As usual in this series, I’m hoping you’ve heard of the man, Vincent van Gogh, painter of Starry Night and various flowers and wheatfields and self-portraits. Also known for cutting off his own ear and eventually killing himself.

During his lifetime, the art world largely did not know Vincent, and those who did largely did not want him. I had in my head that he only sold one painting in his lifetime. Like many factoids I read on the Internet, that turned out not to be true. He sold more than one. But maybe not a lot more than one. He certainly was not a leading artist of the day.

The story of how he moved from unknown crazy guy to tragic celebrity genius is mostly due to a woman, and this is her story.

An Idylllic Childhood

Johanna Gezina Bonger was born on October 4, 1862, in Amsterdam. She belonged to a middle-class family that provided her with piano lessons, books, outings to the theater and concerts, and an education at a prep school for future teachers. She looked back on her childhood as an idyllic time (Luijten, 16).

Her report card at the Higher Secondary School said she was good at French and English. Satisfactory at history, geography, arithmetic, and drawing. Not good at physics and chemistry (Luijten, 29). But that report was good enough to get her a position as a school mistress after graduation, and she picked up money on the side as a translator.

In 1880, she began a diary which is a beautiful gift to modern readers because it reassures us that self-doubt and angst are nothing new. For example, she wrote:

“No one who ever helps me, no one who does something for me, they don’t know me, they don’t know what goes on inside me, oh I don’t know myself: it is a mess” (Luijten, 32).

Or the infinitely relatable cry of distress over the smallness of ordinary life:

Oh God, if life is nothing but mending stockings and washing up cups and doing the washing, what is the point of it? I should have lived in a different age; I’m not in my place here, I think, in our civilized 19th century period; of course I know that life hangs on a thread of small things, but surely it shouldn’t be so hollow, so meaningless” (Luijten, 38)

It’s not clear to me what century she thought she should have lived in. Laundry and dishes are pretty universal, though I will say I’ve never mended a stocking in my life.

Jo also informs her diary that she is not kind enough, not reliable enough, too withdrawn, too shy, too selfish, and too discontented (Luijten, 36). I suspect that she was a much better person than she thought she was. Like so many other people I know.

In between fits of melancholy, things were actually going pretty well for Jo. She moved through a couple of teaching jobs and took a trip to England to improve her English. She turned down a marriage proposal because a girl has the freedom to do that when she is earning her own living.

At one point, she had a visit back home, which was fantastic because her beloved brother Andries was home too. Andries was working in Paris as an art dealer. He brought a friend home with him. His name was Theo van Gogh. We know this because of Theo and Andries, not because of Jo. Theo made so little impression on her that she didn’t even mention him in the diary, though she gushed a lot about Andries and the rest of the visit (Luijten, 52).

Afterwards, she went through a couple more teaching jobs and fell in love with a guy named Eduard. Eduard sent her roses, and they were sitting on her table, when this guy Theo van Gogh shows up out of the blue and proposes marriage. Jo was stunned. She turned him down. But then things didn’t work out with Eduard after all.

Getting Engaged

In 1888, Jo went to Paris. Her reasons are a little unclear. Officially reason was to visit her brother Andries. Very reasonable. If there was lurking any suppressed desire to see the man who was desperately in love with her, it goes unsaid. What we know for sure is that within a month, Theo was writing rapturous letters home to his own mother:

“I thought I could treat her amicably, and I became good friends with her and her brother once again. But mother, that was impossible, I loved her too much, and now that we have seen one another a great deal these last few days she has told me she loves me too and that she will take me the way I am… Oh mother, I am so inexpressibly happy. Can it really be true?” (Ozanne, 139)

The plan was that Jo and Theo would go home to Amsterdam and begin the wedding preparations. But Theo’s travel was delayed, by an event that proved to be an ominous portent for the future. In Jo’s own words written many years later:

“The evening of December 23rd, in an attack of violent overexcitement, an excess of high fever with delirium, Vincent had cut off a part of his ear and had taken it to a woman in a brothel; there was a great ruckus… The police had gotten involved… and had taken him to the hospital” (Ozanne, 145).

Theo did not share all the details with Jo at the time, but instead of going home to Amsterdam he went to the south of France to help his brother. We can’t know exactly what was going on in Vincent’s head, but he was most certainly suffering from mental illness, and it is possible that he was experiencing auditory hallucinations. Perhaps cutting off his ear was his desperate attempt to make it stop. Why he thought any woman, brothel resident or otherwise, would want the ear, I don’t know. For a while there was doubt that Vincent would survive. But he did survive.

