The exhibit is accurate. Van Gogh was definitely on his way to be famous when he died. In the months preceding his death, a particularly laudative article was written about him that put him in the limelight, and, for the first time, some of his paintings were exhibited and noticed. He had people publicly supporting him. It was a matter of time before more people started writing about his genius and that he became a bankable artist. However, even in the "what if" scenario of Vincent Van Gogh not dying in July 1890, his deteriorating mental stability and the death of his brother Theo, who was his main supporter, would have been serious impediments to his rise to fame. Counterfactual history has its limits!

The usual narrative is that Van Gogh was a misunderstood, crazy artist who toiled in loneliness and obscurity until his death. There's some truth in that but it does not tell the whole story.

Van Gogh benefitted from a remarkable social and cultural capital. If one had asked an art connaisseur Parisian about Van Gogh in the mid-1880s, he would have answered "which one?". His uncle Vincent "Cent" Van Gogh had been a prominent and wealthy art dealer and collector whose collection was auctioned off in Paris in 1888. Two other uncles, Cornelius Marinus "C.M" Van Gogh and Hendrik "Hein" Van Gogh, were also in the business. Vincent's brother Theo was managing the Parisian branch of the fine-arts company Goupil & Cie.

Vincent himself had spent seven years working for Goupil in three different countries (thanks to Cent) and though he had eventually been dismissed unceremoniously each time, the fact is that he knew a lot about art: not just art itself (the craft, the history, the theory), but also the artists and the trade. During his decade as an artist, he was always surrounded by - and communicated intensely with - fellow artists and people from the art world. He was engaged in a continuous artistic dialogue with his contemporaries. He had recurring plans - dreams - of building an artist colony, a phalanstère or community (see Bernard, 1891). He was particularly involved in "networking" activities in Paris, visiting fellow artists, discussing with them, or sharing their studio for a while. Full of energy, he tried a couple of times to organize collective exhibitions for those struggling painters whom he called "the Painters of the Petit Boulevard". Even when he was by himself in Arles and in Auvers, he was in company of artists. He may have been a loner, but he was not alone.

Still, he had a few things going against him.

First, he was a late starter, having begun to make art at the ripe age of 27. His formal training was minimal. He had enrolled several times in academies but always hated it and his time there had been short. And he was not a natural at draftmanship, unlike his younger peers like Lautrec and Emile Bernard, both virtuosos trained since childhood (Fray, 1994). Whenever Van Gogh tried to draw and paint as the market required it - perfect human bodies and faces, realistic colours - his artistic process was laborious. This made him a poor fit for commercial work as it was appreciated at the time. One early supporter, Julien Leclerq wrote that his painting "could not be analysed and that one should not try to find technique in it".

Second, while he could be social and jovial, Van Gogh was often uncompromising, quick to anger, vehement, a little too passionate, even a bit scary. This did not prevent him from being friends with many artists, but it did not do him any favour when it came to woo customers. He had all the connections an artist can dream of - a supportive brother who knew the business inside out, and a wide network of art dealers and potential patrons - but nobody bought anything, even simple drawings, from Theo Van Gogh's weirdo brother during the two years he spent in Paris in 1886-1888.

Finally, the kind of art that Van Gogh and his avant-garde artist crowd - Gauguin, Seurat, Lautrec, Cézanne - were doing was judged too radical. The art business still thrived on paintings from the 1850s (like the Barbizon school, that Van Gogh loved) and earlier. It was just beginning to assimilate the Impressionists. Goupil only started to sell Monet's work in 1887, and while the company was open to more innovative works, finding buyers for this newfangled stuff that was ridiculed in the newspapers was hard. Before leaving Paris in February 1888, Van Gogh had only one true supporter who held some of his works: Julien Tanguy aka le Père Tanguy, a former Communard who ran a small paint supply shop with an equally small gallery.

While he was away from Paris, Van Gogh's work appeared in 4 shows, so we can track the progress of his fame in the last two years of his life.

Fourth Exhibition of the Independents, Paris, March 1888

Vincent settled in Arles in 1888. Thanks to Theo, who showed some paintings of him in his own gallery at Goupil (but in a discreet mezzanine, not in the main display area!), three paintings of Vincent were exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in March 1888. Since 1884, this salon showed works from non-mainstream artists unsuitable for the official Salon. Vincent sent two views of Montmartre, Montmartre: Derrière le moulin de la Galette and La Butte Montmartre, and the more intimate Romans Parisiens, all fairly large works. From his letters, there is some evidence that Vincent saw the Montmartre paintings as having commercial value and chose to exhibit them for that reason. Amusingly, Vincent asked Theo to put his first name, not his name, in the catalog, "for the excellent reason that people here wouldn’t be able to pronounce that name", which again shows his interest in the commercial side of the exhibition (letter 589). The three paintings were sort of lost among the 692 works showed there. Most reviews of the show do not mention them, the critics only bothering to comment on the few artists they found worth talking about - Seurat, Signac, Pissaro - and heaping scorn on the rest. Art critics viewed the unusual works of people like Van Gogh or Henri Rousseau like "outsider art" (the term was coined in 1972).

But four articles did talk about Van Gogh. The influential Gustave Geffroy, who had championed Monet, evoked in La Justice (11 April) the "touching inexperience" of some of the artists, including Van Gogh and his Romans parisiens. Notwithstanding this brief and not too elogious remark, Geffroy wrote to Theo the following month, suggesting that they visit Tanguy's gallery together as the famed collector Paul Gallimard was interested in purchasing two of his brother's work. Geffroy was also in contact with Vincent's close friend Emile Bernard and may have planned to write a longer article about him (van Dijk, 2017). Néo, in Le Cri du Peuple (29 March), was short and positive: Van Gogh was "an exuberant Dutchman who sings the glory of Montmartre's colourations Montmartre and of Charpentier volumes [the books in the painting]."

Gustave Kahn, in La Revue Indépendante (April 1888) was short and critical:

Mr van Gogh paints large landscapes with a vigorous brush, paying little attention to the value and precision of his tones. A multicoloured multitude of books faces a tapestry; this subject, which is good for a study, cannot be the pretext for a painting.

Van Gogh reacted positively to Kahn's article ("I think what Kahn says is very true, that I have not taken sufficient account of the values", letter 594) but pledged that he would keep on working with colours anyway.

Jules Christophe in Le Journal des Artistes (April 1888), wrote the longest review, also critical but with a positive conclusion:

three paintings by M. Vincent Van Gogh, a naturalized Dutchman from Montmartre, brother of a chic art dealer; there are two views of the "Butte," near the Moulin de la Galette, and a heap of bound in-12 volumes on a table, in front of a multicoloured tapestry, with, next to them, a glass of water in which a rose is breathing, and it is painted with spirit, without research, without concern for the truth, all streaked with a sort of pink and yellow crosshatching, similar to scratches. And there is a lot of uncertainty in the process, and above all a lot of inobservance. In the landscapes, inexistent skies. But attractive and brilliant.

This was not bad at all for an artist who had not been formally exhibited anywhere until now. His name had been in the front page of La Justice and there were hints that some influential people were beginning to show interest.

It was still not enough: in May, a Dutch gallery asked Theo to send drawings and etchings for an exhibition but the owner turned down those of Vincent, as they only wanted established artists (letter 620. However, it is likely that Vincent sold a painting to Parisian art dealer Athanase Bague (or to a dealer in London through Bague's intermediary) in October 1888, as shown by his enthusiasm in a letter to Theo (letter 699).

In Arles, Vincent's collaboration with Gauguin ended with the famous psychotic episode where he cut his ear.

-> Part 2