50 Fun Facts About Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in which village in the Dutch province of North Brabant?

The province was predominantly Catholic, but his father was a Protestant minister there. A museum and a sculpture by Ossip Zadkine of the two brothers now mark the spot.

Roughly how many artworks did Van Gogh produce in just over a decade as an artist?

Around 860 of them are oil paintings, and most were made in the last two years of his life. He was 27 when he took up drawing seriously and 37 when he died.

On 27 July 1890 Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver. How long afterwards did he die?

He walked back to his lodgings with the bullet still inside him and was able to smoke his pipe and talk to Theo, who arrived from Paris the next day.

Van Gogh's younger brother Theo bankrolled him for most of his career. What was Theo's profession?

Theo worked in Paris for the same firm that had employed Vincent as a young man, and it was Theo who introduced him to the Impressionists and their dealers.

Which ear did Van Gogh partly sever with a razor in December 1888?

He wrapped the piece in paper and delivered it to a woman at a local brothel. Historians still argue over whether he removed the whole ear or only the lobe.

In May 1889 Van Gogh committed himself to an asylum just outside which Provençal town?

He was given two cells, one to sleep in and one to use as a studio, and painted around 150 canvases in the year he spent there, including some of his most famous works.

What kind of medicine did Dr Paul Gachet, who cared for Van Gogh at Auvers, practise?

Gachet was also an amateur painter and print-maker who had befriended Cézanne and Pissarro. Vincent wrote to Theo that the doctor seemed 'sicker than I am'.

In 1869, aged 16, Van Gogh got his first job through his uncle Cent. What was the firm?

He did well and was sent to the London branch, where he was happy until an unrequited infatuation with his landlady's daughter set off the first of his crises.

In 1879 Van Gogh worked as a lay missionary in which Belgian coal-mining region?

He gave away his possessions and slept on straw to live like the miners, and church authorities dismissed him for 'undermining the dignity of the priesthood'.

In which Dutch village, where his father was pastor, did Van Gogh paint The Potato Eaters in 1885?

He wanted the peasants' faces to look like they had been painted with earth, and was furious when a friend criticised the anatomy of the figures.

Van Gogh moved to Paris in March 1886 and shared Theo's apartment in which district?

He studied at Fernand Cormon's studio, where he met Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard, and his palette shifted from Dutch browns to bright Impressionist colour within two years.

Which artist took Van Gogh on as a student in The Hague and introduced him to watercolour?

Their friendship broke down within months, partly over Vincent's decision to live with a pregnant prostitute, Sien Hoornik. He later dedicated a pink orchard painting to Mauve's memory.

Roughly how many letters from Vincent to Theo survive?

Only about 40 of Theo's replies survive by comparison. Theo's widow Johanna arranged their publication, which did as much as the paintings to build the Van Gogh legend.

Van Gogh collected cheap woodblock prints from which country and copied their style?

He bought them in the Antwerp docklands and later organised an exhibition of them in a Paris café. He even made painted copies of Hiroshige prints.

Vincent was not the first Van Gogh child to bear that name. Who else in the family had it?

He also shared it with his grandfather. As a boy he would have walked past a gravestone bearing his own name outside his father's church.

Apart from Theo, which sibling was the only one Van Gogh stayed in touch with in later life?

Willemina outlived him by more than 50 years, most of them in a psychiatric institution. His brother Cor died in the Boer War in South Africa.

Which planet is the brightest 'star' in The Starry Night (June 1889)?

Astronomers have confirmed that Venus really was blazing in the eastern pre-dawn sky over Provence that month. The village below, though, was added from imagination.

Since 1941 The Starry Night has hung where?

It came through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Van Gogh himself was unhappy with it and told Theo the stars were too abstract.

Van Gogh painted his Arles Sunflowers in August 1888 to decorate which part of the Yellow House?

He worked at speed because the flowers wilted fast, and hoped a wall of them would make Gauguin feel welcome. Gauguin later asked to be given one and Vincent refused.

In March 1987 a Sunflowers canvas sold at Christie's London for a then-record price. Who bought it?

The picture went to Tokyo, where it still hangs in the Sompo Museum of Art. The price more than tripled the previous auction record for any painting.

What happened to the Sunflowers version known as Vase with Five Sunflowers on 6 August 1945?

It belonged to a private collector in Ashiya, and burned the same day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, though in a separate conventional raid. Only photographs of it survive.

How many authentic versions of Bedroom in Arles did Van Gogh paint?

You can tell them apart by the little pictures on the wall to the right. They hang in Amsterdam, Chicago and Paris, and were reunited in a single show in 2016.

Where in the Netherlands is Van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night (1888) held?

He never signed it, but described it in three letters. The café on the Place du Forum in Arles still trades on the picture, repainted yellow to match.

Which work did 2020 research name Van Gogh's final painting, not Wheatfield with Crows?

In 2020 researchers matched the tangle of roots to a specific roadside bank in Auvers, still visible on a 1905 postcard, and concluded he was painting it on the day he was shot.

Roughly what did Ryoei Saito pay for Portrait of Dr Gachet at auction in 1990?

Saito caused an outcry by saying he would have the picture cremated with him. He didn't; it was quietly sold after his death and its current whereabouts are unknown.

Which plant lies on the table in Portrait of Dr Gachet, a nod to the doctor's trade?

Digitalis, extracted from the plant, was a heart medicine. Some have argued Van Gogh took it and that it explains the yellow tint of his late work, though there is no record he was ever prescribed it.

In Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889), the bandage appears on the opposite side from the wound. Why?

Behind him hangs a Japanese woodblock print of geishas. The painting is at the Courtauld Gallery in London.

Van Gogh's Irises, painted in the asylum garden in 1889, has hung where since 1990?

It briefly held the auction record in 1987 at $53.9 million, but the buyer, Alan Bond, could not pay in full, and Sotheby's had to take it back before the Getty stepped in.

Van Gogh's The Night Café (1888) belongs to which Ivy League university?

It came from the Moscow collection of Ivan Morozov, nationalised by the Soviets and sold in the 1930s. A descendant sued for it and lost at the US Supreme Court in 2016.

Which two colours did Van Gogh say expressed 'the terrible passions of humanity' in The Night Café?

He described the café as a place where one could ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime, and wanted the colours to clash accordingly.

Almond Blossom (1890), the branches against a blue sky, was painted to celebrate what?

The baby was named Vincent Willem after him. Theo's widow kept the painting over the child's cot, and it later became one of the founding works of the Van Gogh Museum.

In what year did the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam open its doors?

It sits on the Museumplein next to the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk and holds about 200 of his paintings, 400 drawings and 700 letters, the largest collection anywhere.

Twenty paintings were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in 1991. How long until recovery?

The thieves got out of the building but abandoned the haul in a car nearby. A 2002 theft was less lucky: two paintings vanished for 14 years before turning up in Italy.

Which crime organisation's member owned the villa near Naples where two stolen Van Goghs were recovered in 2016?

Italy's Guardia di Finanza found them in Castellammare di Stabia in a house owned by drug trafficker Raffaele Imperiale. Both were early works from Nuenen and Scheveningen.

Roughly how many hand-painted oil frames does the 2017 film Loving Vincent contain?

A team of 125 painters worked in Van Gogh's style, and the film was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. It lost to Pixar's Coco.

Who played Van Gogh in the 1956 biopic Lust for Life, based on Irving Stone's novel?

Douglas bore a striking resemblance to the artist's self-portraits and was Oscar-nominated for the role. Director Vincente Minnelli shot on location in Arles and Auvers.

Who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Paul Gauguin in Lust for Life?

He is on screen for less than ten minutes, one of the shortest performances ever to win an acting Oscar. It was his second win in the category after Viva Zapata!

Don McLean's Van Gogh tribute 'Vincent' first appeared on which album?

McLean wrote it after reading a Van Gogh biography, and the Van Gogh Museum reportedly played it daily for years. It shared the album with the title track's eight and a half minutes.

How long did Paul Gauguin live and paint alongside Van Gogh at the Yellow House in Arles in autumn 1888?

Theo had paid Gauguin to go. The experiment ended with the ear incident and Gauguin's departure for Paris; the two never met again, though they kept writing.

In which year was Theo van Gogh's body moved from Utrecht to lie beside Vincent at Auvers-sur-Oise?

His widow Johanna arranged the reburial. The two simple graves are covered by a single blanket of ivy, reportedly grown from a cutting from Dr Gachet's garden.

Who bought The Red Vineyard, the only painting Van Gogh sold by name in his lifetime, in 1890?

Boch was the sister of Eugène Boch, whose portrait Vincent had painted. The picture later entered Ivan Morozov's collection and now hangs in Moscow's Pushkin Museum.

The Kröller-Müller Museum, with the second-largest Van Gogh collection, sits in which Dutch national park?

Helene Kröller-Müller began buying Van Goghs in 1908, when they were still cheap, and gave her whole collection to the Dutch state in 1935. Visitors ride free white bicycles to reach it.

Van Gogh died on 29 July 1890 in his rented room at which inn in Auvers-sur-Oise?

His attic room, number 5, has been preserved empty ever since; by French custom a room where a suicide occurred could not be let again. His reported last words to Theo were 'the sadness will last forever'.

Starry Night Over the Rhône, painted in Arles in September 1888, hangs in which Paris museum?

It shows the gas lamps of Arles reflected in the river with the Great Bear overhead, and was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1889, a rare public showing in his lifetime.

In October 2022, Just Stop Oil protesters attacked Van Gogh's Sunflowers in London with what?

The painting was behind glass and undamaged, but the frame suffered about £10,000 of damage. The pair were later jailed for two years and 20 months.

Which philanthropist funded the Met's $57m purchase of a Wheat Field with Cypresses in 1993?

Van Gogh called the cypress 'as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk' and painted the same field three times. The National Gallery in London owns a September 1889 version.

Van Gogh painted three portraits of Père Tanguy, whose Paris shop he frequented. What was Tanguy's trade?

Tanguy took canvases from penniless artists in exchange for supplies. The 1887 portrait, backed by Japanese prints from his shop, was later bought by Rodin and hangs in the Musée Rodin.

In Van Gogh's Chair (1888), a rustic straw-seated chair on a tiled floor, what sits on the seat?

Its pendant, Paul Gauguin's Armchair, shows a grander chair by night with a lit candle and novels. Vincent painted them in complementary colours: his in daylight yellows and blues, Gauguin's in reds and greens.

Which French painter of peasant life did Van Gogh revere and copy repeatedly, including his sower?

Van Gogh made more than 20 painted copies after Millet while in the asylum, working from black-and-white prints and inventing the colour himself.

What did Dr Félix Rey do with the portrait Van Gogh painted of him in Arles?

The family reportedly used it to patch a chicken coop. It now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, having been bought by the collector Sergei Shchukin.