Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter who couldn’t see commercial success during his lifetime but became astoundingly popular after his death.
Several factors have contributed to his posthumous popularity.
Factor 1: Too many artworks, too little success.
Van Gogh did not become an artist until 1880 (age 27), and before he committed suicide in 1890 (age 37), he had created about 2,100 artworks.
And yet, he could only sell one painting while alive, which went for $420 in Belgium seven months before his death.
For comparison, his most expensive painting fetched $148.6 million in 1990.
His was a life characterised by remarkable failure — three women turned down his marriage proposals, and he became particularly isolated after a girl rejected him in London.
He started working as an art dealer in 1873, hated his work, and was fired in 1876 when he grew angry at his bosses for treating art as a commodity.
He worked as a teacher for a while, became a bookseller, took up theology, and later became a Christian missionary but was soon dismissed by church authorities.
All this, and the reputation he later gained of being a madman, mythologised Van Gogh in the popular imagination as the typical tortured artist.
Factor 2: Heavy correspondence.
Van Gogh wrote about 800 letters in his lifetime, most of which were to his brother Theo.
Theo, who died six months after Vincent’s suicide, left his wife Jo with Vincent’s artworks and the correspondence between the brothers.
Jo successfully sold some of Vincent’s works, loaned others for exhibitions, and published his letters to Theo.
Vincent’s life story captured in these letters (they often mentioned death) took the world by storm.
His suicide (supposedly because of failing health, depression, financial stress, and heavy drinking—the exact reasons are unknown) also added immensely to his after-death popularity.
Factor 3: Techniques that contributed to the foundations of modern art.
Modern art includes works produced between the 1860s and the 1970s and is considered highly influential in art.
Van Gogh’s work, characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork, is said to have contributed tremendously to the foundations of modern art.