For Jo, this incident was the first indication that she was marrying Theo, but it was Vincent’s life that would come to dominate her own.

At the moment however, Vincent got better, all seemed well, and the wedding went ahead on April 18, 1889. Immediately after the ceremony, the newlyweds moved back to Paris. Vincent had not attended the wedding. He was still in the South of France, and Jo had not met him yet.

Married Life

Married life proved to be an adjustment. Jo didn’t know how to cook (Luijten, 76). She was also quite concerned that she didn’t understand enough art to be married into this artistic family. Theo the art dealer did his best to educate her. Knowing how important Vincent was to Theo, she was particularly concerned with whether Vincent would like her, and angst had not vanished with the maturity of a few more years. During their engagement, she had written to Theo:

“You had often talked about him, about how much you loved him—but now I know what you mean and realize what an influence he must have had on your life—it reflects such a noble, lofty spirit… His letter has made my longing to get to know him and love him much, much stronger, and I can now wholeheartedly endorse something you once wrote to me when he was ill: ‘whether near or far may he be the same advisor and brother to both of us’. … Shall I ever be able to do anything for him when we are married? I’m afraid he’ll see me as a nuisance—even now, he thinks that when I’m there, there will not be room in your apartment for all his paintings. Write and tell him your little wife will take up hardly any space and everything will be just the same as before, will it not?” (Luijtjen, 102)

It was a good question, whether everything would be just the same as before, and one that was undoubtedly preying on Vincent as well. As an art dealer Theo had a regular salary. But by long-standing arrangement, he sent 15 percent of his salary to Vincent, a thing that many a wife could easily resent. In return Vincent sent his paintings to Theo, to be Theo’s property (Luijten, 85).

Eventually, this would prove to be an unbelievably fantastic investment. But there was no guarantee it was going to work out that way. At the moment, they weren’t worth very much at all. They were entirely under foot in the small apartment. As a newlywed, Jo had Vincent’s peach trees on her living room wall, and his yellow roses on her bedroom wall. Plus many more canvases and drawings stuffed behind and under furniture (Luijten, 104). She was drowning in original van Gogh’s, as she busied herself with keeping house, writing to her family (including Vincent), and soon pregnancy.

The pregnancy was hardly a surprise, and yet Jo wrote to Vincent that she was worried about it. She liked babies, but neither she nor Theo were very healthy, and surely the most important thing to give to a baby was a strong constitution?

Vincent was unsettled by the news, as he had been by the marriage. It wasn’t that he didn’t want Theo to be happy. It was just that he depended on Theo, both financially and emotionally. Changes were bound to make him nervous, but he still answered Jo very politely that love counted more than anything else, and he was sure their child would have plenty of love. He then added, “As for being godfather to a son of yours, when to begin with it may be a daughter, honestly, in the circumstances I would rather wait until I am away from here” (Ozanne, 165).

As with many of Vincent’s letters, this one is undated, making the chronology a little hard, but presumably, by “away from here,” he meant out of the mental asylum. He did leave the asylum, but he was soon back in again. He tried to eat his paint from the tubes, so that he could die from his art. His doctor forbade him to paint at all because it was killing him. Vincent thought that not painting would also kill him (Ozanne, 165).

Theo was doing his best in Paris to boost Vincent’s reputation. He did get one of Vincent’s paintings into an exhibition, but one of the other painters took offense to the fact that his paintings would be shown next to that “abominable pot of sunflowers by Monsieur Vincent.” For a while, there was even going to be a duel over it (Ozanne, 172).

Meeting Vincent at Last

Jo was a little too busy to notice this drama because her son, also named Vincent, was born in January 1890. Jo was pretty sure she was dying, but she lived, and so did the boy.

In May of the same year, the older Vincent came to Paris and she finally met him for the first time. She was surprised to see that he looked healthier than Theo, who was really very ill (Ozanne, 177; Luijten, 104).

It’s quite possible that Jo didn’t know what disease Theo had. He might not have wanted to mention it. It was syphilis, undoubtedly contracted from sexual encounters before his marriage. Miraculously, he did not infect his wife or his son. On the other hand, he had been refused life insurance on medical grounds. Jo wrote about it as an annoyance for her beloved Theo. She seemed not to realize that life insurance was not for Theo’s benefit. It was for hers. She was the one who would be in financial trouble if he died (Luijten, 96).

