The Madnesses of Vincent Van Gogh

...And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night

You took your life as lovers often do

But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you

(Vincent – Don McLean)

I’ve never been a fan of Don McLean’s music. He only ever wrote two noteworthy songs, and of those, American Pie is pretentious gobbledegook, and Vincent is syrupy shmaltz. Its lyrics regurgitate the tired old trope of Vincent van Gogh as a martyr to an uncomprehending and unfeeling world that could not recognise his genius. I’ve also never been a committed fan of van Gogh, despite seeing many of his paintings at the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, the Kroller-Muller museum at Otterlo (the world’s second largest collection of his works), and elsewhere. To me, his late pictures appear wonky and gaudy; his images diminished by being overused on merchandise. So the purpose of this article is not to present a Don McLean-like hagiography of Vincent van Gogh, but to critically explore his life and his art, his experience of mental illness and the obsessive efforts of modern psychiatry to explain that experience. I will also consider what may be regarded as the madness of his mythical afterlife as one of the icons of modern art.

Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889)

The Madness of Vincent van Gogh

Vincent was born in 1853 in a village named Zundert, in Brabant, the Netherlands. The van Goghs were a successful middle class clan – one of Vincent’s uncles was an Admiral in the Dutch navy and another (Uncle Cent) was a partner in the international art dealing firm Goupil and Cie. Vincent’s father, however, was a humble pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, spending his working life in small rural congregations in mainly Catholic areas. Consequently, the family was not well-off, and money would be an issue for Vincent throughout his life.

Vincent was highly intelligent, very well-read and a good linguist. He was articulate and expressed his innermost thoughts clearly in his extensive correspondence with his younger brother Theo and others (he used his letters to Theo as one might use a diary). His letters show that he had a deep-seated need for social companionship and love (and sex), and for a fulfilling purpose for his life. Unfortunately however, from childhood he had an extreme personality that meant that he never achieved those dreams. He was careless with his personal appearance and looked odd. He had poor social skills and lacked empathy with others. He was intense, not allowing those he latched onto any space. He was also argumentative and sure of his own opinions and browbeat those who disagreed with him. All his life he tried to form relationships with family and acquaintances, but sooner or later most were put off by his manner and behaviour and broke contact with him. The only person who did not reject him (though he mostly kept his distance) was his brother Theo.

By the age of fourteen, Vincent’s schooling was finished, largely through his inability to get on with his fellow pupils and teachers. When he was sixteen, Vincent’s Uncle Cent found him a job with the art dealers Goupil and Cie, at the firm’s office in the Hague. A few years later, his brother Theo also joined the firm, initially in the Brussels office. Theo thrived as an art dealer, rising to become head of the prestigious Paris office. Vincent, by contrast, performed poorly, and at this stage in his life showed limited active interest in art. He would have been quickly dismissed if not for his Uncle Cent. Instead, he was transferred to the London office, and later to Paris (before Theo went to work there), but would not (or could not) toe the line and was finally sacked in 1876, aged twenty-three.

By this time, Vincent was becoming increasingly religious – one of a series of enthusiasms that came and went during his life. Following a brief (and unsuccessful) spell as a schoolteacher in England, he persuaded his parents to let him study for the priesthood. Yet again, however, he failed to fit in and was forced to abandon this ambition. Still full of religious fervour, he became a lay preacher and missionary in the Borinage, a mining area in Belgium, where he lived among the poor inhabitants and tried to establish a religious community. Unsuccessful again, his contract was not renewed.

By now (1880) Vincent was twenty-seven and had failed at every attempt at a career. His religious fervour faded, but he had begun to show a greater interest in art, adding rough sketches to some of his many letters to Theo. His brother encouraged him to take up art seriously, and for the remaining ten years of his life, Vincent devoted himself to drawing and painting. He had no paid employment, and sold just one painting in his lifetime. He was supported financially for the decade by Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own salary.

Theo van Gogh was a complex character. On one hand he was a sophisticated and successful art dealer, with standing in his profession and a wide circle of clever friends (and mistresses). On the other hand he was himself emotionally needy and never escaped Vincent’s clutches. He allowed Vincent to manipulate him into sending increasing amounts of money with vague promises of reimbursement when Vincent became a successful artist. Although he mostly kept Vincent at arms length geographically, for two years (1886-1888) he allowed Vincent to live in his apartment in Paris, and was swept up in Vincent’s chaotic lifestyle, which embraced excessive drinking (particularly absinthe), eating junk food and making extensive visits to prostitutes. Both Vincent and Theo contracted syphilis – with later tragic consequences for Theo.

