountFree account, no card needed. Already have one? Sign in
Your account is ready — enjoy the read.
Download the EPUBFree for everyone with a HistorIQly account.
All EPUBs are in English. Translations are coming.
Van Gogh’s paintings are often approached through the story of his death. His letters offer a fuller starting point: a working artist discussing colours, money, exhibitions and the people whose help mattered to him. This reconstructed biography follows those efforts as well as the illness that interrupted them, without treating suffering as an explanation for every canvas.
“Paraphrase of letter 400: When doubt tells you that you are no painter, answer it by painting.”
1853–1890
Born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, North Brabant, Netherlands. Died on 29 July 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise, France — thirty-seven years that included failed careers as an art dealer, teacher, and missionary before a decade of furious artistic creation.
~10 years
Van Gogh committed himself to art through drawing in 1880, aged 27, and developed his painting in the following years. His career lasted roughly a decade and produced about 2,100 works, including approximately 900 oil paintings.
~900
His total output includes approximately 860–900 oil paintings and over 1,100 drawings and sketches, plus watercolours and prints. At Auvers he made roughly seventy paintings in a little over two months, as well as drawings; the estimate does not establish a daily schedule.
820 by Vincent
The museum’s account of the surviving correspondence lists 820 letters by Van Gogh and 83 addressed to him. Most of his letters went to Theo; they preserve practical exchanges alongside reflections on art, relationships and work.
Post-Impressionist master who created roughly 2,100 artworks in a decade, transforming modern art
Defining Events
The Starry Night
Painted in June 1889 at Saint-Rémy, The Starry Night combines observation with invention. Its village was not visible from Van Gogh’s window. The painting belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Potato Eaters
Painted in Nuenen in April–May 1885, the composition places five figures around a meal under a hanging lamp. Van Gogh intended the hands and rough setting to convey the labour through which the food had been earned.
The Sunflowers
Van Gogh painted four versions of Sunflowers in August 1888, as he prepared for Gauguin and the shared studio at Arles. The series varies the flowers and their backgrounds; its colour and texture emerge from those differences.
Timeline
Born in Groot-Zundert
Born on 30 March in the parsonage at Groot-Zundert, North Brabant, exactly one year after a stillborn brother also named Vincent. His father Theodorus was a Dutch Reformed pastor; his uncle “Cent” was a partner in the art dealing firm Goupil & Cie. The Van Gogh family straddled two worlds — the church and the art trade — and Vincent would try both before finding his own path.
Art Dealer at Goupil & Cie
Van Gogh entered Goupil in The Hague in 1869 and later worked in London and Paris. The trade gave him a sustained education in pictures. His employment ended in 1876; the familiar story of a decisive rejected romance in London remains uncertain.
Missionary in the Borinage
After teaching and unsuccessful preparation for religious work, Van Gogh went to the Belgian mining district. His paid evangelical appointment was not renewed in 1879. He remained for a time before concentrating on drawing.
Decision to Become an Artist
In 1880, Van Gogh increasingly committed himself to drawing, encouraged and supported by Theo. He studied reproductions after artists such as Millet and continued his work in Brussels.
The Potato Eaters
In Nuenen, repeated studies of heads and interiors led toward The Potato Eaters. Van Rappard’s criticism of the related lithograph provoked a dispute; the finished painting did not immediately establish a market for Van Gogh’s work.
Paris and the Impressionists
Living with Theo in Paris, Van Gogh experimented with brighter colour and different brushwork. Contact with painters including Bernard, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, and study of Japanese prints, helped broaden his practice.
The Yellow House and the Ear
In February, Van Gogh moved to Arles seeking southern light. He rented the Yellow House and envisioned an artists’ colony. Gauguin arrived in October; tensions escalated over two months. On 23 December, Vincent suffered a crisis and injured his left ear. Gauguin’s later account describes a confrontation, but the complete sequence is uncertain. The “Studio of the South” dream collapsed.
The Starry Night at Saint-Rémy
Van Gogh voluntarily entered Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy in May. He painted landscapes, portraits and works after artists he admired, including The Starry Night and Irises. Recurring illness interrupted the work and shaped when and where he could paint.
Death at Auvers-sur-Oise
Van Gogh dies on 29 July 1890, two days after suffering a gunshot wound. Suicide is the standard historical account, though aspects of the event remain uncertain. Theo’s later letter to their sister Lies reports words spoken at the bedside; it is not a transcript of Vincent’s final thoughts.
Key Figures
Theo van Gogh
Four years younger, Theo was Vincent’s principal financial supporter and a trusted correspondent. An art dealer at Boussod, Valadon & Cie in Paris, Theo provided the monthly allowance that kept Vincent alive and painting. Their correspondence — over 660 letters — is one of the great literary records in art history. Theo married Johanna Bonger in 1889; their son was named Vincent Willem. Theo was already seriously ill before Vincent’s death. He died in January 1891, aged thirty-three, six months after his brother. Johanna later had Theo’s remains reinterred beside Vincent in Auvers.
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin joined Van Gogh in Arles in October 1888. They worked together and argued about their art; their shared household ended during Van Gogh’s December crisis and hospitalisation. Later accounts, including Gauguin’s, require comparison rather than being treated as a complete eyewitness record.
The Legacy of Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh’s reputation grew through the efforts of artists, collectors and his family, especially Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who published his letters to Theo in 1914. The correspondence preserves a working life more complex than the familiar image of an isolated, unrecognised genius.
The book is a reconstruction, not Van Gogh speaking in his own words throughout. Read it alongside the paintings and letters, which sometimes resist the tidy story a biography wants to tell.
Get the Full Book
Read the story of Vincent van Gogh — 8 chapters of historical narrative.
Dramatised first-person narrative; not an autobiography.