There are so few people given us to love.
– Anne Enright

You may have heard that Vincent van Gogh sliced off his ear. It’s “common knowledge,” and it’s almost true —that is, it wasn’t the whole ear, and he didn’t give it to a prostitute either, (she was, actually, a housemaid at the brothel) but close enough. He did pass out from loss of blood and had to go to a hospital. And you may have heard he killed himself although, recently, there’s another story about that, but someone shot him in the stomach, and, of course, you know, that he was nuts.

Well, that, at least, is true enough.

But did you know that by the age of twenty-seven, van Gogh was done with finding work? (He died at thirty-seven.) True, by then, his vocation was drawing and painting, but in the ten years before he died, he’d earned a total of eighty dollars with that. He was a very keen and enthusiastic critic of art, and he had trained to be a dealer, except—and if you think about it, this is really a problem—he didn’t like anyone telling him what to do. Instead, his younger brother, Theo (who literally was an Art dealer) supported him for the rest of his life with money for food and board and art supplies, (and also for mental hospitals bills) which is amazing when you consider that Theo himself was not well-off, and that Vincent completely expected it of him. In fact, not only did Theo support Vincent, but he also paid for Paul Gauguin to keep Vincent company in his imaginary “art colony” (of two) in Arles, and then for Gaugin to get the hell out of town when Vincent (or Gauguin — and again, there’s disagreement on that) sliced off his ear. Finally, when Vincent shot himself (or was shot), Theo raced to Auvers to be with him when he died. But, then shockingly, not six months afterward, Theo himself died horribly from the final, excruciating stages of syphilis, leaving his newlywed wife, Johanna (Jo) van Gogh- Bonger, and their infant son (Vincent) behind. Jo had to deal with Theo’s inheritance of all of Vincent’s art (over 850 canvases and drawings) and correspondence that Theo had stored inside their Paris apartment. Artists and dealers in Paris suggested she should leave the work with them, but she knew, instinctively, this would be wrong. And “instinctive” is correct because she was not an art dealer at all. She was a newlywed widow with a one-year-old child.

Nine months later, taking all of Vincent’s drawings and paintings and letters (963 of them) with her, Jo moved back to the Netherlands and opened a guest house in the town of Bussum, an actual art colony located about ten miles southeast of Amsterdam. There, over the next twenty-five years, she taught herself about art history, the art business, and singlehandedly created the success and reputation of Vincent as a phenomenal genius that is unparalleled in the art world today. Honestly, you can’t buy a van Gogh painting today. They have long since passed the five hundred million dollar mark. They are, in fact, “priceless.” Today, if you ask anyone, “Who is/was the greatest painter of all time?” there will, of course, be various names offered up, but it is a certainty that Vincent van Gogh’s will be one. But while the story of Theo’s unending support is the truth, his most loyal supporter was actually Jo. Because it was she who, over the next twenty-five years, in multiple countries and in four languages (which she spoke,) altered his reputation from a lunatic who sold, literally, one painting in his life to an artistic genius who burnished the reputations of all the major museums that bought his work, culminating in the magnificent “Sunflowers” that was purchased by the National Museum in London and “The Starry Night” purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

And why did she devote all this energy to Vincent? Truthfully, it was no less than she would have done for Theo. “For a year and a half I was the happiest woman on earth.” Her marriage to Theo was the best time of her life. He was a sensitive soul, and he was totally devoted to her. Actually, he proposed to her on the first night he met her. (She said no.) But his loyalty to Vincent was first priority in his life, and Jo’s loyalty was remarkably in sync. Even the fact that they named their new son Vincent (Vincent Willem) was an acknowledgment of their joint devotion to him. Traditionally, you don’t name your first child after your older brother (although, by coincidence, Vincent was named after his older brother —Vincent Willem — who had died a year to the day before his birth) but Vincent at the time, was in a mental asylum, and they both knew that Vincent would never have a child of his own.