Having decided to devote his life to art, Vincent never wavered from that aim. With no training in drawing or painting, he largely taught himself, from books and endless practice. He had a few brief spells of instruction, first from a cousin, a respected Dutch painter named Anton Mauve; later at an Art School in Antwerp, and finally at the studio of Fernand Cormon in Paris, where fellow students included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In every setting, Vincent quickly fell out with his teachers, and did not get on well with other students. He was not a naturally talented draughtsman and never perfected the ability to accurately depict the human figure. However, he never stopped practising, spending copious sums on art materials, subsidised by Theo.

In the first half of the 1880s, Vincent lived in a variety of places in the Netherlands, sometimes in rented studios and sometimes with his parents, though his relationship with them was always stormy. This was partly a consequence of his typically eccentric love life. For a time, he was infatuated with a widowed cousin named Kee Vos, bombarding her with proposals of marriage and in the process alienating both her and many members of his wider family. Later, he lived in the Hague for some eighteen months with a former prostitute named Sien Hoornik and her two children. Theo finally persuaded Vincent to leave Sien, and following the break-up Vincent moved to Drenthe, an isolated rural area where he hoped to establish himself as a painter of landscapes and peasant life. After only a few months, however, he was driven away by poor weather and loneliness, the locals regarding him as an oddball and ostracising him.

In the Kroller-Muller museum in Otterlo, a room is devoted to Vincent’s paintings. On one wall are earlier works, mainly landscapes or scenes of peasant life, and uniformly dark in colour and form. On the other wall are the later works, in the brightly coloured, emotionally charged style that is today most associated with Vincent van Gogh. The contrast is startling, and perfectly encapsulates the development of Vincent’s art. In the years before moving to Paris to live with Theo in 1886, Vincent was heavily influenced by the works of Jean-Francois Millet and other painters of the ‘Barbizon School’. This was a group of artists who established a ‘colony’ in the small French village of Barbizon in the 1830s, painting landscapes and depictions of peasant life ‘en plein air’. As well as admiring their art, in his loneliness Vincent long dreamt of establishing an artistic colony himself. But Vincent would not, or could not, paint pictures with the facility of Millet and the others, who produced sanitised rustic scenes attractive to middle-class urban buyers. Despite Theo’s constructive criticism, Vincent’s early paintings, typified by his first ‘masterpiece’, The Potato Eaters (1885), were unremittingly dark in colour and tone, messily constructed, and with human figures that were little more than caricatures. Vincent sent The Potato Eaters to Theo hoping that he would find a buyer for it, but Theo knew better than to offer it for sale.

The Potato Eaters (1885)

In late 1885, Vincent left the family home and the Netherlands for good, driven out by conflict with his family (his father had died in March 1885), and the local villagers, who accused him of getting a peasant girl pregnant. He went to Antwerp in Belgium, enrolling at the Art School there, but soon alienated his teachers and fellow students. He seems to have had a depressive breakdown as a result, and following a vague invitation from Theo he turned up unannounced at his apartment in Paris, staying there for the next two years.

As mentioned earlier, Vincent’s stay in Paris did not do his brother’s health much good, and cramped his social life, as Vincent put off Theo’s friends with his strange and combative manner. Theo himself wrote in a letter that Vincent was, “impossible to get along with...since he spares nothing and nobody...Everyone who sees him has said: ‘C’est un fou’”. However, Paris marked a turning point in Vincent’s art. Theo introduced him to the work of the Impressionists, of whom Vincent had previously known little. Vincent started to paint like an Impressionist, his work making the transition from dark to light.

The art dealing firm for whom Theo worked, which had previously largely sold old masters and Salon painters, began to embrace avant garde art, with Theo van Gogh taking the lead. Through Theo, Vincent met Impressionist artists such as Camille Pissaro, and newcomers who came to Theo hoping that he would promote their art. Chief among these was Emil Bernard, who used his acquaintance with Vincent as a way of currying favour with Theo. However, he also introduced Vincent to Japanese art, whose bold, simple colours and clean lines combined with Impressionist influences to create Vincent’s late, most popular paintings. Another hopeful artist who crossed Vincent’s path at that time was Paul Gauguin.

Then in February 1888, Vincent abruptly left Paris and settled in the little town of Arles, in Provence – no one knows why (there is no surviving correspondence with Theo from this time). He rented rooms in a building known as the Yellow House, next to a rough all-night cafe, and adjacent to a park that was a haunt of prostitutes and their clients. Subsidised by Theo, Vincent set up a studio and produced painting after painting in his new style, enchanted by the light and bright colours of the South. As elsewhere, the locals viewed him with suspicion (Paris hadn’t changed him), and his only acquaintances were some of the lowlife characters who frequented the cafe. However, he maintained his dream of a community of artists, and tried to persuade artistic acquaintances such as Emil Bernard to join him in Arles. He also cajoled Theo into trying to recruit candidates for a community. The only person who could be persuaded was Paul Gauguin, who was ambitious but broke, and came to Arles on condition that Theo subsidised him as well as Vincent.

