The Other Heiress: The Marchesa Luisa di Casati

I was fourteen when I fell in love with a mysterious redhead I met at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I fancied myself a seasoned intellectual, a young lady of literary tastes and culture, despite my blue-collar country upbringing. And so I would take the Greyhound into Toronto, and dressed in something as obscure and outlandish as a girl could muster on a babysitter’s income, I would visit the gallery. My heart beat faster when I saw her. Her eyes were daunting, piercing through an alabaster visage, set afire with a mop of carrot curls.

We never spoke, because my redhead haunted me from a canvas painted by Augustus John. From her backdrop of sea-foam green, she never flinched, but held my gaze with her own, and an expression of both curiousity and haughty disdain. I was sure she was eccentric, that she must be a writer like me, a woman of outrageous tastes and interesting lovers. She was the woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

The famous painting is one of the Toronto gallery’s highlights to this day. “Luisa Casati should be shot, stuffed and displayed in a glass case,” is what the artist Augustus John said of the Marchesa.

John was not the only artist to paint this captivating femme fatale. Indeed, her whole celebrity was based on her lavish extravagance and eccentricity, which made her muse for the artists and literati of Europe in her time. Born in 1881, she reigned supreme over the imagination of anyone with a heartbeat for the first three decades of the 1900s. Her estate archives suggest she may be the most “artistically represented” woman after Cleopatra and the Virgin Mary. Sculptures, photographs, sketches and paintings preserve her spirit long beyond her death in 1957. She posed for Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Kees Van Dongen, and Jacob Epstein. She captivated Erte, Jack Kerouac, Jean Cocteau, Tallulah Bankhead, Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound, Colette and Coco Chanel. Her pets inspired the famous Cartier Panther design. Later, she was played by silver screen legends Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman.

But who was she, and what was all the hoopla about? Was she beautiful? What talents did she possess?

Luisa, born in Milan in 1881, was the daughter of a wealthy Austrian cotton manufacturer who was made count by King Umberto the first for his contributions to the cotton industry. Luisa was born rich, but she was an unfortunate looking child, with bulging alien eyes on a harshly chiseled face. She was also very shy. But she was fiercely intelligent and curious about arts and culture, and her passions were encouraged with visits to museums and art galleries. Very early on, Luisa became enchanted with eccentric royalty or outrageous theatre figures, a fascination that was to continue through her lifetime.

Luisa’s mother died when she was just 13, and then the Count died two years later. Luisa and her only sister were the richest women in Italy at the time. The girls moved into the care of an uncle, but a few years later, Luisa married Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, Marchese di Roma. They had one child a year later, and Luisa soon found that wedded bliss was stifling her style, and the pair took up separate residences. Though she’d picked up a fascinating with the mystical arts and the macabre from her husband, she soon began an affair with the famous Italian lover, poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. The affair lasted decades, and the friendship a lifetime. It was at the time of this relationship that Luisa began to explore her deepest eccentricities and vanities, becoming a truly Gothic heroine and dandy. She artfully blended the macabre with the outlandish in her demeanor, surroundings, and fashion- the freakier, the better. She engaged in scandalous love affairs, with both men and women. Her decadence was supreme and captivating. Disregarding her childhood insecurities, she seized the tall, ghostly androgyny and accentuated it wildly, powdering her face whiter, circling her eyes with black kohl, smudging her lips in vermillion. It’s a look that reappears on fashion runways every few seasons even today.

“The face was that of a sinister Pierrot, utterly white, the thin mouth a slit that seemed to be of the same black as the rings encircling the eyes. The high cheekbones, the forward-thrusting chin, the long neck bespoke the apparition’s class,” said Philippe Jullian. “Was this the vampire Nosferatu in drag or the daughter of Dracula turned grandmother?”

The Marchesa had a penchant for outrageous luxury. She went to Paris, Rome, Capri, buying palaces! She loved to lavishly and bizarrely entertain guests of artistic or aristocratic temperament, hostessing grandiose masquerade balls. She painted her Nubian servants gold. She had wax mannequins made to populate her rooms- legend says they were modeled after her lovers. And like fellow eccentrics Lord Byron, Josephine Baker, and Michael Jackson, the Marchesa had her own menagerie of pets.

