His brothers suggested he try carpentry, or look for work as a barber. His sister thought he would make a fine baker. He was an insatiable reader, so perhaps a librarian. But in the depths of his despair, he turned his ferocious energy on the last thing he could think of that he could start right away. His next letter to his brother was very short: “I’m writing to you while drawing and I’m in a hurry to get back to it.” Previously, the man had seen drawing as a distraction from his aim of reaching people with truth. Now he began to seek truth by documenting the lives around him in drawings. He had stopped drawing freehand as a child when he realized he was a clumsy draftsman, so he started at the very beginning, reading Guide to the ABCs of Drawing.
In the coming years, he would make a few very brief attempts at formal training. His cousin-in-law was a painter and tried to teach him watercolor. The cousin would later be listed on the man’s Wikipedia page as the sole entry beside “Education.” In truth, the man struggled with the fragile touch required for watercolor, and the mentor/mentee relationship ended after a month. His former art-dealer boss, now an esteemed tastemaker in the art world, pronounced his drawings unworthy of being displayed for sale. “Of one thing I am sure,” the boss told him, “you are no artist.” He added flatly, “You started too late.”
When he was nearly thirty-three, he enrolled in art school alongside students a decade younger, but lasted only a few weeks. He entered the class drawing competition, and the judges harshly suggested he revert to a beginner’s class with ten-year-olds.
As he had between careers, he pinballed from one artistic passion to another. On one day he felt true artists only painted realistic figures, and then when his figures came out poorly, the next day true artists only cared for landscapes. One day he strived for realism, another for pure expression. This week art was a medium for declaring religious devotion, next week such concerns encumbered pure creation. One year he decided all true art consisted only of shades of black and gray, and then later that vibrant color was the real pearl inside the artist’s shell. Each time he fell fully in love, and then just as fully and quickly back out.
One day, he dragged an easel and oil paints—with which he had almost no experience—out to a sand dune in a storm. He ran in and out of cover, slapping and slathering paint on the canvas in staccato strokes between gusts of wind that peppered the painting with grains of sand. He squeezed color right from the tube onto the canvas when he had to. The viscous oil paint and the speed required to apply it in the storm freed his imagination and his hand from the crippling deficiencies that plagued him when he strove for perfect realism. More than a century later, his definitive biographers would write of that day, “[He] made an astonishing discovery: he could paint.” And he felt it. “I enjoy it tremendously,” he wrote his brother. “Painting has proved less difficult than I expected.”
He continued to whipsaw from one artistic experiment to another, avowing and disavowing, roundly condemning the attempt to capture sunlight in paint only to reverse course and place his canvas outside in the sunlight to do just that. He obsessed over deeper and darker blacks in colorless works, and then dispensed with that in an instant and forever in favor of vibrant color, his about-face so thorough that he would not even use black to depict the night sky. He started piano lessons because he thought musical tones might teach him something about color tones.
His peregrinations continued for the few remaining years of his short life, both geographically and artistically. He finally forsook the goal of ever becoming a master draftsman, and then one by one left behind all of the styles that he had previously claimed to be critical, but at which he had failed. He emerged with a new art: impetuous, slathered with paint, erupting with color, laden with no formality other than to capture something infinite.* He wanted to make art that anyone could understand, not haughty works for those with privileged training. For years he had tried and failed to capture every proportion of a figure accurately. Now he let that go so entirely that he left figures walking among trees with faces left blank and hands like mittens.
Whereas he had once demanded live models to portray and images to copy, now he wielded his mind’s eye. One evening, he looked out his bedroom window toward the rolling hills in the distance and, as he had with birds and beetles as a boy, watched the sky pass for hours. When he picked up the brush, his imagination transformed a nearby town into a tiny village, its towering church to a humble chapel. The dark green cypress tree in the foreground became massive, winding up the canvas like seaweed in the swirling rhythm of the night sky.
It was just a few years from the recommended relegation to a drawing class for ten-year-olds. But that starry night, along with scores of other paintings in his new style, the one he devised amid a succession of failures, would launch a new era of art and inspire new conceptions of beauty and expression. Works that he dashed off in hours as experiments over the final two years of his life would become some of the most valuable objects—culturally and monetarily—that have ever existed in the world.
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• • •
It is a myth that Vincent van Gogh died in anonymity. An ecstatic review cast him as a revolutionary months before he died, and made him the talk of Paris. Claude Monet, the dean of impressionism—the movement Van Gogh ignored, lamented, and then innovated upon—declared Van Gogh’s work the cream of an annual exhibition.
Adjusted for inflation, four of Van Gogh’s paintings have sold for more than $100 million, and they weren’t even the most famous ones. His work now graces everything from socks to cell phone covers and an eponymous vodka brand. But he reached far beyond commerce.
“What artists do changed because of Vincent Van Gogh,” artist and writer Steven Naifeh told me. (Naifeh, with Gregory White Smith, wrote “the definitive biography,” according to a curator of the Van Gogh Museum.) Van Gogh’s paintings served as a bridge to modern art and inspired a widespread devotion that no artist, perhaps no person, has equaled. Teenagers who have never visited a museum tape his art to their walls; Japanese travelers leave the ashes of their ancestors at his grave. In 2016, the Art Institute of Chicago displayed together all three iconic “Bedrooms”—pictures meant “to rest the brain, or rather the imagination,” according to Van Gogh; the record number of visitors forced them to create impromptu crowd control strategies, with a TSA-precheck-style express lane.
And yet had Van Gogh died at thirty-four rather than thirty-seven (life expectancy in the Netherlands when he was born was forty), he might not even merit a historical footnote. The same goes for Paul Gauguin, a painter who briefly lived with Van Gogh and innovated a style known as synthetism, in which bold lines separated sections of brilliant color, without the subtle gradations of classical painting. He, too, became one of the few artists to crack the $100 million barrier. He spent the first six years of his professional life with the merchant marine before he found his calling: bourgeois stockbroker. Only after the market crash of 1882 did Gauguin become a full-time artist, at the age of thirty-five. His switch is reminiscent of J. K. Rowling’s. She “failed on an epic scale” in her twenties, she once said, personally and professionally. A short marriage “imploded,” and she was a single mother and unemployed former teacher on welfare. Like Van Gogh in the coal country and Gauguin after the crash, she was “set free” by failure to try work that better matched her talents and interests.