Gauguin provisionally planned to stay with Vincent for a year, but left after just nine weeks (at the end of December 1888), finding Vincent’s lifestyle, his neediness and combustibility overwhelming. When he learned that Gauguin was leaving, Vincent had the first of what would prove to be a series of apparently psychotic breakdowns. He threatened Gauguin with a razor, and after he left, sliced off most of his own ear. In a delirious state, he knocked on the door of his favourite prostitute and handed her the ear. He was admitted to hospital in Arles, staying there for several weeks and remembering little about the incident.

On discharge, Vincent returned to the Yellow House and continued to paint, but experienced more psychotic or delirious episodes, and in May 1889 allowed himself to be admitted to a Mental Hospital in Sant-Remy-de-Provence, staying there for a year. The psychotic attacks continued; sometimes taking the form of stuporous episodes. On one occasion, in a delirious state, Vincent was found eating paint. In between times he continued to produce pictures, painting some of his best known works (including ‘A Starry Night’).

Starry Night (1889)

Vincent left the mental hospital in May 1890 (pronounced cured) and moved to the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, some twenty miles from Paris, to be nearer to Theo, and also to Doctor Paul Gachet, a psychiatrist who had treated other artists. Yet again, Vincent resumed painting. Yet again, he struggled with companionship in Auvers, but he spent time over the summer with teenage brothers, Rene and Gaston Secretan, who were staying at the family holiday home. Vincent regarded them as friends, but they were more motivated by teasing or playing pranks on him.

During the turbulent time following the ear-cutting episode, two significant events happened far away in Paris. The first was that in April 1889 Theo married Johanna Bonger (Jo), the sister of a friend, and their son, Vincent Willem was born in January 1890. The second was the publication, also in January 1890, of an appreciative article about Vincent’s work by a young art critic named Albert Aurier (some of Vincent’s paintings had been displayed at Theo’s instigation at the Salon des Independentes and a group exhibition of Belgian artists known as ‘les Vingt’). As a result of the article, Vincent began to get some recognition among his fellow artists, and made his first sale, of a painting named ‘The Red Vineyard’. However, Aurier’s article related Vincent’s art to his social isolation and mental disorder, thus sowing the seeds for the legend of the ‘mad genius’.

Vincent was pleased by the positive review of his work, but was more concerned by the implications for his future of Theo’s marriage. As well as being preoccupied with his wife and baby son, Theo was also unsettled at work, and spoke of setting up his own art dealership – and he was increasingly worried about his own health. Vincent feared losing Theo and his financial support, and the consequences of his continuing psychotic attacks, and became more and more despondent. He pleaded with Theo to bring his family to Auvers, where they could all live together. Inevitably, Theo declined.

On 27 July 1890, Vincent took his painting materials into the fields, as he was accustomed to do most days. He returned in the evening, apparently in physical distress. His landlord asked him what was wrong and Vincent showed him a small hole under his ribs from a gunshot wound, and said, ‘I wounded myself’. There were no witnesses to the incident. When the police came to investigate, they asked him if he had intended to kill himself (suicide at the time was a crime), and Vincent replied, ‘Yes, I believe so’. Medical help was summoned, and Theo arrived from Paris. Two days, later, Vincent died of his wound, aged 37. He was buried in Auvers on 30 July 1890.

The manner of Vincent’s death raised questions that have never been fully answered, and which call into question the assumption that Vincent had committed suicide (needless to say, in the USA a group of conspiracy theorists believe that he was murdered). While Vincent had talked of suicide before, he never mentioned the possibility of shooting himself. He was not known to own a gun, and the weapon that shot him was never recovered. It was identified as belonging to young Rene Secretan, who denied knowing how Vincent had got hold of it. Vincent was shot in the abdomen, not the heart or the head as with most suicides. And when the first shot did not immediately kill him, he staggered home rather than finishing the job. The verdict of suicide suited everyone, apparently including Vincent. But years later, Rene Secretan, then in his eighties, gave an interview in which he stated that it was indeed his gun that had shot Vincent, and, without giving specific details, said that the incident was a prank that had gone wrong.

Six months after Vincent’s death, Theo van Gogh died in a Paris asylum, of an incurable neuro-degenerative disease. He was 33 years old.

