After riding a series of escalators to the fifth floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, visitors step into a gallery where a dozen paintings and lithographs by late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century masters—including Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Seurat—hang on the walls. Yet, despite the immense historical weight of these artists, the vast majority of visitors naturally congregate around one explosively colorful canvas painted in swirling shades of light and dark blue, bottle green, and pale gold.

Instantly recognizable, it stands as one of the most famous and universally revered paintings in the world: The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh.

For art historians and researchers, standing before this masterpiece inevitably brings to the surface three haunting and inescapable questions: Why did he cut off his ear? Why did he ultimately commit suicide? And how, after dying in complete obscurity with virtually no commercial success, did he eventually ascend to be regarded as one of the greatest artists in human history? The answers to these enduring mysteries are deeply intertwined with a largely overlooked figure whose extraordinary determination reshaped art history.

Gauging Van Gogh

Watching and talking to people as they engage with this particular masterpiece provides a vivid way to gauge the enduring fascination that modern audiences hold for Van Gogh. For many, the encounter triggers deeply personal memories of discovery. Remembering the exact moment one first saw The Starry Night—perhaps reprinted in a parent’s weathered art history book—is a common rite of passage for art enthusiasts. For countless individuals, it serves as their definitive modern art "aha" moment, captivating the young imagination without the need for formal instruction or external prompting.

Observing the gallery crowds reveals that this mesmerizing reaction is far from unique. Visitors from all walks of life find themselves spellbound by the canvas.

A visitor from Southern California named Paul Duelo stood near the masterpiece with a knowing laugh. “I know this painting, and I don’t know anything about art,” he said with a chuckle, gesturing broadly at the dense crowd surrounding the canvas. “Look at everyone!”

Nearby, a traveler from Seattle named Sheri Larison stood gazing quietly with her arms folded across her chest. Larison first encountered a reproduction of The Starry Night more than 30 years ago in a high school art class. For years, a print of the iconic painting hung in her office, but this marked her very first opportunity to stand before the actual original.

“It’s overwhelming,” Larison whispered, her eyes welling with tears. “It evokes something. It’s magical.”

Naturally, viewers are immediately drawn to the tragic circumstances surrounding the painting’s creation. “His mental health was declining,” Larison noted, reflecting a popular perception that, while true, only captures part of a much more complex reality.

Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June of 1889 during a year-long stay he voluntarily undertook at an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France. Contrary to what casual observers might assume, the painting does not represent an actual, physical place. Instead, it is a brilliant compositional compilation of elements—a quiet village, a swirling starry sky, a crescent moon, rolling dark hills, and a prominent, brooding cypress tree—all pulled from various memories and observations that Vincent brought together on canvas. The sight of stars, he frequently noted in his correspondence, always inspired him to dream.

Hanging just to the left of The Starry Night at the museum is a painting by Paul Gauguin titled The Moon and the Earth. The physical juxtaposition of the two works provokes a curious thought about the volatile relationship between the artists. Gauguin and Van Gogh famously lived and worked together for several intense weeks inside Vincent’s yellow house in Arles, located in the sun-drenched south of France. One can only imagine what the hot-tempered, fiercely competitive Gauguin would have thought if he could witness the massive crowds currently gathering around Vincent’s painting while his own work remains comparatively ignored. Conversely, what would Vincent himself have made of the staggering level of global attention showered upon The Starry Night?

Art historians generally agree that a bitter argument with Gauguin—who was threatening to abandon Arles and walk away from their shared artistic experiment—spun the mentally fragile Vincent into a state of profound despair and frustration, ultimately culminating in the infamous act of self-mutilation where he sliced off a portion of his left ear.

The Fine Art of Family Matters

Yet, as recent historical research reveals, complex family dynamics also played a critical, underlying role in the most notorious instances of self-harm and despair in art history. It is a tragic story revolving around the heavy burdens of financial dependence, the limits of familial love, and, crucially, the pivotal intervention of Jo van Gogh-Bonger.

Detailed biographical information about Jo—unveiled through her personal diaries and letters recently brought to light and made public by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam—paints a portrait of a remarkably determined woman to whom the global art world owes an immense and undeniable debt.

Jo was married to Vincent’s younger brother, Theo van Gogh, who worked as an art dealer in Paris and served as Vincent’s sole financial lifeline. Theo supported his struggling brother with a modest monthly allowance. In exchange, Vincent sent his paintings to Paris in the hopes that Theo might successfully market and sell them to collectors and galleries.

This financial arrangement inevitably placed an intense emotional and economic strain on both brothers, as such dynamics often do in families. Theo was far from wealthy, and Vincent frequently suffered under the crushing weight of poverty. He routinely complained about not having enough money for basic necessities like food, often practically begging his brother for additional funds to survive.

Over the course of an intense ten-year career, Vincent created more than 800 paintings and 700 drawings, harboring a desperate hope for financial independence and commercial validation. However, during Vincent’s entire lifetime, Theo is known to have successfully sold just a single painting: Red Vineyard at Arles.

In July of 1890, overwhelmed by the crushing conviction that he was a complete failure as both an artist and a man, Vincent shot himself in the chest. He died from the wound at the age of just 37.

