Did Van Gogh really sell only one painting in his lifetime?

Perhaps no one is more often held up as the artist who went unrewarded in his lifetime than Vincent van Gogh. He lived on money sent by his younger brother, his paintings didn’t sell, and he died at 37. And in his whole life, the story goes, he sold just one painting.

That “just one” has been repeated again and again in books and films as the episode that sums up Van Gogh’s tragedy. Follow the records, though, and the story turns out to be a little more complicated.

The Red Vineyard and 400 francs

The painting usually named as “the only one he sold” is The Red Vineyard. Painted in Arles in the south of France in the autumn of 1888, it shows people picking grapes in a field lit by the setting sun, in strong reds and yellows.

In early 1890, Van Gogh was invited to show at the exhibition of Les XX (“The Twenty”), a group of avant-garde artists, in Brussels, Belgium, and he sent six works. One of them, The Red Vineyard, was bought for 400 francs by Anna Boch, a Belgian painter and collector. Anna’s brother Eugène was also a painter, and a friend of Van Gogh’s.

Van Gogh mentioned the sale in a letter to his brother Theo, writing to the effect that he felt rather sheepish that she had paid the full exhibition price when a friend’s discount would have been in order. The painting later passed to a Russian collector and is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Not “just one” after all?

Yet several records suggest this was not the only time Van Gogh’s work was sold.

First, in 1882, when he was only just starting out as an artist, his uncle Cornelis, an art dealer, ordered a number of pen drawings of the streets of The Hague. Van Gogh was paid per drawing and received a follow-up order as well. Then a letter discovered later shows that in October 1888, Theo sold one of Vincent’s self-portraits to a London art dealer, along with a landscape by Corot. And a letter of condolence sent by relatives after Van Gogh’s death is said to have included a line of gladness that his paintings had sold more than once.

Van Gogh also traded works with fellow painters, and handed over paintings in exchange for paint or meals. How many of these cases you count as “sales” changes the answer. Strictly speaking, it seems fair to say that The Red Vineyard is the only painting we can name with a recorded sale.

Recognition was just around the corner

Few as his sales were, Van Gogh was not entirely ignored at the end of his life. In January 1890, the young critic Albert Aurier published an enthusiastic essay about him in a Paris magazine. That spring, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, his work also drew attention from fellow artists.

But in July of that year, Van Gogh died at the age of 37. His serious career as a painter had lasted only about ten years. In that time he is said to have produced about 860 oil paintings, and more than 2,000 works if drawings and other pieces are included.

Theo died just six months later, and the enormous body of work was left in the hands of Theo’s wife, Jo. She devoted herself to lending works to exhibitions, selling paintings, and publishing Van Gogh’s letters, spreading her brother-in-law’s name around the world. Without her, the “unsellable genius” might never have become a painter everyone knows.

A painter worth tens of millions

Van Gogh’s reputation soared in the 20th century, and he eventually became a star of the art market. In 1987, at an auction in London, one of his Sunflowers paintings was bought by the Japanese insurer Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance (as it was then called), making headlines as the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction at the time. The painting can now be seen at the SOMPO Museum of Art in Tokyo.

Paintings that fetched almost nothing during his lifetime were breaking world records about a century later. Perhaps the “sold only one painting” story lives on precisely because that contrast is so dramatic.