The Madness of Vincent’s Psychiatric Diagnoses

Just as armchair detectives love to speculate on the identity of Jack the Ripper, armchair psychiatrists are fascinated by Vincent van Gogh. Some 150 mental health professionals have considered his case in the 130-odd years since his death, and he has been given over 30 different diagnoses. It is of course hard to properly assess a historical figure – one cannot interview, observe or get to know him, and cannot use modern psychological or medical tests. There is written evidence available, from Vincent’s copious letters, eye witness accounts and the surviving case notes of the doctors who treated him. But Vincent was garrulous and self-absorbed to a fault, and his letters reveal everything and nothing. Stories by people who knew Vincent were generally told long after his death – while he was alive few paid him any attention. And his nineteenth century doctors wrote to other sets of assumptions and diagnostic categories to those of today, and used terminology differently. None of this however has stopped speculation about his confusing mental state.

Disorders that Vincent has been suggested to have experienced include bipolar disorder, as evidenced by his mood swings from despondency to excessive energy and enthusiasm. He has also been labelled as having borderline personality disorder, which may have been behind his difficulty with social relationships, holding down a job and his successful manipulation of his brother. In his letters, he spoke fluent ‘therapy speak’, showing understanding of his problems while being completely unable to change – another characteristic of borderline personality disorder. He was also almost certainly an alcoholic, freely admitting to consuming large quantities of absinthe and cognac to blunt his feelings and get him through the day. In addition, he may have been experiencing mental effects of syphillis infection.

His psychotic or delirious episodes were diagnosed by his doctors as being caused by temporal lobe epilepsy, and that diagnosis was held to be valid for many years, before falling out of favour more recently. Other possible explanations for them are schizophrenia, catatonia or an acute stress reaction fuelled by alcoholism and nutrient deficiency. Opinions differ as to whether the attacks were a more extreme continuation of his previous difficulties, or a new mental illness.

In 2016, the van Gogh museum held an Expert Symposium on Vincent’s mental state. Its conclusions were suitably guarded. Each of the above conditions were considered possible, without coming to a definite verdict. Could Vincent be diagnosed more accurately if he was alive today? Well perhaps, but psychiatry is still a notoriously imprecise business. Psychiatrists often disagree about a diagnosis even if they have the patient in front of them, with a battery of test results, and are generally stumped when asked what actually caused the person’s disorder. And there is also no guarantee that the person can be treated, let alone cured. As a commentator pointed out recently, only one psychiatric condition has been reliably pinned down in the past hundred years, in terms of identifying a reliable diagnosis, cause, treatment and cure, with the result that the condition in question has more or less been eradicated. It is a neurodegenerative condition named General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI), which before the development of antibiotics was a common (and fatal) consequence of tertiary syphilis – and ironically what killed Theo van Gogh.

But this is not the end of the story, for in the last few years, two new conditions have been invented that have eagerly been applied to Vincent’s case. These are the ‘neurodevelopmental’ conditions, Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Both appear to fit Vincent like a glove. His lifelong difficulties with social skills, empathy and making friends are characteristic of ASD, as is his single-minded pursuance of notions or activities. At the same time, his chaotic lifestyle, constant production of swiftly completed paintings (sometimes one a day) and inability to manage money tick the boxes for ADHD. Vincent has become a poster boy for neurodevelopmental disorders.

So that’s that then. But in reality, ASD and ADHD are hypotheses, not solidly identified medical entities, like GPI. Vincent fits their diagnostic criteria – but those criteria are so broad that so do a significant portion of the adult population. Actual neurological mechanisms underpinning the ‘symptoms’ of these ‘conditions’ have not been discovered. While trendy at the moment, it is quite possible that in the future ASD and/or ADHD will go out of fashion, and new diagnoses will be mooted to explain the enigma of Vincent van Gogh.

Or perhaps, the medicalisation of life will itself fall out of fashion, and like those who knew him in the nineteenth century people will simply shrug their shoulders and say, ‘C’est un fou’ – which roughly translates to, ‘He’s an arsehole’.

The Madness of Vincent’s Artistic Afterlife

We noted above that Vincent sold just one painting in his lifetime. When he died, his entire stock of paintings and drawings (some 860 oil paintings and over a thousand works on paper) came into Theo’s possession. Theo died just six months later, and his widow, Jo van Gogh Bonger was left with Vincent’s artworks. And that could have been that. Despite some positive attention given to those paintings that Theo had exhibited on Vincent’s behalf, there was no clear demand for his art, and apparently no one alive to promote it. Jo could have disposed of her cumbersome legacy, and Vincent would have been, at best, a brief footnote in art history.

