Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime

Vincent van Gogh produced roughly 900 paintings in barely a decade, and is certain to have sold just one of them during his lifetime. That picture is The Red Vineyard, painted near Arles in the autumn of 1888 a fiery sweep of laborers gathering grapes under a low orange sun, the kind of blazing landscape that would later define his reputation.

Its buyer was the Belgian painter Anna Boch, sister of Van Gogh’s friend Eugène. She spotted the canvas at the 1890 Les Vingt exhibition in Brussels and bought it for 400 francs four months before the artist’s death. To a man who lived on money wired by his brother Theo, it was a small fortune and a rare flicker of recognition after years of indifference.

He sold one painting in life; the world has been buying him back ever since.

The near-total silence around his work was not for lack of trying. Van Gogh worked feverishly, wrote constantly about his ambitions, and relied on Theo to place his pictures with dealers who mostly weren’t interested. He was not a hermit who hid his canvases he simply could not find a market. Fame arrived almost entirely after his suicide in July 1890, driven largely by Theo’s widow, Johanna, who tirelessly championed both the paintings and the extraordinary letters.

The contrast is now the stuff of legend. Today his paintings rank among the most valuable ever sold, with several changing hands for tens of millions, and The Red Vineyard hangs in Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts a quiet rebuke to the idea that the market ever recognizes genius on time.