In a year filled with significant events including some truly catastrophic disasters, hardly anyone noticed the arrival in Paris of a ragtag, unknown artist with an unpronounceable name.  The year was 1886 and, today, hardly anyone remembers the 12 hurricanes, the volcano eruption that wiped out one of the natural wonders of the modern world, or the Haymarket Riots of Chicago, while almost everyone knows and appreciates the art of Vincent Van Gogh.  
     
    The story of Vincent’s personal life survives mostly as myth generated from a few events which occurred during the last year and a half of his life.  This is surprising because an excellent record of almost 20 years worth of letters survive, written to his family, friends, and acquaintances.  Not only are they an unprecedented cataloguing of the artist’s work, they show us his hopes, his dreams, his disappointments, his failures.  We know where he was, what he did, when he did what, his sense of humor, his affection for his family, and his monumentally bad love life.  From the visit of his brother in 1872 to the last, unfinished letter in his pocket when he died in 1890, we have an uninterrupted, personal accounting of one of the world’s most famous artists, with one spectacular exception.  
  

     To explain, it must be understood that most of Vincent’s letters were sent to his younger brother Theo.  Theo supported Vincent in every way, most notably, with cash.  As such, Vincent considered himself employed by Theo and diligently reported to him all his expenses and described, in detail, all the works he produced except for a two year period when they lived together in the Montmartre suburb of Paris.  Obviously, as they were living together, there was no need to communicate with letters.  This is most unfortunate for two reasons.  We are denied Vincent’s self-description of discovering his sense of color, of making the leap from moderately talented craftsman to artistic genius.  And, he would have provided us with a fascinating record of the day-to-day activities of Montmartre, one of the most exotic and entertaining places that ever existed. 

   Before Paris, Vincent’s paintings are best described as lackluster.  His portraits are mostly caricatures, the colors of bituminous darkness and tarnished drain pipes.  Afterwards (in his words) “…from nearby it is greenish-red, yellowish-grey, white-black and many neutral tints, most colors that can’t be defined, but when one stands back a little, it emerges from the paint and there is an airiness about it, a certain vibrating light falls on it.”  In 1886, when Vincent arrived, the artistic community was still abuzz over a new, scientific color theory that had just been presented by Georges Seurat.  He would be unveiling his wall-sized masterpiece, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte”, in 2 months which was to cause such controversy, some of the other artists would remove their work from the exhibition in protest.  
 
    The neighborhood of Montmartre, unlike most of the industrialized world at this time, was exceptionally diverse,  inhabited by artists and laborers, prostitutes and clergy, as well as princes, paupers and everyone betwixt and between.  These people not only inspired Vincent, many would become the only group of like-minded friends he would ever have.  To understand why this area was so unique, to understand the underlying social issues of the time, one only needs to be told about the birth of communism, the bombings of anarchists, and the rapid rise of labor unions.  All were the direct result of the brutal treatment of most workers during the Industrial Revolution.  Wealthy individuals owned the factories, employed their own police, and made sure politicians did whatever it took to keep the status quo.  The population required to operate the huge sweatshops created vast slums of unprecedented squalor in most industrialized nations.  In 1886, there were 1,400 strikes in the United States protesting working conditions.  At the same time, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Reform & Control Act that allowed 3.1 million previously illegal aliens to obtain legal status.  In the Borinage region of Belgium, Vincent describes going down 600 meteres in a mine and seeing young children, both boys and girls, loading coal into carts for the trip to the surface.   

     Just as society was in tremendous upheaval, so was the artistic world.  Nowhere was this more evident than in the area of fine art painting.  Throughout history people paid to have their portrait painted.  The artist who could create the most pleasing, life-like rendition of their patron, earned the most money.  The same applied to landscapes, religious icons, battle scenes, flowers and bowls of fruit.  Realism ruled, or so it was thought.  In the mid 1800s, a new technology was beginning to mature that put all artists to shame.  The technology was photography and an image produced by a good camera was incomparable.  For the first time, everyone had the opportunity to see an exact replica of whatever the camera was pointed at, rather than a somewhat flattering version of the artist's quasi-reality.  Even more threatening, new uses for photography were continually being found, so it was constantly in the news.  For example, in 1885, in Paris, everyone was treated to the first photo finish of a horse race. 