Tragedy struck the family again merely six months after Vincent’s suicide, when Theo succumbed to the physical ravages of syphilis. This left Jo as a young widow with an infant son to support, very limited financial resources, and a profoundly unusual inheritance: hundreds of Vincent’s unsold paintings, totaling more than 400 works.

These canvases filled the walls of their Paris apartment, while others were packed away into closets, shoved under beds, and stored at a nearby art supply store. Among them were masterpieces such as The Potato Eaters, Irises, Sunflowers, numerous self-portraits, and The Starry Night. While celebrated universally today as priceless cultural treasures, at the time they were widely dismissed by the public and critics alike as the unpolished, chaotic output of a mentally unstable man, rendering them commercially worthless.

Jo, however, saw things entirely differently. Though she possessed no formal training in art history, she deeply loved Vincent’s work, and her sharp instincts told her—just as Theo had ultimately come to believe—that Vincent was a visionary genius.

Furthermore, Jo inherited hundreds of intimate letters written and received by Vincent, the vast majority of which had been exchanged with Theo. Initially, Jo read and re-read these deeply personal missives simply to feel a closer connection to her late husband. Before long, however, she became utterly captivated by Vincent’s profound compassion, piercing intelligence, and raw eloquence.

She made a resolute decision: the world needed to read these letters. This realization became the cornerstone of her ambitious master plan. She set out to organize public exhibitions, lobby skeptical art critics, and aggressively publicize the correspondence. The letters exposed not only Vincent’s vulnerability and psychological anguish, but also the extraordinary deliberate care he applied to his craft, as well as the profound bond shared by the two brothers.

Eventually, in 1914, Jo’s tireless efforts bore fruit when she succeeded in publishing Vincent’s letters in an ambitious three-volume collection. Today, that publication is regarded as one of the most revealing, foundational, and important works of art history ever compiled.

An Infamous Ear

While Jo ultimately played a vital, irreplaceable role in propelling Vincent to global fame, historical records suggest she also unwittingly contributed to some of the pressures that drove his self-destructive descent—a reality she openly acknowledged and wrestled with in her personal writings after his death. Jo understood that Vincent was profoundly lonely and that his sense of isolation deepened significantly after she and Theo married.

That infamous act of self-mutilation, in which Vincent severed his ear, occurred on the very same day Vincent likely received the surprising news that Theo and Jo had become engaged. Van Gogh scholars, including researcher Martin Bailey, suspect this news triggered deep, unquenchable fears in Vincent that Theo might eventually abandon him as his primary emotional and financial anchor.

Similarly, Vincent shot himself just days after a stressful family visit with Jo and Neo in Paris. At the time, Theo was contemplating leaving his employment to start an independent business venture, a move that threatened to leave the household without a steady income for an unpredictable period. The couple—who by then were raising a baby son named Vincent in honor of the artist—hoped to rent a better apartment on a lower floor to accommodate the child.

However, budgets were painfully tight, heated arguments ensued, and Vincent eventually rushed out of the apartment, tormented by the inescapable feeling that he had become a crushing burden that Theo could no longer bear or afford.

Jo never sought to place herself at the center of the historical narrative, yet her presence is indelible. A surprisingly relatable figure who frequently wrestled with her own insecurities while displaying dogged, unwavering persistence, she courageously stood up to the deeply male-dominated art world of her era. For three decades, she dedicated her life to championing Vincent’s art and life story across the Netherlands, Germany, France, England, and even, for a time, the United States.

Interestingly, despite the iconic status The Starry Night enjoys today, none of the key figures—neither Jo, nor Theo, nor Vincent himself—initially considered it to be among Vincent’s finest achievements. In fact, Vincent did not even sign the canvas. Recent research published by the Van Gogh Museum indicates that Vincent signed only about 16 percent of his total output, hypothesizing that he typically applied his signature only when he felt completely satisfied with a finished piece or intended it as a specific gift for friends or family members.

In the correspondence between the brothers, The Starry Night was rarely given formal prominence and was usually referred to descriptively rather than by title. Theo simply called it “the village in the moonlight,” offering a critical assessment in a letter to Vincent where he wrote, “I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things.”

Vincent himself largely conceded that the painting lacked the authentic character he sought, viewing it as a misstep. In his letters, he lamented that “once again I’m allowing myself to do stars too big… new setback, and I’ve had enough of that.”

Jo, too, did not initially view The Starry Night as an especially important work. She parted with it relatively early by selling it, though she managed to briefly reacquire it in time for a major retrospective exhibition she organized in Amsterdam in 1905. Listed in the catalog as painting number 199 under the Dutch title De Sterren (The Stars), the canvas changed hands two more times before the Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1941. By that time, it had been officially rechristened The Starry Night, and the name permanently stuck.

Ultimately, a vast world of deeply personal human stories lies behind the vibrant brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh, offering a timeless reminder of an old adage: it is nearly impossible to completely separate the art from the artist. It is a sentiment that Jo van Gogh-Bonger, having dedicated the remainder of her life to preserving his memory, would likely have endorsed without hesitation.