She could be seen in her skintight long velvet gowns walking her greyhounds- or her pet cheetahs. She wore live, gilded snakes as necklaces. Isidora Duncan recounts her experience as Luisa’s visitor. A parrot greeted her with a tirade of vulgarities. A while bulldog snarled. A cobra hissed from a cage. The walls and floors were covered in white bear skins and tiger skins. “There was a gorilla, showing its teeth.” The Marchesa drove in a carriage fronted by twin leopards. She carried a monkey in a cage. Others complained of the stench, but she gave him a sprig of lilacs, which he flung about, scattering the petals. “Now do you see why I have a monkey? Don’t you think that’s beautiful?” Luisa asked her detractors. “Isn’t it like something in a Chinese painting?”

Her biographers Scot D. Ryersson, Michael Orlando Yaccarino, Quentin Crisp, in Infinite Variety, tell the above anecdote. They also recount how her palace gardens were filled with a veritable zoo, and that she sometimes sailed the canals with her selection of primates, tigers, and exotic birds. There were white peacocks, ocelots, boa constrictors, and albino blackbirds.

“She was the most flamboyant and dramatic character to flit through the early 20th century European beau monde,” writes Michael Mattis at www.dandyism.net.  “They simply don’t make her kind anymore: richer than God, gloriously semi-sane, with outrageous taste in friends, art, décor, clothes, houses, pets and lovers. Guests of Casati’s boudoir were a veritable who’s who of the aristos, aesthetes, artists, bons vivants, poets, dancers and dandies that made the early 20th century’s art scene what it was: totally, utterly, and delightfully mad.”

A Polish sculptor named Catherine Barjanksky once said, “She was so different from other women that ordinary clothes were impossible for her.” The artist described Luisa’s ensemble of one occasion as something out of Thousand and One Nights. “Long Persian trousers of heavy gold brocade, fastened tightly…. held by diamond bangles…feet encased in gold sandals with high diamond heels…she smoked cigarettes out of a long black mouthpiece studded with diamonds.”

The Marchesa has been criticized for the bottomless well of her vanity. Would she have been so outrageous if she attracted no attention? Furthermore, she had hundreds of portraits made of herself in ink and oil and photograph. Her motivation, hardly original, yet clear as a bell, was simply this famous statement: “I want to be a living work of art.” Luisa wished to make herself immortal, and so she made herself memorable, with portraits that would bring her to life centuries after her passing.

Luisa was also criticized for being a showy, flamboyant personality despite contributing no art or literature to society. Her talents were mere shock value and superficial veneer.

But this is hardly a fair critique when one considers not only the inspirational value of the muse, but the monetary injections her estate provided for endless artists, sculptors, photographers, costumiers, designers, dancers, actors, musicians, writers, theatres, even puppeteers. Her high profile cemented their stature in some cases, and others had a chance at a career because of her. Her lavish splurging boosted the productivity and importance of the arts in Europe after the turn of last century.

Just as important as her money was the attention she brought to the arts and literary affairs. People flocked in droves to events just to see the living work of art, and thus the arts themselves gained considerably in both finance and audience. The importance of this role cannot be understated. This was a vivid time in Europe for arts and culture, with other eccentrics like Ballet Russes superstar Nijinsky and opera/theatre artist Erte and a whole host of others mingling around salons and galleries. But the roots of these geniuses and most of their company were humble. Luisa’s grandiosity fuelled the development of greatness.

Today we depend on the fickle and disinterested government arts grants and listen to other taxpayers complain that they could care less about opera or oil painting. Or we watch artists and writers live their passion very nearly in the gutter. The Marchesa was a patroness extraordinaire who valued the arts above all else, even, I believe, above her own image. I am certain that the meaning of her vanity was rooted in her absolute devotion to the creativity of the human imagination. It takes tremendous vanity to fuel the salons and cafes and theatres of Europe, and this was the Marchesa’s fate.

But alas, even for a filthy rich heiress, the bottomless well of gold runs out after one too many monkeys. By the early 1930s, the Marchesa had spent more than everything, overdrawn by some 25 million dollars.

Even her penitence was the height of elegant soap operatics. She appeared before the Parisian archbishop to seek his forgiveness, dressed from head to toe in white, carried by four valets, holding white flowers and an albino parrot on her lap.

Her estates were sold to pay off her debts, and the lady Luisa spent 25 years in England in humbling circumstance. But she lost none of her pluck, apparently- legend holds that the Marchesa could be seen strolling the alleyways, dumpster diving for feathers and other accoutrements with which to decorate her bonnets.

