An unknown lady who modified artwork historical past

Behind each profitable man is a lady, they are saying. She’s
not at all times his spouse.

Portrait of Johanna Bonger, 1905, Johan Cohen Gosschalk

Johanna Gezina
Bonger is an unknown title to most of us. She was described by those that
knew her as ‘cheerful and full of life’ and ‘good and tender’, and her remaining
portraits depict a lady of grace and intelligence. For her occasions, that might
have been sufficient, however she additionally modified the course of artwork historical past.

Johanna was born in 1862 in Amsterdam to a big
middle-class household. Unusually for the time, she pursued greater training,
together with a stint on the British Museum library. She grew to become an English instructor,
which is the place her story would have ended had she not met one Theo van Gogh. She rejected his first
proposal, a sign that she was a lady who knew her personal worth. A yr
later, she mentioned sure.

Portrait of Theo van Gogh, 1887, Vincent van Gogh, courtesy Van Gogh Museum

Theirs was a sadly quick marriage, lasting lower than two
years earlier than Theo died of what was recorded as dementia paralytica, a symptom of syphilis.
Theo definitely didn’t transmit it to his spouse, who lived a protracted and productive
life. The couple had one son, named Vincent after his uncle.

Theo’s dying left Johanna and her toddler baby comparatively
impoverished. Their property had been their Paris condominium and round 200
work by her late brother-in-law, Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh’s legacy as a painter was not but established. The
critic Albert Aurier, who was his biggest champion, died
all of the sudden of typhoid in 1892. Van Gogh’s former good friend, artist Paul Gauguin, was disinclined
to assist the younger widow market his late competitor’s work. Though at the moment we
consider van Gogh as the first determine in Put up-Impressionism,
on the time he was on the fringes of acceptability. Most artwork specialists thought
his footage had been nugatory, and instructed her so.

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger with son Vincent Willem, 1890, Raoul Saisset, Paris

Fortunately, Johanna ignored them. She moved again to the
Netherlands, opened a boarding home, and started to tirelessly promote Vincent’s
work. For additional earnings, she translated quick tales from French and English. In the meantime,
she raised a toddler.

“Mrs Van Gogh is a captivating little lady,” wrote the
now-forgotten painter Richard Roland Holst,
“but it surely irritates me when somebody gushes fanatically on a topic she is aware of
nothing about, and though blinded by sentimentality nonetheless thinks she is
adopting a strictly essential angle. It’s schoolgirlish twaddle, nothing
extra. The work that Mrs Van Gogh would really like finest is the one which was essentially the most
bombastic and nostalgic, the one which made her shed essentially the most tears; she
forgets that her sorrow is popping Vincent right into a god.”

Her son Vincent was 11 when Johanna married painter and artwork
critic Johan Cohen Gosschalk, who shared her
appreciation for her late brother-in-law. He helped her set up an exhibition
of van Gogh’s work on the then-new museum of contemporary artwork in
Amsterdam, the Stedelijk. Johan died after a decade of marriage, and Johanna then
organized a retrospective of his works.

Earlier than her personal dying, Johanna organized for her late husband to be exhumed and reburied in France along with his brother in order that the inseparable pair might lie collectively in eternity. Photograph courtesy Yannbee Dutch Wikipedia.

By her second widowhood, Johanna continued to tirelessly
promote Vincent. She organized showings of his works and translated and
printed the brothers’ correspondence. The Letters of
Vincent van Gogh established his fame as a struggling genius. By
saving and selectively displaying his works, time and again, Johanna created the fashionable
fable of Vincent van Gogh, which in flip influenced 20^th century artwork
in incalculable methods.

Johanna lived to age 62, engaged on the van Gogh letters proper to the tip. However as vital as her artwork legacy is, her private legacy can be
arresting. Her grandson Theo was executed as a resistance fighter
through the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Her great-grandson, additionally
referred to as Theo
van Gogh, was a filmmaker who was murdered by an extremist for making a
film with Ayaan Hirsi
Ali that criticized the therapy of ladies in Islam. Braveness and imaginative and prescient run
in that household.