How Many Paintings Did Van Gogh Sell in His Lifetime?

Not quite. It is often said that he sold a single painting, with only one identified work going to a buyer, as Martin Bailey of The Art Newspaper notes ^[3]. The Pushkin Museum, which owns that work, calls it “the only documented work sold during his lifetime” ^[5]. “Documented” here means there is a paper trail for the sale, not that nothing else ever sold.

The wider record gives a fuller story. In August 1890 his aunt Cornelia wrote to Theo that it must have been satisfying that Vincent had succeeded in “selling a painting and in fact more than once” ^[3]. Even so, a handful of sales is a minute share of the almost 1,000 paintings he completed ^[3].

The buyer was the Belgian painter Anna Boch, sister of Vincent's friend Eugène Boch, who bought The Red Vineyard at the Les Vingt exhibition in Brussels for 400 francs ^[1][2][4]. Vincent heard the news from Theo and passed it on to his mother on 19 February 1890 ^[2]. On 6 March Theo entered the 400 francs in his account book, received from “Mlle Bock pour tab Vigne rouge” (Miss Boch for the painting Red vineyard) ^[2].

Vincent played the sum down, but 400 francs was a serious price for an up-and-coming artist: two months of the allowance Theo sent him in Arles, or more than two years' rent for the Yellow House ^[3]. Theo, a dealer at the leading Boussod & Valadon gallery, arranged the sale privately ^[3]. Van Gogh had painted the canvas in early November 1888, shortly after Gauguin arrived in Arles, and it is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow ^[4][5].

His first commission came from his uncle Cor, an art dealer, who in March 1882 ordered 12 small pen drawings of The Hague at a rijksdaalder (2.50 guilders) each, with the promise of more; the museum counts 19 cityscapes in all ^[1][6]. In 1884, in Nuenen, a retired goldsmith named Antoon Hermans commissioned six landscapes for his dining room, but in the end paid only 25 guilders, which hardly covered the paint ^[3]. Bailey shows one of them, Potato Planting, from August 1884 ^[3].

In Paris, the museum says, he sold his first painting to the paint dealer Julien Tanguy, and Theo sold another work to a gallery in London ^[1]. Bailey adds a portrait of a friend of Tanguy's, sold for 20 francs, a still life of smoked herrings swapped for a carpet, and “a study” bought in 1888 by the Paris dealer Athanase Bague ^[3]. Bailey thinks the portrait is one known only from a black-and-white photograph, and he shows no picture of the herrings, so there is nothing to show for either ^[3]. And he often traded work, with other artists and, in his younger years, for food or drawing and painting supplies ^[1].

Despite encouragement from his avant-garde colleagues, most people simply rejected his work, Bailey writes, and The Art Newspaper suggests he may have ended up pricing his pictures too high ^[3]. Having a dealer for a brother gave him an allowance and contacts, but selling his art proved very challenging ^[3].

Time was the other problem. Recognition only came in his last two years: he showed at the Indépendants in Paris (three paintings in 1888, two in 1889 and ten in March 1890), the critic Albert Aurier praised him in a six-page article in January 1890, and more than 20 reviews cited his work in his last seven months ^[3]. His death in July 1890, told in how Van Gogh died, cut that career short ^[3].

A year after his death, slowly at first ^[4]. In April 1891 the critic Octave Mirbeau bought two flower paintings, Three Sunflowers and Irises, for 600 francs together; he had paid 300 francs for the sunflowers, which were worth 50,000 francs by 1912 ^[4]. The J. Paul Getty Museum bought Irises in 1990, for around $50 million by Bailey's account ^[4].

Anna Boch added a second Van Gogh, Peach Trees in Blossom, for 350 francs ^[4]. All 11 paintings sold in 1891 went for roughly 400 francs each, marketed by Tanguy for Theo's widow, Jo Bonger ^[4].

Real commercial success began in 1895, when the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard started a series of exhibitions and sold around 30 paintings in five years ^[4]. For what his work fetches now, see how much a Van Gogh painting is worth.