Luisa’s long-term lover, the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio wondered, “By what fire did she transmute the substance of her life into the beauties of such moving power? She demonstrated how true it is that all enchantment is a madness induced with art.”

Today I stood at the renovated and spectacular new Art Gallery of Ontario. More than two decades have gone by since I was first astonished and seduced by the portrait. Now I know that Augustus John was her lover, too, and that the effect she had on me was precisely the one she wanted to have on anyone who laid eyes on her. Amazingly, this picture was purchased for a mere 1500 pounds in 1934. It is said to be the best loved work in the gallery. Clearly, her ability to make an instant audience wherever she goes has prevailed long after she died. She was indeed the living work of art she wanted to be. Immortal.

Every portrait of the Marchesa shows another side, another layer, and John’s is disarming for its near-softness. He avoided the Gothic, macabre, darker incarnations and focused on the shock of her orange hair, flaming against a grey-green backdrop. She is pale, almost vulnerable, turning guardedly to her observer, yet unflinching. She shows that her intensity is still present even when undressed of her carriages and strange pets and vampiric gowns, never having been dependent on those things after all. Here, as ever, she does not flinch. She makes no apology for the fact that she is everyone’s lover, and not just mine. There is enough of her to go around, and always will be.

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
- Shakespeare, on Marchesa’s tomb, 1957

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The Life and Death of Benjamin Chee Chee 1944-1977

The serene, spare elegance of Ojibway painter Benjamin Chee Chee was probably my first consciousness of art.

I babysat the neighbour kids, amazingly named the Friends, and loved going to their house, which was free of the clutter that defined our home. The clarity and breathing room there was a safe haven from the manic pace I came from. Mom was a compulsive hoarder, and the closest thing we had to art were Old Testament felt storyboards and macaroni fridge magnets. While there were countless wonderful things about my own home, there was also much chaos. The Friend family had selective, neatly laid out objects. I felt safe there. And it was the minimalist lines of Chee Chee’s bird paintings that mesmerized me most. I stared at their artful flight for hours after the kids went to bed. Of course, I knew then very little of art or of Indians or even Benjamin Chee Chee’s name, but those stunning paintings stayed in my mind’s eye. I forever associated peaceful serenity with the Temagami artist’s monochromatic and linear style.

But the handsome young native’s life and imagination was anything but serene. Rather, Benjamin was an orphan, a drifter, an alcoholic with a raging temper, in and out of trouble, and in and out of jail. He abused drugs as well, until he saw an acquaintance overdose and die. He burned himself with cigarettes. He was 32 at the end of his short story.

He was also at the height of his fame, and galleries were selling out every showing. He sometimes received rush commissions for ten or more works in order to stock public demand. And he had recently fulfilled his 20-year desire to find his mother, reunited with her at last. This search had consumed much of his life, but the reunion was perhaps disappointing. Both were glad, but veritable strangers. Josephine was a recovering alcoholic, happy to see her son, but she had little to offer him. A few months afterward, Benny was arrested for public drunkenness for the last time. He fashioned a noose from his clothing and slumped against the bars of his cell, dying in hospital three days later.

Chee Chee was born in northern Ontario’s Temagami in 1944, in the cabin of “Angele,” a woman who was the first wife of the naturalist and native poseur, Grey Owl. His name was Kenneth Thomas Chee Chee, and it was Angele who added “Benjamin.” His early years were spent on the Bear Island Indian Reserve. He never knew his father, who died while gathering firewood when his truck crashed through the ice to his freezing grave.

Mom Josephine struggled to survive her grief and support her family. She had no education and her only work experience was as a cleaning lady. She earned about 30 bucks a month as a widow, not nearly enough to support her child. Benjamin was often left with friends while Mom went out to work. By early adolescence, he did not even know where his mother was. And while the tall and good-looking kid had a witty and outgoing persona, he maintained few real friendships. He joked around to get over his shyness. He was sent to juvenile detention, where like countless other native children, he was abused. The boy took to booze early on, preferring the buzz to fleeting human relationships. It was impossible to trust anyone. He later had one serious relationship with a woman, Yvette, toward whom he was very kind, but he was violent toward her when he was drinking and so the affair didn’t last.

Although Chee Chee was drinking from his early teens, he had another deeper interest: drawing. No one was around to recognize or encourage the drifter’s considerable talent, but the boy took some comfort in sketching and occasionally expressed his desire to be an artist.

