Question: Who did Van Gogh confess to that he didn't have any children?
About the article "Vincent van Gogh", section "Influence".

Candidate passages:
[[File:George Hendrik Breitner - Distribution of Soup.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|alt= A watercolor of a group of people standing in front of a courtyard.
Some are carrying pots.|George Hendrik Breitner - "Distribution of Soup", watercolor, 1882, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
In the early months of 1882, Breitner came into contact with Vincent van Gogh.
Van Gogh appears to have been introduced to him by his brother Theo, and the pair sketched together in the working-class districts of The Hague.
Breitner was motivated to do so because he regarded himself as a painter of the common folk.
Van Gogh, initially at any rate, was more intent on recruiting models.
It is likely that Breitner introduced van Gogh to the novels of Émile Zola and the cause of social realism.
Breitner was hospitalised in April.
Van Gogh visited him in hospital, but Breitner did not return the visits when van Gogh himself was hospitalised two months later, and they did not meet again until the following July when van Gogh was on the verge of leaving The Hague and Breitner spending more time in Rotterdam than the Hague.
At that time van Gogh gave Theo a less than flattering account of Breitner's paintings as resembling mouldy wallpaper, although he did say he thought he would be all right in the end.
For his part, there is no evidence that Breitner saw anything notable in van Gogh's work.
He later reminisced that sketching with van Gogh was problematic because, whereas Breitner sketched discreetly in a notebook, van Gogh came laden with apparatus and attracted hostile attention.
Two years after van Gogh's death, Breitner wrote that he did not like van Gogh's paintings:"‘I can’t help it, but to me it seems like art for Eskimos, I cannot enjoy it.
I honestly find it coarse and distasteful, without any distinction, and what’s more, he has stolen it all from Millet and others."
In his final letter to Theo, Van Gogh admitted that as he did not have any children, he viewed his paintings as his progeny.
Reflecting on this, the historian Simon Schama concluded that he "did have a child of course, Expressionism, and many, many heirs."
Schama mentioned many artists who have adapted elements of Van Gogh's style, including Willem de Kooning, Howard Hodgkin and Jackson Pollock.
The Fauves extended both his use of color and freedom in application, as did German Expressionists of the Die Brücke group, and as other early modernists.
Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s is seen as in part inspired from Van Gogh's broad, gestural brush strokes.
In the words of art critic Sue Hubbard: "At the beginning of the twentieth century Van Gogh gave the Expressionists a new painterly language that enabled them to go beyond surface appearance and penetrate deeper essential truths.
It is no coincidence that at this very moment Freud was also mining the depths of that essentially modern domain – the subconscious.
This beautiful and intelligent exhibition places Van Gogh where he firmly belongs; as the trailblazer of modern art.
"In 1957, Francis Bacon (1909–1992) based a series of paintings on reproductions of Van Gogh's "The Painter on the Road to Tarascon", the original of which was destroyed during World War II.
Bacon was inspired by not only an image he described as "haunting", but also Van Gogh himself, whom Bacon regarded as an alienated outsider, a position which resonated with Bacon.
The Irish artist further identified with Van Gogh's theories of art and quoted lines written in a letter to Theo, "painters do not paint things as they are...
They paint them as "they themselves" feel them to be."
An exhibition devoted to Vincent van Gogh's letters took place in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from October 2009 to January 2010 and then moved to the Royal Academy in London from late January to April.
The Van Gogh Museum hosted an exhibition "Van Gogh at Work" featuring 200 paintings and drawings, 150 of them by van Gogh and others including Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard; from May 1, 2013 until January 12, 2014. 
Due to his relationship with Sien, van Gogh experienced the loss of support and goodwill from family and friends, and he experienced an even more strained relationship with his parents.
His teacher and cousin-in-law, Anton Mauve, abruptly ceased his support and tutelage of van Gogh within a few short weeks of van Gogh first meeting Sien, although there were other factors involved as well, not least their mutual melancholy.
Hulsker called this a simple tragedy for van Gogh.
Likewise, a long-standing family friend, Hermanus Tersteeg, an influential art dealer who taught van Gogh and his brother Theo a great deal about art and literature, and who gave van Gogh his first set of art supplies when he decided to become an artist, although he was always somewhat equivocal in his support, abruptly withdrew at the same time.
Van Gogh's relationship with Mauve in truth had scarcely lasted a month.
Already by the end of January, van Gogh was writing his brother Theo that he did not always find it easy to get on with Mauve.
Shortly after this, they fell out with each other over an issue involving drawing from plaster casts, which Mauve was anxious van Gogh should undertake to perfect his technique.