But Jo had other ideas. She was an intelligent, cultivated, energetic and canny woman, whose role in rescuing Vincent’s art from obscurity has until recently been underplayed (when Jo and Theo’s son, V. W. van Gogh spoke at the opening of the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam in 1973, long after Jo’s death, he inexplicably did not mention his mother’s contribution). Jo began to act as an art dealer, to bring Vincent’s work to the market. She was apparently not motivated by money (she was comfortably off), but by her desire to provide a fitting memorial to Theo and Vincent. She cannily placed paintings on the market, and stoked up interest in Vincent’s work by accompanying them with extracts from his letters to Theo. Thus, as with Albert Aurier’s 1890 article, Vincent’s art was inextricably linked to his backstory. In 1905, Jo organised a major exhibition of Vincent’s work at the Stediljk museum in Amsterdam, and in 1914 she published her own translation of his letters to Theo. By 1920 the popular legend of Vincent van Gogh as a ‘mad genius’ was in place. It was reinforced by the publication in 1934 of Irving Stone’s novel ‘Lust for Life’, loosely based on Vincent’s life, and boosted further by the 1956 film of the book, starring all-American hero Kirk Douglas as a far too handsome and strapping Vincent.

So was Vincent a genius, mad or otherwise? He certainly adhered to Malcolm Gladwell’s dictum that genius requires at least 10,000 hours of practice (despite which his draughtsmanship remained imperfect), and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of art theory and contemporary artists from his extensive reading (Theo sometimes sought advice from Vincent when considering whether to promote an artist). His untutored mix of impressionism and Japanese styles, and his signature bright colours and wonky compositions are certainly appealing to popular taste, with or without his romanticised backstory. He has been credited as a key influence on the early-twentieth century European Expressionist movement, and on post-war ‘Neo-expressionist’ artists such as Anselm Keifer and Julian Schnabel.

At the same time, while Jo was trying to spark interest in Vincent’s art, not all art critics or dealers were equally impressed by his work. Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer who brought the Impressionists to the attention of the public would not promote Vincent’s paintings (though to be fair, he disliked Cezanne and Gauguin as well). Roger Fry, the inventor of the term ’Post-impressionism’, included some of Vincent’s works in his seminal 1910 exhibition of the same name, but preferred the more formal and technically adept style of Cezanne and omitted Vincent from the 1912 follow-up exhibition. Later, the dealer Daniel Kahnweiler, who promoted Picasso and Cubism, censured a fellow dealer for advertising that he was interested in purchasing van Goghs, stating disdainfully that this was “the behaviour of an interior decorator, not an art dealer”. And in the 1950s, the influential American critic Clement Greenberg was uncomplimentary about Vincent’s ‘craft competence’, and questioned whether he could be regarded as a great artist.

By this time, however, critics such as Greenberg were on the wrong side of history. The popularity of Vincent’s art, fuelled by ‘Lust for Life’, had rendered all criticism null and void. Prices paid for Vincent’s paintings have risen exponentially, with the most expensive sold at auction to date being ‘Orchard with Cypresses’, painted at Arles in 1888, and fetching $117 million in November 2022. A canny commentator has noted that as the prices of Vincent’s paintings increased, critics became more positive about his art. Vincent van Gogh has become a genius by default.

Conclusion: The Madnesses of Vincent van Gogh – a Marriage of Art and Backstory

In 2025, the Turner Prize, the UK’s annual art prize, was won by Nnena Kalu, a 59-year old woman artist who is autistic (uncontroversially), learning disabled and has limited communication. Her art includes sculptures bound together with VHS tape and drawings of swirling, tornado-like shapes. Her victory was not universally approved of by the critics. Some saw little in her work that the other short-listed artists couldn’t do as well or better, and questioned the extent that the judges were influenced by her history of cognitive difficulties. Others came to Kalu’s defence, deeming her an original and exciting artist and a worthy winner and accusing the naysayers of prejudice against people with learning disabilities. As with Vincent, any sober consideration of her art was rendered moot by knowledge of her backstory.

So what can we learn from the life and afterlife of Vincent van Gogh? In my opinion, nothing. He was a one-off – a freak, if you will – a deeply disturbed and unsympathetic character with a unique and baffling array of psychiatric symptoms. He somehow taught himself to paint, and was lucky enough to have a brother and sister-in-law who devoted themselves to supporting him and promoting his art in life and after his death. The stratospheric popularity he has gained in the 130-odd years since his passing is the result of a unique coming-together of a highly romanticised version of his life story, and the garish, untutored output of his brush. We will never see his like again.

 

Key Reference

Naifeh S & Smith GW (2011) Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House