Theo van Gogh

Theo van Gogh paid for every painting his brother made and died six months after him. He was four years younger, went into the art trade at fifteen with the firm of Goupil, and by his thirties managed a Paris branch with real standing in the market. He supported Vincent financially from 1880 until the end - a monthly allowance, paint, canvas, rent - out of a salary that was good but not large, while also sending money to his mother. The relationship ran on letters. Some 650 from Vincent survive, and they are the reason his working life is better documented than almost any other painter's; they exist because Theo kept them. He was not merely a paymaster. He was among the earliest dealers to push Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work at a firm that wanted salon pictures, handling Monet, Degas, Pissarro and Gauguin, and it was he who arranged for Gauguin to go to Arles. He sold almost nothing of his brother's, which was not for want of trying. Vincent shot himself in July 1890 and died with Theo beside him. Theo collapsed within weeks - the diagnosis was dementia paralytica, tertiary syphilis - and died in Utrecht in January 1891 at thirty-three. His widow Johanna Bonger inherited hundreds of unsold canvases and the letters, published the correspondence, and spent the rest of her life placing the work, against the advice of nearly everyone who told her the pictures were unsellable. She had his body moved from Utrecht to Auvers in 1914, and the brothers lie side by side there under matching stones with ivy grown over both.

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