The beginning of Vincent’s visit was beautiful. But it was only days before the cracks began to show and weeks before the cracks became chasms, and money was at the heart of it. There was a family plan for Jo, Theo, Vincent, Jo’s brother Andries, and his wife Annie to all go into business together and start their own art gallery. Like many family businesses, it sounded beautiful in theory, but was a lot harder when it came down to brass tacks and who was going to risk what.

In July 1890, there was a family squabble that left bad feelings on all sides and no more art gallery (Luijten, 106). Vincent went back to the south of France. Jo worried that she had been unkind to him. Theo was unhappy with his own employers, but he could no longer afford to leave if no one else would go in on the art gallery. Vincent shot himself. The details were fuzzy and some scholars think it was more complicated than that (Naifeh, 856). But at the moment, though, it hardly mattered. He was badly wounded and Theo rushed to his side. Jo sent him her best wishes by letter, but it was too late. Vincent died on July 29, 1890 (Luijten, 110). Her letter had not had time to arrive.

Guilt, Mental Illness, and a Bitter End

Jo was devastated. Not just because her brother-in-law had died, but also because they had parted on bad terms. It is hard not to feel that a little bit of guilt may have motivated her later actions, though it truly was not her fault that Vincent shot himself.

Theo was also devastated and guilt-ridden. It was too late to save Vincent’s life, but he said he would never forgive himself if he did not do everything in his power to convince the world that Vincent was a master artist (Naifeh, 862). He returned to Paris and staged an exhibition of Vincent’s work in their own apartment, since he had no better art gallery to use.

Not everyone was ready for Vincent’s work. One obituary that upset Theo said that Vincent’s art was the “expression of a sick mind” (Naifeh, 863).

Even so, Theo managed to sell a couple of Vincent’s paintings, but there was no time for him to build on the momentum. By October of the same year Theo was so sick he was admitted to a nursing home, and later a mental asylum. Within days he was lashing out at the attendants and threatening to kill people, including his own wife. He was transferred to the Netherlands and took the train in a straitjacket. He could not remember any French (Luijten, 113-115).

Dementia is a possible symptom of syphilis. It’s also a symptom of the mercury he was given as a treatment. And it was also quite possibly related to his family heritage. He and Vincent were not the only van Gogh siblings to suffer, and not the only ones to die young. And of course, he had plenty of reason to grieve as well, which cannot have helped.

As with anyone faced with a mentally ill family member, there was very little Jo could do. She argued with doctors, brought in a hypnotist, she tried to bring Theo home, and none of it worked. None of it was even appreciated by Theo. By the end when she visited him, he spoke gibberish and knocked furniture over. She sent him flowers; he trampled him on the floor (Luijten, 117-118; Naifeh, 867).

Even as Theo declined, a friend asked Jo to lend some van Gogh paintings for an exhibition. This was a new role for her. Theo had been the art dealer, not her. Still, she selected some, packaged them up, and gamely sent them off, knowing that’s what Theo would have wanted, if he had been self-aware enough to help.

All that seems perfectly reasonable, but Andries was livid. He was an art dealer, too, remember, and he thought Jo was getting above herself, thinking she knew how to select paintings for an exhibition. You might think a brother watching his sister suffer through her husband’s mental decline might refrain from criticism, but he didn’t.

On January 25, 1891, Theo died. He was 33 years old.

Jo was only 28. She had been happily married for not even two years. She had known Vincent in person only for a couple of months earlier that same year. She had a young son, hundreds of canvases and drawings that were worth very little, and no financial support. Next week, I will tell the story of what she did next.

Selected Sources

Luijten, Hans. Jo van Gogh-Bonger. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

Naifeh, Steven, and Gregory White Smith. Van Gogh. Random House, 2011.

Ozanne, Marie-Angelique, and Frederique De Jode. Theo. Vendome Press, 2004.

Stolwijk, Chris, and Richard Thomson. Theo van Gogh, 1857-1891. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum and Waanders Publishers, 1999.

Van Gogh Museum. “How Many Paintings Did Vincent Sell during His Lifetime?” Van Gogh Museum, n.d. https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/vincent-van-gogh-faq/how-many-paintings-did-vincent-sell-during-his-lifetime.