50 free van Gogh trivia questions with answers. Vincent van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime and now sells out museum shows on three continents, and that gap between the failure and the legend is what makes him such good trivia. This quiz covers the whole story: the preacher's son from Zundert who was sacked as a missionary in the Belgian coalfields, the ten frantic years in which he produced about 2,100 works, the Yellow House in Arles, the nine weeks with Gauguin, the ear, the asylum at Saint-Rémy and the wheatfields of Auvers. The paintings get their own questions: which planet blazes in The Starry Night, why the bandage is on the wrong ear in the self-portrait, how many Bedrooms there are, which Sunflowers burned in 1945, and what Ryoei Saito threatened to do with Dr Gachet. There are also rounds on the museums, the thefts, the record auction prices, and Van Gogh on screen, from Kirk Douglas to Loving Vincent. About a third of the questions are easy enough for anyone who has seen a poster of his work; the rest climb to details only art historians and museum guides usually know. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, and each question shows its citation and a short explanation once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Vincent van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in which village in the Dutch province of North Brabant?
Zundert
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.
Q 02Roughly how many artworks did Van Gogh produce in just over a decade as an artist?
About 2,100
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.
Q 03On 27 July 1890 Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver. How long afterwards did he die?
Two days later
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.
Q 04Van Gogh's younger brother Theo bankrolled him for most of his career. What was Theo's profession?
Art dealer
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.
Q 05Which ear did Van Gogh partly sever with a razor in December 1888?
His left ear
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.
Q 06In May 1889 Van Gogh committed himself to an asylum just outside which Provençal town?
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
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.
Q 07What kind of medicine did Dr Paul Gachet, who cared for Van Gogh at Auvers, practise?
Homoeopathy
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'.
Q 08In 1869, aged 16, Van Gogh got his first job through his uncle Cent. What was the firm?
The picture dealers Goupil & Cie
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.
Q 09In 1879 Van Gogh worked as a lay missionary in which Belgian coal-mining region?
The Borinage
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'.
Q 10In which Dutch village, where his father was pastor, did Van Gogh paint The Potato Eaters in 1885?
Nuenen
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.
Q 11Van Gogh moved to Paris in March 1886 and shared Theo's apartment in which district?
Montmartre
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.
Q 12Which artist took Van Gogh on as a student in The Hague and introduced him to watercolour?
Anton Mauve
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.
Q 13Roughly how many letters from Vincent to Theo survive?
More than 600
Q 21What happened to the Sunflowers version known as Vase with Five Sunflowers on 6 August 1945?
It was destroyed in a US air raid
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.
Q 22How many authentic versions of Bedroom in Arles did Van Gogh paint?
Three
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.
Q 23Where in the Netherlands is Van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night (1888) held?
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.
Q 14Van Gogh collected cheap woodblock prints from which country and copied their style?
Japan
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.
Q 15Vincent was not the first Van Gogh child to bear that name. Who else in the family had it?
A brother stillborn a year before him
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.
Q 16Apart from Theo, which sibling was the only one Van Gogh stayed in touch with in later life?
His sister Wil
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.
Q 17Which planet is the brightest 'star' in The Starry Night (June 1889)?
Venus
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.
Q 18Since 1941 The Starry Night has hung where?
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
It came through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Van Gogh himself was unhappy with it and told Theo the stars were too abstract.
Q 19Van Gogh painted his Arles Sunflowers in August 1888 to decorate which part of the Yellow House?
The bedroom meant for Gauguin
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.
Q 20In March 1987 a Sunflowers canvas sold at Christie's London for a then-record price. Who bought it?
Japanese insurer Yasuo Goto
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.
The Kröller-Müller in Otterlo
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.
Q 24Which work did 2020 research name Van Gogh's final painting, not Wheatfield with Crows?
Tree Roots
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.
Q 25Roughly what did Ryoei Saito pay for Portrait of Dr Gachet at auction in 1990?
$82.5m
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.
Q 26Which plant lies on the table in Portrait of Dr Gachet, a nod to the doctor's trade?
Foxglove
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.
Q 27In Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889), the bandage appears on the opposite side from the wound. Why?
He painted his reflection in a mirror
Behind him hangs a Japanese woodblock print of geishas. The painting is at the Courtauld Gallery in London.
Q 28Van Gogh's Irises, painted in the asylum garden in 1889, has hung where since 1990?
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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.
Q 29Van Gogh's The Night Café (1888) belongs to which Ivy League university?
Yale
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.
Q 30Which two colours did Van Gogh say expressed 'the terrible passions of humanity' in The Night Café?
Red and green
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.