Episode Details

Vincent van Gogh did not begin his true career until age 27, and in roughly ten years he produced more than 2,100 works, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in his final two years. This episode uses his letters to Theo to trace the engine behind that output: a string of failures as an art dealer, a theology student, and a missionary in the Belgian coal-mining Borinage who gave away his lodgings to sleep on straw.

From the dark earth tones of The Potato Eaters to the color theory he discovered in Paris and the frantic productivity of Arles, the hosts explain how his technique developed, dismantle the myth that madness created his genius, and close with a haunting story about a 50-mile walk.

• Being named after a stillborn brother, the London rejection that shattered him, and holding his hand in a lamp flame to see his cousin Kee
• Why Theo told him the dark palette was unsellable, and how complementary colors, pointillism, and impasto transformed his work in Paris
• Racing to paint sunflowers before they wilted, painting shadows in purple and blue, and preparing for Gauguin's arrival in Arles
• The severed ear, the townspeople's petition, the Saint-Remy asylum, and why his art was made only during periods of lucidity
• Auvers-sur-Oise, Dr. Gachet, the wheat field in July 1890, and the artist Jules Breton whose wall Vincent never dared to knock on