This blog was built to be a Van Gogh blog, specifically — I could write about many different things I know or want to dig into. But Van Gogh is one of the topics I keep coming back to, because a book of mine is coming out soon, and I wanted a place where people could learn a little more about what’s actually behind each painting before they open it. Not just a coloring book. A man’s story.
There is a sentence Vincent van Gogh wrote to Theo in September 1888, almost in passing, thanking his brother for another envelope of money he hadn’t asked for but desperately needed. He wrote that the more he thought about it, the more he felt there was nothing more genuinely artistic than to love people. He wasn’t being poetic for its own sake. He meant it as a kind of confession — that loving well was, to him, indistinguishable from making something beautiful. It was the same gesture, aimed at different surfaces: canvas, or a person.
It’s easy to read Van Gogh’s life and see only the cost of that belief. He was right to worry about the cost. But the letters — hundreds of them, spilling over with an honesty most of us edit out of ourselves before we ever put pen to paper — show something else too: a man who kept choosing to love, again and again, even when it left him with almost nothing.
The Cost
He knew, better than anyone, what he was. In the summer of 1882, writing to Theo from The Hague, he described himself plainly: a nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. He wasn’t fishing for reassurance. He believed it. And still, in that same breath, he insisted that it was precisely from that low place that he wanted to show, through his work, what there was in the heart of such a man — of such a nobody, an ambition he said was based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything.
It’s a line often attributed to him, in one form or another, in the years since: I wish they would only take me as I am. Whether or not those exact words came from his pen, they name the wound underneath everything else — a man who kept offering himself, unfiltered, to people who kept asking him to be someone easier to love.
That’s the shape his love always took: given by someone who didn’t believe he deserved to give it, to people who mostly couldn’t or wouldn’t take it in the way he needed them to.
Kee Vos, his cousin, was the first great wound. In 1881 he told her, clumsily and completely, that she felt like the closest person in the world to him. She answered with three words he would carry for the rest of his life: no, nay, never. Years later he was still describing it to Theo as a wound which I live above but which is there deep down and cannot heal. Not healed. Lived above. That distinction — the difference between recovering from pain and simply learning to carry it upright — might be the truest description of how Vincent loved for the rest of his life.
Then came Sien Hoornik — pregnant, working the streets of The Hague, already raising a daughter alone — and Vincent did something almost no one around him could forgive: he took her in. His parents were horrified. Theo, on whom his whole life depended, disapproved. Vincent didn’t budge. He wrote to Theo that his feelings for her were less passionate than what he’d felt for Kee, but that a love like this — steady, unglamorous, built on two unfortunate people bearing a burden together — was the only kind he was capable of giving, and that in it, unhappiness was somehow turned into happiness. He wanted to marry her. He worried, in letters that are painful to read now, that without him she would go the way of the abyss. In the end, family pressure and his own doubts pulled them apart. Decades later, alone and far from him, she did exactly what she’d once told him she would.
And then Gauguin — the friendship Vincent prepared for like an act of devotion, decorating a room with sunflowers so a man he admired would feel welcomed, and which collapsed into the most violent night of his life. Even that failure, though, sits inside a larger pattern: Vincent loved with his whole hand open, every time, knowing — because he’d already been taught this lesson twice — exactly how often the hand comes back empty.
What It Gave Back
And yet. In one of the plainer, less-quoted lines from his letters, he wrote something almost like a philosophy of survival: that it’s good to love many things, because that is where real strength lies — whoever loves much, does much, and what is done with love is done well. Not despite the risk. Because of it.
Late in his life, in a moment of real calm — a rare one — he wrote to Theo that life had become very dear to him, and that he was glad, simply glad, that he loved. Not “loved well.” Not “was loved back.” Just — that he loved. As if the act itself, independent of what it earned him, was the thing worth being grateful for.
He said it another way once, describing what he thought love actually did for a person trapped inside himself: that every deep, serious affection was a kind of freedom — that friendship, brotherhood, love, these were the forces that could open a locked door by something like magic, and that wherever sympathy came back to life, life itself came back with it.
There’s a line from earlier, written to Theo from The Hague in February 1883, that might be the closest Vincent ever came to explaining why he kept doing this to himself. He wrote that he regarded love — like friendship — not only as a feeling but chiefly as an action, and that when it involves real work and real effort, it carries with it a kind of fatigue and powerlessness. But where people love sincerely and in good faith, he believed, they are blessed — even though that doesn’t make the hard times any easier. Not a feeling you fall into. A thing you do, over and over, at a cost, whether or not it’s returned.
That is, in the end, the ledger of Vincent van Gogh’s love: Kee, who refused him. Sien, who he lost. Gauguin, who left in the worst way a friend can leave. Theo, who gave him everything and was repaid mostly in apology and need — and who, when it mattered most, sat by his brother’s bed and did not leave, and died himself within the year, as if his body had simply run out of reasons to keep going once Vincent was gone.
It cost him almost everything he had to give. It’s also, reading the letters now, unmistakably the thing that kept him alive as long as it did — the thread he held onto, the proof he kept trying to leave behind, that a man the world had already decided was a nobody had, in fact, a heart capable of loving people all the way to the end.
References
Van Gogh Letters Project — Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Arles, 18 September 1888 (letter 464): vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let464/letter.html
Van Gogh Letters Project — Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, 21 July 1882 (letter 254): vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let254/letter.html
Van Gogh Letters Project — Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Etten, 7 November 1881 (letter 180): vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let180/letter.html
Van Gogh Letters Project — Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, 11 February 1883 (letter 312): vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let312/letter.html
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam — Was Van Gogh Ever Lucky in Love?: vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/stories/lucky-in-love
The Art Newspaper — Martin Bailey, on Sien Hoornik and Living with Vincent van Gogh: theartnewspaper.com
The Marginalian — Maria Popova, Vincent van Gogh on Art and the Power of Love in Letters to His Brother: themarginalian.org/2014/05/07/vincent-van-gogh-art-love-letters
Quote Investigator — provenance research on “there’s nothing more genuinely artistic than to love people“: quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/01/art-love
One line — “I wish they would only take me as I am” — is widely attributed to Van Gogh across quote-compilation sites, but could not be traced to a specific letter in the primary archive. It is flagged as such in the text and should be treated as popular attribution rather than a verified quotation.
Sunny Ink 
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