Van Gogh didn’t die a neglected genius. Here’s the real reason we like to think he did

By then, Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet, as well as ­Seurat, had exhibited with Les XX: “When you got an invitation to Les XX,” explains Homburg, “that was a really big deal.” Van Gogh ­submitted six paintings to the ­society’s exhibition of 1890 – including The Red Vineyard (which is where Boch, Les XX’s only female member, came across it).

Four days after the opening of the show, the magazine Mercure de France published an article about Van Gogh by the French poet and art critic Albert Aurier, who, in florid, outdated language, praised him as a “robust and true artist, a thoroughbred with the brutal hands of a giant, the nerves of a hysterical woman, the soul of a mystic”.

Thus, by his death, Van Gogh had a burgeoning international reputation. He was, perhaps, about to hit the big time. It’s often said that his contemporaries couldn’t understand what he was up to in his pictures, but this isn’t correct; while Van Gogh believed that he was fashioning the “art of the future”, his paintings were appreciated – by some, at least – in his own time, too. As word about him spread, more people interested in the latest developments of painting visited Theo’s Parisian apartment, where Vincent’s work was on display.

Indeed, the surprise is rather how much attention Van Gogh did receive, despite having taken up painting only a few years earlier. He wasn’t a loner or a victim, but, says Homburg, “a major player in the contemporary art scene”. The suggestion that his art declined after his initial breakdown is, she adds, “not true at all. His power and ambition as an artist do not go away.”

Why, then, do old tropes about Van Gogh as a mad genius and tragic hero persist? Perhaps people don’t like the facts to get in the way of a good story – and the outline of his biography, with all that suffering, and (without wishing to sound callous) its dramatic ending, still proves irresistibly compelling. Even Aurier was already laying the myth’s foundations when he described Van Gogh – whom he called, in his essay’s title, one of “les isolés” (isolated ones, or outsiders) – as a “fanatic” and “a terrible and maddened genius… always close to the pathological”.

Moreover, thanks to the ­intimate revelations of Van Gogh’s diary-like letters (more than 800 of which survive), it’s easy to feel we have a personal connection with this ­artist – which, in turn, may ­partially account for our reluctance to change how we think about him. As Gerritse explains, “Every­body wants to see themselves as having the possibility of being very unsuccessful now, but being discovered, and becoming hugely successful, in 10 or 20 years.” On some deep, instinctive level, perhaps we respond to the story of Van Gogh’s posthumous success because we, too, hope that one day we will be remembered.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers opens at the National Gallery, London WC2 (nationalgallery.org.uk), on Sept 14