Bonnie Somerville

Vincent van Gogh painted almost a thousand pictures in his life but he sold only one. And he never lived to find out that he would become one of the most famous artists who ever lived... The painting he sold is called The Red Vineyard, made in Arles in 1888. It shows workers gathering grapes in a vineyard at sunset. It went for 400 francs, roughly two thousand dollars in today's money, at an exhibition in Brussels in early 1890. The buyer was a Belgian painter and collector named Anna Boch, the sister of Van Gogh's friend Eugène Boch. Some believe she bought it partly out of solidarity, because his work had been mocked and dismissed, and she wanted him to have one small win. That sale happened just months before his death in July 1890. He was thirty-seven and he had spent his life supported almost entirely by his brother Theo, convinced he was a burden, selling nothing, watching his paintings pile up unwanted in a world that had no use for them. After his death, within a few decades, the man who sold a single canvas for 400 francs became one of the most beloved and valuable artists in human history. His Portrait of Dr. Gachet later sold for over 80 million dollars. His Irises for nearly 54. The Red Vineyard itself now hangs in the Pushkin Museum and no price could buy it. Yet he died believing he had failed. He once wrote something that says everything about a life spent making things no one wanted: "What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity, or an eccentric, or a disagreeable person. Well then, I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody." His work would go on to move the whole world, and he is the only one who never got to see it...