His immense gift was evident much later to a lawyer named Frederick Brown, whom Chee Chee met at a party in Montreal. Brown introduced him to other artists and helped him find a job in a warehouse. But the lawyer saw that in addition to general disruptive behaviour under the influence of alcohol, Chee Chee exhibited a great deal of hatred toward whites. While it is absolutely true that the authorities were harsher with Chee Chee and other Aboriginal Canadians in detention, and that poverty and racism were grim realities from the start, it was white people who recognized and boosted Chee Chee’s art career.

In the last four years of his life, he was valued as an artist and was on the verge of becoming very famous. Chee Chee had no formal training in art. Other native Canadian Woodland-school artists were painting in the Norval Morisseau tradition- symbolic native legends in a very beautiful and popular style. But Chee Chee preferred to be known on his own, and his sparse, elongated wildlife merged contemporary minimalism with his own ideas of Ojibway art, creating a style unique to him. Benny sold a considerable number of works during his brief career: they sold for $200 or so per print- or even per original- and now fetch upwards of ten grand each. It could be surmised that his suicide has made certain collectors and art world figures quite wealthy.

Indeed, Al Evans, a retired professor from the University of Waterloo, blames Chee Chee’s tragedy on whites like himself, and his book, Chee Chee: a Study of Aboriginal Suicide contains most of the very limited information we know of Benny’s life. He speculates in his fascinating text on the redemptive power of art, and generally champions Chee Chee, interpreting all of his flaws and violent outrages as the unavoidable side effects of a bad childhood. It is undeniable that Chee Chee is a victim, and undeniable that most native Canadians have suffered countless abuses and racisms that have devalued their heritage and contribution. It is true that a man with no roots and nothing in way of stability had little to cling to even when he achieved recognition, success, and reunion. His lawyer friend Frederick Brown said that in the artist’s last days, he was filled with incredible self-loathing and tormented by isolation, rejections, and darkness. Not even art could assuage the hopelessness and meaninglessness he experienced.

Evans quotes Chee Chee telling an interviewer about his artistic hope. “I wanted to be my own man. I wanted to develop a style that was so much my own that anyone looking at a painting by me would say at once, even if the work was unsigned, ‘Now that was done by Benjamin Chee Chee.’”

Indeed, as a young lady first addressing my own madness and my own inclinations toward creativity as both a writer and an artist, I spent long hours looking at those prints, and in my head. I made up legends about the native group who painted them. Naïve to art or folklore, I assumed the various prints were a ‘style’ and that Chee Chee was one member, kind of like the Group of Seven of which I would later learn, or the Woodland painters. I found some books of Indian legends at the library and read about the Great Spirit and Quebecois mythology and east coast native mythology like Glooskap. I made up stories to go with the paintings, stories of deep serenity and elegance and clean, harmonious living with wildlife. I was inventing my own ‘noble savage’ ideology to take me away from the cluttered chaos and upheaval of my own personal narrative. I meditated on the clarity and serenity of Chee Chee’s loons, breathing in the perceived calm. It was the first conscious healing I received from art. That my impressions and research were crude and naïve is forgivable- I was only eleven years old.

Though Chee Chee’s work was known for its linear grace, he himself was known as a man who fluctuated wildly between gregarious joking and drunken brutality. I’m not the only one who read into his work- critics, patrons, and other various art people also tended to over-interpret his work. Curator Elizabeth McLuhan saw ‘visual longing for a family he never had.’ Friends also saw representations in the wildlife of that romanticized family. But Chee Chee himself said in a calendar, “My drawings of birds and animals have no symbolic meaning from the past. To me they are creatures of the present and I draw them because I like their clean lines and beautiful shapes.”

That may be, but the grace that Chee Chee never knew somehow materialized in those beautiful, mysterious wildlife abstractions. Little Lorette never tired of studying the prints after my charges had fallen asleep and the dishes were done. It was the Friend house, too, that brought me solace- every troubled little girl needs a place to go, and my early responsibilities, along with the serenity of an alternate life, gave meaning and direction to any adolescent upheaval I was experiencing.

