Theo van Gogh

Biography

Theo van Gogh was fifteen when his correspondence with Vincent began: his older brother was by then working in the Hague branch of the art dealers Goupil & Cie, and that first letter opened almost eighteen years of exchange. Theo later kept Vincent’s letters with care, and about six hundred of them have come down to us. Of Theo’s own letters only a little over thirty survive, because Vincent did not keep them.

Theo was born on 1 May 1857 in Groot-Zundert, in North Brabant, the son of the parish pastor Theodorus van Gogh and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. Besides Vincent he had a brother, Cor, and three sisters.

He entered the trade by the same route as Vincent, through family connections. On 1 January 1873 Theo joined the Brussels branch of Goupil & Cie as its youngest employee. When Vincent was transferred to London, Theo took his place in The Hague, where he quickly became a successful dealer. By 1884 he had been transferred to the head office in Paris; the firm later changed its name to Boussod, Valadon & Cie. The sources disagree about where exactly he worked between Brussels and The Hague, and I would not insist on the details of those years. He began sending Vincent money in the winter of 1880–1881, when his brother was living in Belgium and soon moved to the Netherlands. Each month, drawing and painting materials were added to the money. At first Theo pretended that the help came from their father, but Vincent soon learned the truth and thanked him. The dependence weighed on him, and he consoled himself with the thought that Theo was, in a sense, a partner in the making of the pictures and that they would share the proceeds later.

In 1886 Theo invited Vincent to Paris, and from March the brothers shared an apartment in Montmartre. Through Theo, Vincent met Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat. In 1888 Theo persuaded Gauguin to join Vincent in Arles and paid for his journey from Pont-Aven in Brittany. The living expenses of both artists in Arles also fell to him. When relations between them broke down, Gauguin wrote above all to Theo.

Theo’s own work as a dealer deserves separate mention. He competed with Paul Durand-Ruel and Georges Petit and urged his employers to exhibit and buy the Impressionists. In January 1888 Edgar Degas allowed him to set up a small exhibition of his nudes, and in 1889 he showed a selection of Degas’s work. In the autumn of 1888 Theo presented several recent works by Pissarro, and in 1890 he devoted a separate exhibition to him. He was also interested in Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and “modern” artists such as Paul-Albert Besnard, Eugène Carrière and Jean-François Raffaëlli. Yet he did not manage to sell a single painting by Vincent: he could not overcome his superiors’ view of such painting.

In Paris Theo met Andries Bonger and his sister Johanna. They married in Amsterdam on 17 April 1889. Their son, Vincent Willem, was born on 31 January 1890. On 8 June the family visited Vincent at Auvers-sur-Oise.

Vincent died on 29 July 1890, with Theo at his side. In September Theo asked the gallery of Durand-Ruel, without success, to organise a memorial retrospective of his brother. He then arranged a posthumous exhibition in his former apartment with the help of Émile Bernard, and moved into the one next door.

Theo did not long outlive his brother. In the autumn of 1890 he was placed in a clinic near Paris; in November, at his wife’s request, he was moved to Utrecht, and there on 25 January 1891 he died, aged thirty-three. He was first buried in the Soestbergen cemetery in Utrecht. On 8 April 1914, at the wish of his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, his remains were moved to Auvers-sur-Oise and buried beside Vincent. That same year she decided to publish the brothers’ correspondence.