      The answer to this onslaught of technology was conceived by a group of artists who met weekly at the Café Guerbois in Paris.  The painters were Manet, Bazille, Sisley, Degas, Pissarro, Monet, Cezanne, and Renoir and what they tried to do was create their own, unique version of reality.  Using style, composition, color, choice of subject material, in whatever combination, in each his own way, they were able to create a more full and emotional viewing experience than could ever be achieved with a photograph, let alone the old, rigidly structured paintings of the past.  As logical as it seems today, at the time, it was absolutely revolutionary and extremely threatening to the existing artistic community.  Traditional artists had spent years learning the skills to become good enough to produce paintings on par with those hanging in the museums and galleries of the day.  Art dealers had the benefit of hundreds of years of history to explain what good art was and why one painting was worth 10 francs and another 10,000.  Opposition to the new work was dramatic.  Not only was this new style of painting not accepted for exhibition at the annual Salon nor any of the established galleries, they were ridiculed unmercifully.  One cartoon shows a pregnant woman being rushed out of a gallery for fear of harming the unborn baby.  This was particularly vexing for Theo Van Gogh.  As the manager of one of the galleries of one of the most respected art dealers in the world, he was expected to keep pushing the company 's product even though he saw the beauty and huge potential of the new works, not to mention his very own brother, Vincent, would go on to become one of the most successful in applying this new philosophy of painting.   
    
   Lastly, some common misconceptions about Vincent need to be corrected as soon as possible. He did not go mad in the sense that he lost his mind, unable to comprehend reality.   He did have epileptic-type seizures, sporadically, the last year and a half of his life. Many reasons have been postulated for his condition. In the end, it is not important what caused his malady, only that he did not remember anything of any significance that happened during the seizure and he was a brilliant artist in spite of his illness, not because of it. The famous incident in which he cut off part of his ear was, most likely, an unfortunate shaving accident, which occurred during his first attack. The evidence for this is quite clear as seen in dozens of his portraits. With one exception, throughout his entire adult life, Vincent had a beard. The only self-portraits in which he is clean-shaven were done at the time of his bandaged ear. He wrote to his brother, a few months before the incident, that he had shaved because of the heat in the South of France, but as the accident happened in December, it is more likely that he shaved for Rachel, a prostitute he frequented and to whom the liberated appendage was presented. It is easily imagined what might result from a seizure happening at the instant of an upward stroke of a straight razor while holding an ear lobe. 

   Another misconception concerns Vincent’s affairs of the heart.  It is true that he never had a traditional, long-term relationship with anyone.  But, he did live with someone in a family situation for a year, had affairs with at least five different women at different times, and is implicated in fathering three children, all before arriving in Paris in 1886.  
   
  The last problem to be cleared concerns Vincent’s serious and difficult nature.  While his best friend, Emile Bernard, describes him as being interminable in explaining and developing ideas, he also says he was not very ready to argue, with dreams of gigantic exhibitions and philanthropic communities of artists.  Vincent inspired such loyalty that Toulouse-Lautrec challenged someone to a duel because they made disparaging remarks about Vincent’s work.  When provoked, Vincent could raise his voice and argue in four different languages, yet he was so thoughtful of those who viewed his paintings, knowing the problems they would have trying to pronounce his last name correctly, he signed his works, simply, “Vincent”.  Many times when asked to explain his work, he would say, “My main goal is to leave the canvas more valuable after I’m through with it, than it was before I started.”  Such was the politeness and self-effacing humor of Vincent Van Gogh.