But things change, and the Friend family moved away, and I never went back into that very special house next door. The spirit of the walls, emptied of the artist’s grace, held an alternate legacy for the new tenants. In an absolutely haunting irony, one I wouldn’t connect until much later when as an adult I heard of Chee Chee’s demise, the new neighbour’s child hung himself in the basement of that house, eternally suspended in seventeen.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Flowers for Vincent (1853-1890)

A few things come to mind when one hears the name Van Gogh- the outrageous multimillion-dollar auction sales for sunflowers and irises; the fact that he sold only one painting while he was alive; and something about insanity, severing his own ear, and sending it to a prostitute.

It is true that Van Gogh’s work, 100 years after they were created, are among the highest fetchers in all of art history. Multiple works have sold for more than $50 million a pop. The infamous Dutch artist, who lived in abject poverty on little more than coffee and turpentine and the odd prostitute, sold only one painting, named The Red Vineyard, near the end of his short life. Starry Night, arguably his most famous painting, was what he saw from the window of the lunatic asylum where he was confined. And yes, after a fight with his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, with whom he frequented the whorehouses and absinthe parlours of France, he severed his own year with a razor, presented it to 16-year old Rachel, and went home to bed.

It all seems very sordid, and it was, but in context, it’s important to know that many artists were mad. They were free thinkers, in an era giving way to Impressionism and Modernism, moving away from the confines of realism and religiosity. And Vincent was not alone in his penchant for prostitutes- the cat houses in Paris and Montmartre in the late 1800s were meeting places where the café society gathered to discuss painting techniques and philosophy, drink absinthe, and meet women. Everybody was doing it. In this manner, Van Gogh did not stand out at all in his time.

But he was definitely not quite right, and the speculation continues to this day over ‘what was wrong with him.’ Van Gogh, born in 1853, said himself that when he had episodes- such as the severing of the ear- he did not recall a thing that was said or done during that time. He attempted suicide several times, following various rejections throughout his life, and though his alcoholism, absinthe addiction, and ingestion or inhalation of paints and cleaners- and possibly syphilis- all contributed most assuredly to his problems, Vincent’s head wasn’t screwed on straight from the beginning.

Or maybe it was, and society was all wrong. For Van Gogh was a deeply sensitive child, whose early days were spent staring at a grave marker that read Vincent Van Gogh. He was a replacement for the real Vince, whose death left his mother heartbroken and inattentive. Van Gogh was definitely one of the HSPs (‘highly sensitive persons’) and his original desires were not art, but social work and the ministry. He was a devout Christian, like his Calvinist pastor father. He wanted to reach out to the poor and downtrodden, like his good shepherd Jesus. The family was middle class, but Vince spent his emotions feeling sorry for the lower working classes. He was prone to mood swings, temper tantrums, and crying jags, often over nothing in particular but the state of the world.

By chance his very first job was as an art dealer, for an uncle was in the business and did a family favour. But Vincent fell in love, as he would do often and passionately, with the landlady’s daughter. She was engaged to another and the rejection brought about the first noticeable changes in the young man’s health. He grew thin and lived in silence, and became more religious.

Though Vincent stubbornly refused to study ‘dead languages’ he found irrelevant to missions work, an evangelical school took a chance on the young man’s considerable conviction. He was assigned to a remote post in a coal-mining community of Belgium. He didn’t fare well in this position because he was depressed by witnessing firsthand the deplorable conditions. Miners stood for hours in freezing water labouring at the coal, and their lungs filled with toxins. When explosions buried miners or injured them, Vincent worked into exhaustion tending to the wounded or comforting the grieving.

He gave his own lodgings to the homeless and lived in a hut without heat, and refused to tend to his hygiene, a luxury that was not afforded to the mineworkers. He became so embroiled in his compassion that he fed the insects and mice in his quarters while he himself went hungry. But in this depth of despair, he began documenting the scenes of labour, and these sketches began his ‘career’ as an artist.

From this point on, Vincent relied on a stipend from his brother Theo, and spent the rest of his life painting, in and out of psychiatric treatment. His brother was a successful art dealer in Paris, and was certain that brother Vince was a genius. Though Vincent did treat himself to occasional carousing, by and large, he lived as a pauper, never misusing the generosity of his family. He drank endless amounts of coffee, seldom bathed, and had ten teeth extracted. He was not exactly lavish- every penny possible went toward paint and canvas, and he produced ceaselessly, sometimes working so manically that he made a painting in an hour. Other times, he stared endlessly until he would grab the brushes and began angrily striking colour onto the canvas. His work, though tame by today’s standards, was considered outrageous. Though he painted perfectly respectable landscapes, flowers, or perspective scenes, and portraits, he did not use colour or brush strokes in a conventional way. He left some parts of the canvas bare, he mixed strange hues to brighten or darken a palette, and he let his emotions dictate the paint strokes he laid down. But it didn’t matter whether or not Vincent was free to wander with his painter acquaintances, or locked up in a room with little view- he painted endlessly from whatever was there in front of him.

