page_title: Posthumous fame of Vincent van Gogh
section_title: Early private and public collectors
hierarchical_section_title: Posthumous fame of Vincent van Gogh / Early private and public collectors
caption_attribution_description: the only painting Vincent van Gogh is certainly known to have sold during his lifetime.
context_page_description: The fame of Vincent van Gogh began to spread in France and Belgium during the last year of his life, and in the years after his death in the Netherlands and Germany. His friendship with his younger brother Theo was documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. The letters were published in three volumes in 1914 by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo's widow, who also generously supported most of the early Van Gogh exhibitions with loans from the artist's estate. Publication of the letters helped spread the compelling mystique of Vincent van Gogh, the intense and dedicated painter who suffered for his art and died young, throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
  His fame reached its first peak in Austria and Germany before World War I, and at the end of World War I in Switzerland. Due to the economic crisis in Germany and France after 1918, pioneer collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art which included works by Van Gogh were dissolved. Thus, British and American collectors had the opportunity to acquire first rate works relatively late.
context_section_description: Van Gogh's friends, his colleagues and promoters were at the same time his first collectors. Anna Boch, Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Schuffenecker, Edgar Degas as well as Albert Aurier, Octave Mirbeau, Julien Leclercq and Van Eeden - each of them held works by Van Gogh.
  During the 1890 "Les XX" expo in Brussels van Gogh sold one of his paintings, The Red Vineyard. It was purchased by Anna Boch, impressionist painter, heiress of a Ceramics fortune and sister of his friend Eugene Boch. Although The Red Vineyard is often said to be the only work of art van Gogh sold during his lifetime, he actually managed to sell at least a couple of other paintings, as well as some drawings. He also exchanged works with other artists and sometimes used them as a payment for food or painting and drawing material.
  In 1903, the first works of Vincent van Gogh entered museum collections in Vienna and Rotterdam, as well as Folkwang Museum, then privately run by Karl-Ernst Osthaus in Hagen (later transferred to Essen).
  Little attention was paid at this time to the considerable number of Van Gogh masterpieces already held by the Museum of Modern Art New York (established in 1929), along with the Tate Gallery in London and other British and American galleries.
caption: The Red Vineyard, 1888, oil on canvas, 75 × 93 cm, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
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