16

Widow’s Intuition

With news of Vincent’s death reaching the studios and the Salon in Paris, prominent members of the French art world, including the young Post-Impressionist Emile Bernard, art critic Albert Aurier, artist Tom Hirschig, and Andries Bonger, among others, met with Theo van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise on July 30, 1890, to attend the funeral. (The Salon was the greatest annual art event in Europe, dating back more than 150 years. It was Paris’s official art exhibition, the exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.)

The innkeeper Adeline Ravoux, in her memoir of Vincent van Gogh, recalled: “The house was in mourning as if for the death of one of our own. The door of the café remained opened but the shutters were closed in front. In the afternoon, after the bier was set out, the body was brought down to ‘the painter’s room.’”151

Vincent was lying in the coffin. Albert Aurier wrote of the scene:

On the walls of the café where the body lay all his last canvases were nailed, forming a sort of halo around him, and rendering his death all the more painful to the artists who were present by the splendor of the genius which radiated from them.152

Emile Bernard painted the funeral scene of men dressed in black suits. Dr. Paul Gachet was heartbroken, as was the sobbing Theo. They interred Vincent with his painter’s easel, folding stool, and paintbrushes, which were placed into the grave before the coffin.

Though much was lost that day, there was also something gained as Andries Bonger met one of Vincent’s old and influential friends, Emile Bernard, at the funeral. Andries was not just a relative of van Gogh. He was also an art collector. Soon he would be tasked with creating the catalogue des oeuvres of van Gogh, which would include the paintings that Theo cared for in France.

When the funeral was over, Theo removed all of Vincent’s paintings from his lodgings and sent them back to Paris. Before he could inventory the hundreds of paintings that he possessed in France—which didn’t include the ones Vincent had given away to Dr. Rey, railway postman Joseph Roulin, Dr. Paul Gachet, artists such as Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, or the ones he had sent back to their family in Holland—he was struck down by the latent, slow-acting disease of syphilis. After Theo was committed to a hospital for paralytic dementia, he quickly faded away.

Jo van Gogh-Bonger was a young widow with little money in the form of liquid assets. But she sensed she was sitting on a goldmine; she just had to wait for the day the market for French Impressionism paintings took off. Since her brother Andries was an art collector and knew the Paris art scene well, and had also worked in the insurance field, he would be a good accountant for putting together a ledger, an inventory of all van Gogh paintings stored in her apartment and in Tanguy’s shop and house. All those were owned by the van Gogh-Bonger families in France.

Together they would create the Catalogue des Oeuvres de Vincent Van Gogh. In the ledger marked by Andries’s handwriting, they ended up listing 364 paintings.153 Many were portraits of Vincent, some were copies of several studies, and others, like the Millets, “translations” (“copies”); for these, Andries used the same number over and over, so the original number was 308 and would evolve to 364. That catalogue, published in 1891, would become known as the Andries Bonger List—or A. B. List.154

There is a striking absence in the A. B. List. Nowhere is there any mention of the Champs de blé avec Cyprès—Wheat Field with Cypresses. Nowhere in the ledger book could one find Vincent’s stirring landscape study that he had begun in June 1889 at Saint-Rémy, with a drawing, and finished in September, after taking most of the summer off because he was overwhelmed by his maladies and the heat. One of Vincent van Gogh’s top ten masterpieces is entirely absent from the A. B. List; there is no mention of any of the versions. Not the First version. Not the Small version. Not the Final version. In the case of the latter two versions, the absence can be explained by the paintings’ history, which will be discussed below; not so when it comes to the First version.

With the A. B. List in hand, Jo van Gogh-Bonger sensed an opportunity was awaiting her and her brother-in-law’s paintings back in the Netherlands, where art collectors would appreciate the new Dutch master. Jo, together with her brother Andries and the hordes of paintings and letters, would travel north over the border, through Belgium, and into Holland, where she would keep tight control of the exhibits, the publicity about Vincent, the consignments, and ultimately the sales of the paintings.

Before Theodorus van Gogh—named after his father—had been committed to the insane asylum in a complete collapse in October 1890, he made sure he gave his wife Jo and her brother Andries—“Dries”—strict instructions on what to do with Vincent’s massive collection of artwork, as well as his troves of letters stored in a cupboard. He insisted on the need to make and keep an inventory of the paintings, and tried to explain to her how to sell the art in the years to come.

Art dealer Theo was a great instructor; he knew exactly what to do and communicated that to his wife. Jo, for her part, was an even better listener and would become the gatekeeper to her brother-in-law’s masterworks, introducing Vincent van Gogh to the world. Ever the wise woman, she would wait for the right time to sell some of the paintings after the Impressionist new school painters’ art market took off.

She would bring a woman’s touch to selling Vincent’s “peasant genre,” a woman’s intuition to knowing whom to trust, and a woman’s patience to selling the paintings at the right time for the right price while keeping many pieces of art in the family and not flooding the market with too many van Goghs. That tactic, strategy, and execution were repeated and perfected by the auction houses of the day, driving an air of exclusivity both for the artists and their particular artwork. Jo also took meticulous care in transcribing and organizing the 850 or so letters written in French, as well as translating them first into Dutch, then eventually German, and, during the last decade of her life, from the 1910s to 1925, into English.

Along with Theo’s letters and others that Vincent had kept, she would publish the archival record of communications of all of the letters between Vincent, Theo, and their mother and sister, and the letters from doctors Ray and Peyron, Postmaster Joseph Roulin, and Jo herself.

Jo van Gogh-Bonger was twenty-eight years old when Theo died on January 25, 1891, in the asylum in Utrecht, Netherlands. He was clinically insane. When he died his death certificate read: “dementia paralytica.” It was thought to be caused by “heredity, chronic disease, overwork, sadness.”155

In 1914, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger would have Theo’s body exhumed from his native Dutch soil and his body sent back to Paris to be buried alongside his brother Vincent, where today their headstones sit side by side—the master artist and the art dealer brother.156

By 1914, Vincent van Gogh was one of the most famous, celebrated, and renowned artists in the world. Jo put her brother-in-law on that trajectory, an ascendancy that would continue long after she passed away in 1925.