Vincent van Gogh1

Vincent van Gogh is a world-famous artist. His works are always crowded with visitors, and the prices of his works on the art market are always astronomical.

The immense fame that Van Gogh enjoys today is in stark contrast to the solitary life he led during his lifetime. He didn’t receive much recognition until the end of his short life at the age of 37. He was purely self-taught, and his time as an artist was very short. It’s hard to imagine how someone who was an outsider in the art world could dedicate himself to painting and achieve worldwide recognition, even posthumously.

One unique aspect of Van Gogh’s life stands out: before he became a painter, he was an art dealer, a person who bought and sold paintings. More precisely, his family had strong ties to art dealers. One of his uncles was a successful art dealer, and on his advice, Van Gogh got his first job in a gallery. At the tender age of 16, he was already in the art market.

Van Gogh began drawing with a pen to illustrate his neighborhood in every letter he wrote to his family. One day, as he continued to draw, albeit crudely, to communicate with his family, he came across a fateful painting: Jean-François Millet’s (1814-1875) masterpiece, The Ten Thousand Bells (1857-1859).

Millet was a French painter whose paintings represented the lives of poor peasants and was known as the “painter of the peasantry.” The painting depicts a peasant couple praying to God in thanksgiving after a hard day’s work, and it was a painting that Van Gogh was deeply drawn to.

Van Gogh’s work at Goupil & Cie took him to The Hague, London, and Paris, all of which were large cities with a huge gap between the rich and the poor, especially London, which was home to many peasants and laborers who had come from the provinces after the industrial revolution. Van Gogh was moved and heartbroken to see most of the town’s inhabitants living in poverty and struggling to make ends meet, so he was moved by Millet’s life and work, and his desire to be with the poor captivated him.

Van Gogh begins working for the Hague branch of Goupil & Cie, the leading European art gallery at the time, and then moves to the Brussels-Paris branch and then to the London branch. He worked for the gallery for a total of seven years until 1876, so it’s safe to say that selling paintings was a natural fit for Van Gogh. He eventually quit his job at the age of 23, but this was more due to a disagreement with his immediate supervisor than an irritation with the commercialization of art.

n the grand scheme of things, Van Gogh spent 10 years of his 37-year life as a painter and 7 years as a draughtsman. Working as an art dealer is not a short career, and the experience gained here was particularly influential in his rapid development as a painter. Van Gogh, for example, was able to study the world of masterpieces at close quarters thanks to his work in a gallery. The peasant painter Millet, whose paintings he copied countless times on his way to becoming a painter, was also frequently traded at Goupil & Cie. Above all, his work as an art dealer taught him not only how to look at paintings, but also that good paintings would eventually be recognized commercially.

Van Gogh wandered around for a while, but the inspiration of Millet and the influence of his father led him to make one decision: to become a minister to the poor. To fulfill his dream of becoming a minister, he needed to enter a theological school, and to do so, he had to pass an examination. Unfortunately, Van Gogh failed the Latin and Greek courses that were required for admission to the seminary.

However, his passion for ministry was recognized by local officials who granted him temporary permission to preach for six months, and he finally left for Borinage, Belgium, in 1878, at the age of 25. Borinage was one of the most notorious coal mining areas in Europe, and the people living there were far worse off than Van Gogh had expected. Van Gogh created two paintings of the coal miners, Men Carrying Coal and Men Carrying a Bag of Coal in the Snow.
The people here were working harder than anyone else, carrying heavy sacks of coal, and it is said that he gave away all of his belongings to the poor, earning him the nickname “Christ in the Coal Mine.

But even his father, a minister, thought his behavior toward the workers was too fanatical. In addition, Van Gogh had suffered from some depression in the past, and his parents thought he should be committed to a mental institution. Upon hearing this news, Van Gogh stopped writing to his family for a year and stopped talking to them altogether. Even his friends and colleagues begin to turn away from him, feeling overwhelmed by his fanatical devotion. He is left alone and desperate, and it’s at this point that a new figure enters his life, one who shows him a new path. His younger brother, Theo van Gogh.

With Theo’s help, Van Gogh decided to end his wanderings and become a professional painter. In September 1880, Van Gogh wrote a letter to Theo saying, “Now I have found my way,” and he was 27 years old. Deciding to become a painter, Van Gogh decided to end his wandering life and return to his family in Etten, Holland. There, he set up his own studio and focused on painting, while slowly repairing his relationship with his parents.

Behind every world-class artist today is a competent art dealer, and Van Gogh was no exception. He had a trusted art dealer in his brother Theo. Theo followed in his brother’s footsteps as an art dealer, and as is well known, he succeeded, supporting his brother’s work for nearly a decade. Theo was the first person to recognize Van Gogh’s work, and from a commercial point of view, he was his exclusive representative. Sadly, despite Theo’s active support, Vincent only sold one painting (The red Vineyard) during his lifetime, and that was only seven months before his death.

Standing in front of one of his paintings, one is first struck by the brilliant, intense colors, and then even more impressed when one realizes that these visual effects are the result of painstaking brushstrokes. Of course, this attention to detail can be attributed to Van Gogh’s own personality, but it may also be due to his belief that good paintings are eventually recognized.

In Europe in the late 19th century, when Van Gogh lived, commercial galleries were finally beginning to dominate the art market. The art market, which had previously been driven by the orders of royalty and aristocrats, was now being traded through the marketplace. In the process, art dealers burgeoned, connecting artists with buyers, allowing even paintings with unconventional styles, such as Impressionism, to find buyers.