Vincent’s depressive episodes were blamed on his overly sensitive heart.  He never got over an early rejection, his older cousin Kee, who responded to his marriage proposal rather clearly: “no, never, never.” Evidently she didn’t want him to have false hope, but poor Vincent insisted that he would go on loving her ‘until in the end she loves me.’

He never quite gave up this unrealistic passion, but went on to have an involved relationship with a prostitute, Sien, and her children, living altogether. Vincent by then had thrown out the hypocrisies of his childhood faith, developing a real hatred for the church and its insult on his intelligence, loathing its lack of kindness. He thought the clergy was vile but kept his love for the groovy JC in tact. He was convinced by his own interpretations of the Bible that Christ would take pity at women for whom there was no option but to sell themselves, rather than blaming these impoverished, widowed women for the downfall of society. To avenge himself of the sins of the church, Vincent took a rather unusual approach- he would himself help the whores, both by caring for them as friends, and by purchasing their services. “I am no friend of the present Christianity, though Jesus was sublime,” he wrote to his brother. “I have taken revenge…by worshipping the love which they…call sin, by respecting a whore…”

Like his empathy for the miners, he became so sensitive to the plight of women that he could probably be considered an early feminist. He condemned the clergy and religious rhetoric that spoke down to women. Indeed, he all but lost his early faith, feeling religious rejection as fiercely as any other rejection. “That God of the clergymen is as dead as a doornail,” he wrote. His family was outraged by the scandal of Vince and his hooker girlfriend- Sien was rather unattractive and in poor health, on top of it all, though Vince found her beautiful. To defend himself from his family’s disdain, he wrote, “No matter how good and noble she may be by nature, if she has no means…in present day society runs a great and immediate danger of…prostitution. Our life is so dependent on our relations with women…that it seems to me one must never think lightly of them.”

The scandals continued up until the end of Vincent’s short life. He became ill with gonorrhea, a common affliction in France at this time. Later, the only woman to ever fall in love with him attempted suicide after his rejection. There was a pregnancy out of wedlock blamed on him, as if he should be so lucky. He also hallucinated frequently that people were trying to harm him. This could point to paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar mania, or the effects of the absinthe. He attempted suicide by swallowing his paints during a particularly low point confined in the loony bin.  And after a fight with his beloved friend Gauguin, he chased the other painter with a razor, turning it on himself in the end, and sending his severed ear to a prostitute they both loved.  (It is highly unlikely that the two artists, both on the ugly side, were lovers, as some insinuate. There were plenty of homosexual liaisons and scandals in art history, but there is very little evidence or titillation to suggest that these unwashed, toothless madmen had anything but a brotherly love for one another.)

In the very end, he had a great deal of support and love from his brother Theo’s wife, who named their baby Vincent in his honour. Little Vince became ill, and Van Gogh felt that because he was a mooch and a leech, the baby did not have the proper care that more funds could have afforded him. It was around this time that he took psychiatric care with a doctor that many felt ‘played with his mind’ before putting a bullet into his stomach in the wheat fields near his brother’s house. He was 37 years old.

Brother Theo died from grief – or possibly from syphilis- six months later, ironically in a loony bin, having taken to violent fits against his loved ones and himself, similar to the outbursts and episodes that his brother suffered. He was buried alongside Vincent.

Theo left his widow Jo with all of Vincent’s paintings, and the rest is art history.

In 1888, a couple of years before both of their deaths, Theo wrote about Vincent in a letter to his wife: “That head of his has been occupied with contemporary society’s insoluble problems for so long, and he is still battling on with his goodheartedness…His efforts have not been in vain, but he will probably not live to see them come to fruition, for by the time people understand what he is saying in his paintings it will be too late. He is one of the most advanced painters…his ideas cover so much ground, examining what is human and how one should look at the world…I am sure he will be understood later on. It is just hard to say when.”

Visit writer and artist Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

(Letters quoted are thanks to Derek Fell’s amazing book Van Gogh’s Women.)