Van Gogh, however, vehemently insisted on drawing from models, and in a fit of pique destroyed some plaster casts of hands and feet that Mauve had given him to make studies from.
Following that incident, Mauve said he would have nothing more to do with him for the next two months (i.e.
for the rest of the winter).
In reality, Mauve, had resolved to break with van Gogh completely.
Van Gogh initially blamed Tersteeg for Mauve's indifference, but a chance meeting with Mauve in May made it clear to him that Mauve had definitively broken with him.
He described the meeting in a letter to Theo, and in the same letter he revealed his relationship with Sien for the first time and passionately defended it:Van Gogh left Sien the autumn of 1883.
Van Gogh went to Drenthe to paint and Sien went back to work as a seamstress, charwoman and possibly as a prostitute.
Her children, Maria and Willem, lived with Sien's mother and brother Pieter.
In 1901 Sien married a seaman, Anton van Wijk.
She committed suicide in 1904 at the age of 54 in Rotterdam's harbor, 14 years after van Gogh's death. 
In 2011, authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith published a biography, "Van Gogh: The Life", in which they challenged the conventional account of the artist's death.
In the book, Naifeh and Smith argue that it was unlikely for van Gogh to have killed himself, noting the upbeat disposition of the paintings he created immediately preceding his death; furthermore, in private correspondence, van Gogh described suicide as sinful and immoral.
The authors also question how van Gogh could have traveled the mile-long distance between the wheat field and the inn after sustaining the fatal stomach wound, and how van Gogh could have obtained a gun despite his well-known mental health problems.
Naifeh and Smith developed an alternative scenario in which van Gogh did not commit suicide, but rather was a possible victim of manslaughter or foul play.
Naifeh and Smith point out that the bullet entered van Gogh’s abdomen at an oblique angle, not straight as might be expected from a suicide.
They claim that van Gogh knew the boys who may have shot him, one of whom was in the habit of wearing a cowboy suit, and had gone drinking with them.
Naifeh said, "So you have a couple of teenagers who have a malfunctioning gun, you have a boy who likes to play cowboy, you have three people probably all of whom had too much to drink."
Naifeh claimed "accidental homicide" was "far more likely."
The authors contend that art historian John Rewald visited Auvers in the 1930s, and recorded that version of events was widely believed.
The authors postulate that after he was fatally wounded, van Gogh welcomed death and believed the boys had done him a favour, hence his widely quoted deathbed remark: "Do not accuse anyone... it is I who wanted to kill myself."
On October 16, 2011, an episode of the TV news magazine "60 Minutes" aired a report exploring the contention of Naifeh and Smith's biography.
Some credence has been given to the theory by van Gogh experts, who cite a recorded "confession" by a known and respected French businessman, Rene Secretan, in 1956, in which he claimed that he was the one who accidentally shot Vincent.
Nonetheless, this new biographical account has been greeted with some skepticism.
Prominent skeptics Joe Nickell also was not convinced.
Nickell analyzed the questions raised by Naifeh and Smith to support their new theory and found that all can be addressed with a more likely answer.
By ignoring the well-known psychological state of Van Gogh (given to self-inflicting harm, self-mortification) and much more reliable testimony (from Adeline Ravoux, daughter of the inn keeper Gustave Ravoux, the owner of the gun), Naifeh and Smith instead make a lot of assumptions on the circumstances around the incident, and misrepresent what Rene Secretan said sixty-six years later in 1956, who did not confess shooting Van Gogh.
Nickell concludes that their theory is the result of the logical fallacy of 'confirmation bias' – "start the investigation with a supposed answer and work backward to the evidence". 
Van Gogh made "Pair of Shoes" (F255) from a pair of boots he purchased at a flea market.
He wore the boots on an extended rainy walk to create the effect he wished for this painting, which may have been a tribute to the working man.
The Van Gogh Museum speculates that they may also be symbolic for Van Gogh of his "difficult passage through life."
Of his walking through mud to make the shoes look more worn and dirty, Van Gogh was known to say "Dirty shoes and roses can both be good in the same way.
"Van Gogh's friend and fellow artist, John Peter Russell, received Van Gogh's "Three Pairs of Shoes" (F332) in 1886.
Russell had painted a portrait of Van Gogh that he dearly loved.
In exchange for the portrait he had given Van Gogh, Russell selected "Three Pairs of Shoes" and a lithograph copy of "Worn Out (Eternity's Gate)" (F997) that Van Gogh made in 1882.
Russell selected these works at a time when Van Gogh had begun to make more colorful work.
Russell's selections indicate that he understood who Van Gogh was and the messages about the peasant or working man that he wished to convey through his work.