In the early weeks of 1890, at an exhibition of the avant-garde group Les XX in Brussels, a Belgian painter and collector named Anna Boch paid 400 francs for a canvas of grape-pickers under an evening sky. The picture was The Red Vineyard; the artist was Vincent van Gogh, and he had about six months to live. It is the only painting Van Gogh is definitely known to have sold for money in his lifetime — a fact so neat that it has hardened into legend, and like most legends it needs a footnote. The record shows he also traded canvases for paint, food and lodging, and as a young man sold some commissioned drawings of The Hague to his uncle. But of the roughly 900 paintings, one documented sale. Quizzes ask about that one, and its name is The Red Vineyard.
The 400 francs was respectable money — perhaps a labourer's wage for a couple of months — but it was a drop against the support that actually kept Van Gogh working: his younger brother Theo, an art dealer with the Paris firm Boussod, Valadon & Cie, who sent a monthly allowance plus paint and canvas for a decade, and received in return the extraordinary stream of letters, more than 600 of which survive. Vincent's entire career lasted barely ten years, and the most famous works — the sunflowers, the wheatfields, The Starry Night — were compressed into the final three. He died of a gunshot wound at Auvers-sur-Oise on 29 July 1890, aged thirty-seven. Theo, shattered and already ill, died just six months later.
Jo's campaign
That double death should have been the end of the story. Instead the estate — hundreds of unsold paintings and the letters — passed to Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, a twenty-eight-year-old with a baby son named after his uncle. Dealers advised her to offload the stock quietly. She did the opposite: running a boarding house in Bussum to pay the bills, she taught herself the art trade, lent works strategically to exhibitions across Europe, drip-fed the market rather than flooding it, and in 1914 published the brothers' correspondence, which fused the paintings to an unforgettable life story. She also had Theo's remains moved to Auvers to lie beside Vincent. Almost everything the world feels about Van Gogh — the devotion, the letters, the myth — reached it through Jo's editing and persistence. Her son later founded the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, opened in 1973.
From 400 francs to world records
The market Jo built eventually went vertical. In March 1987, on the wave of Japan's bubble economy, the Yasuda insurance company paid about $40 million at Christie's in London for a version of Sunflowers, nearly quadrupling the record for any artwork at auction. Months later Irises fetched $53.9 million — bought by the Australian businessman Alan Bond with money he did not quite have; the picture was later resold to the Getty Museum. Then in May 1990 the Portrait of Dr Gachet, painted in Van Gogh's final weeks, sold at Christie's New York for $82.5 million to the Japanese paper magnate Ryōei Saitō, a world record that stood for well over a decade. Saitō caused an international scandal by remarking that he wanted the painting cremated with him when he died; he later said it was a joke, but after his death the Gachet vanished into private hands, and its whereabouts have been a mystery ever since.
And The Red Vineyard itself? Anna Boch — whose brother Eugène had sat for Van Gogh, and who bought partly out of solidarity — later sold it on; it passed to the great Russian collector Ivan Morozov, was nationalised after the 1917 Revolution, and now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The one canvas the market accepted while the painter lived ended up owned by a state, beyond the market altogether. Van Gogh once wrote to Theo that he could not change the fact that his paintings did not sell, but that the day would come when people would see they were worth more than the price of the paint. It remains the most comprehensively vindicated prophecy in the history of art.
Quiz nuggets
- The Red Vineyard, sold to painter Anna Boch for 400 francs in Brussels in 1890, is the only painting Van Gogh is known to have sold in his lifetime.
- Van Gogh died in July 1890 aged 37; his art-dealer brother Theo, who had supported him for a decade, died six months later.
- Theo's widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger built the artist's reputation and published the brothers' letters in 1914.
- Portrait of Dr Gachet sold for $82.5 million in 1990 to Ryōei Saitō, who joked it should be cremated with him; its location is now unknown.
- The Red Vineyard now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, via collector Ivan Morozov and the 1917 Revolution.