Some might say he was “unlucky in love,” but, honestly, he was impossible to love. He was a stranger to the habit of basic hygiene, (he rarely bathed and his teeth fell out) and, obviously, he was incapable of supporting a spouse. Moreover, even though he had a spiritual and visionary approach to his art, he insisted that there was no other valid point of view. including, unfortunately, those of his art collectors. It wasn’t an accident that he only sold one painting in his life. The expression “bull-headed” does not even begin to describe him. He was NEVER!!! EVER!! (ever) wrong. At one point, Theo wrote to him, saying in effect, “Really Vincent, have you considered a bath? And, maybe you could, maybe you should, finally get some work?” Vincent, helpfully, set his poor brother straight:

And now for as much as 5 years, perhaps, I don’t know exactly, I’ve been more or less without a position, wandering hither and thither. Now you say,  from such and such a time you’ve been going downhill, you’ve faded away, you’ve done nothing. Is that entirely true . . .it’s true that I’ve lost several people’s trust, it’s true that my financial affairs are in a sorry state, it’s true that the future’s not a little dark, it’s true that I could have done better, it’s true that just in terms of earning my living I’ve lost time, it’s true that my studies themselves are in a rather sorry and disheartening state, and that I lack more, infinitely more than I have. But is that called going downhill, and is that called doing nothing?

 Yes! Yes, it is!! (Theo sent him money.) And scene.

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Jo knew early on that the task to redeem Vincent was at the heart of her mission to memorialize Theo. It was not the first time she realized that she wanted to contribute meaning to the world. In March 1880, when she was 17, Johanna Bonger wrote in the first of her four diaries:. “ . . . I would think it dreadful to have to say at the end of my life: ‘I’ve actually lived for nothing, I have achieved nothing great or noble.’” Now at twenty-nine, widowed with a two-year-old child, she wrote in November 1891: “I am alone and lost. But I have a mission in my life.” And that was to finish the promise to make Vincent’s work known to the world and to complete the task that her husband had begun.

I live utterly with Theo and Vincent in thought, oh, how infinitely fine and tender and loving that relationship was! How they felt for each other – how they understood each other! And oh, how moving Vincent’s dependence was sometimes—Theo never let him feel it—but he felt it himself sometimes and then his letters were distressing –-                 

…………………………………………………………………………………………….Diary   6 March 1892         Jo van Gogh-Bonger,

Initially, though, she was not taken seriously, neither as a woman nor, obviously, as an “untrained” art dealer. And also because, in Holland —which was not the home of color and Impressionism (France was) —Vincent’s paintings were considered the product of  his “long mental illness.” “The Starry Night,” probably now one of his most legendary works, was considered as proof of his mental disease. One reviewer compared the whirling nests of painted stars to oliebollen, the fried dough balls that Dutch people eat on New Year’s Eve. And to be fair, they were the product of his long mental illness (which, to this day, nobody can actually say what it was,) but they were also the product of his spiritual conviction that “art was a window into the mind of the artist.” Vincent’s belief in the power of complementary colors as symbols for expressing the energy of the divine was the certainty that drove his commitment to art. In the last three years of his life, Vincent began producing his finest and most famous works, not only revolutionary in brush stoke and surface tension, but in unlikely colors and vigorous lines. Unlike the Impressionist painters who used color to reveal how things looked to the eye, Vincent’s colors revealed how they looked to the soul.  And, gradually, eventually —and, of course, posthumously—his post-impressionistic style began to gain recognition.

By 1892, Jo was able to display three of Vincent’s paintings at an ‘art appreciation session’ held by Arti et Amicitiae, a prestigious art colloquium that was based in Amsterdam and although the paintings were only there for discussion, Vincent’s work was at least considered being worth discussing. And then, after that, between 1892 and 1900, she managed to coordinate another twenty exhibitions, often writing the newspaper articles that “discussed” his great work, and successfully achieving new respect for it. Miraculously, by 1905, she managed to mount an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam  of no fewer than 484 of Van Gogh’s works —(shrewdly excluding “The Starry Night”)—which, according to Hans Luijten, the heroic researcher of both Vincent’s and Jo’s lives, “an exhibition of this magnitude would never again be matched.” And that was before she published Vincent’s letters to Theo.

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Dear brother,

And then, when dusk fell —imagine the silence, the peace of that moment! Imagine, right then, an avenue of tall poplars with the autumn leaves, imagine a broad muddy road, all-black mud with the endless heath on the right, the endless heath on the left, a few black, triangular silhouettes of sod huts, with the red glow of the fire shining through the tiny windows, with a few pools of dirty, yellowish water that reflect the sky, where bogwood trunks lie rotting. Imagine this muddy mess in the evening twilight with a whitish sky above, so everything is black on white. And in this muddy mess a rough figure—the shepherd —a throng of oval masses, half wool, half mud, that bump into one another, jostle one another—the flock. You see it coming— you stand in the midst of it— you turn round and follow them. . .

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..2 November 1883      Vincent van Gogh

Because it was the letters —not the art —that sealed his reputation as a genius, and it was part of the plan that she’d had all along: first the works, then the letters to Theo. But if the letters were all that we knew of van Gogh, his reputation as a genius would still be ensured. Because they’re that remarkable. In 2010, the Museum of Dutch Literature placed Van Gogh among the one hundred greatest Dutch writers of all time. Clearly, it took Jo much longer than she had thought to transcribe over 900 letters (van Gogh scholars estimate that at least as many—900 letters— have been lost as well) but as she was fluent in four languages (English, Dutch, German, French) Jo decided to translate and transcribe them herself although when she was finally finished with transcribing and translating them and personally financed the publishing of Vincent van Gogh: Brieven aan Zijn Broeder  (Letters to My Brother) it was 1914, twenty-four years after his death. The Dutch and German editions, published in 1914, changed the entire perception of the van Gogh landscape. And, finally, effectively, Jo’s work was done . . . she died in 1925. Then it was up to Vincent Willem, Jo and Theo’s only son, to take all the hundreds of paintings left to him (the ones that she had previously sold were for the purpose of raising public awareness.) to make a deal with the Dutch government to design and build a van Gogh museum on its legendary Museumplein in Amsterdam in exchange for the donation of all of his works.

And also, twenty-four years after Theo van Gogh died and was buried in the Netherlands, Jo exhumed his body, transported it to France, and had it reburied next to his beloved brother Vincent’s. Next, she planted a bed of ivy, one of Vincent’s favorite plants, to cover them like a blanket and protect the two graves. And finally, quoting from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, she said: “In their death, they were not divided.” Think about it: She loved her husband so much that she dug up his body and buried him next to Vincent. Honestly, I can’t explain it, but I know it is love.

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            Many years passed before Vincent was recognized as a painter; now people can become acquainted with him and understand him as a man.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….Introduction: Letters to My Brother     Jo van Gogh-Bonger,

            For the flowers will be short-lived and will be replaced by the yellow wheatfields.

…………………………………………………………………………………………….Letter to Theo       6 June 1889     Vincent van Gogh

– Susan Demarest

Author’s Note: More and more, in my teaching over the past few years, I have been both alarmed and baffled by what basic “background knowledge” my college students don’t have. For example: when I tell them (in introducing Flannery O’ Connor as a “Southern” writer) that we have a North and a South in this country. Also, when I mention that there was a Civil War, they look at me as if I had two heads. They don’t believe it. Therefore, “My Dear Theo” is part of a Humanities Primer I am writing, in which I provide friendly, accessible, and (inadvertently) funny information on various aspects of the arts and literature. Its working title was “Bad Dog,” which is a moniker that Vincent van Gogh gave to himself in one of his remarkable letters to his brother, Theo.