The Woman Who Made Van Gogh Famous Jo Van Gogh Bonger s Untold Story

Hello, bonjour, welcome. I am Sylvia Davis, Culture Editor for France Media, and today we have a very special Bonjour Paris episode for you. In this episode I am joined by Joan Fernandes, author of Saving Vincent, a novel of Jo Van Gogh, who shares the remarkable story of the woman who made Vincent Van Gogh famous. This is a shorter version of the event made especially for YouTube. The full extended version is exclusively for Bonjour Paris members. Membership gives you complete access to our event archive and future live sessions and the chance to ask your own questions live directly to the speaker. You can find out more via the link in the description and while you're here hit subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss an episode. Let's begin. Bienvenue to Bonjour Paris live. Our online event series, free for Bonjour Paris members, offers expert lectures, discovery talks and conversations about la vie française. In between your trips to France, we're here to inspire you. Bonjour Paris has been online since 1995, almost as old as the internet itself. Our website is packed with interesting articles about the culture and history of Paris and now, thanks to the support of our growing membership base, we're able to showcase new offerings like video and online talks. For details about all the benefits of Bonjour Paris membership, visit our membership page on our website. Enjoy today's Welcome to Bonjour Paris live. I am Silvia Davies, Culture Editor for France Media and your host today for a talk with Joan Fernandes, author of Saving Vincent, a novel of Jo Van Gogh, who will share with us a fascinating chapter in art history gleaned from her research for her book. I will now invite Joan to start her video. Hello, Joan. Hello, Silvia. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you so much for joining us. We are so excited about your story and all your research you did about this fascinating, lesser-known story about Van Gogh's obviously very well-known work. So, Joan, you're coming to us from Saint Louis, right? Yes, I am. So thank you very much. And we are going to be here for about an hour total, as usual. So let me first introduce you. Joan Fernandes is a novelist who brings to light brilliant women's courageous deeds in history. In 2018, she retired from a 30-year career as a senior marketing executive to devote herself to writing. Joan calls both Saint Louis and Sedona home. Her latest book, Saving Vincent, a novel of Jo Van Gogh, published in April 2025, has garnered significant recognition, including the 2024 American Writing Award for Art and finalist for the 2025 American Fiction and 2024 American Writing Award in Historical Fiction. Congratulations, Joan. Thank you. Thank you, Silvia. I owe it all to Jo Van Gogh. She has an amazing story. I'm so happy to be here because Van Gogh has such deep roots in Paris that this is the perfect audience to hear about Jo's story. Absolutely. So having said that, over to you. All yours. Okay. Jo Van Gogh Bonger, the unsung champion of Vincent's legacy. Well, I first heard about Jo on a trip in 2016 at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Many of you may have been here. And that trip is where I first saw a notation about Jo. And it ultimately planted a seed where a few years later, I decided to retire from my career and then begin to write her story. So I'll let you be the judge as to whether that was a good decision or not. Well, in 1891, Vincent Van Gogh is dead. His brother, an art dealer, Theo Van Gogh, is dead. Joanna Van Gogh Bonger, Theo's widow, Vincent's sister-in-law, inherits hundreds of Vincent's paintings, but they're valueless. No one is buying them. Isn't that amazing? Even now, millions of people now flock to see Van Gogh's work. Last year, maybe some of you went to to see the exhibit, Vincent Van Gogh, Poets and Lovers. 334,559 people attended that show in 16 weeks. It was their largest ticketed event ever. And many of you may have gone to the D'Orsay in February 2024, where there was a show, Vincent Van Gogh, Auvers Revoirs. And there, almost double the number, I've got 793,556 visitors. That's nearly 7,200 people walk through the doors of your D'Orsay to see Vincent's artwork. In 1891, no one is coming to see Vincent's work. He's dead. He's insignificant. So what happened and how did Vincent's artwork that was valueless then become priceless today? I believe that some of this is illustrated in the life of the person that you see on the screen, Jo, and her gift to humanity, especially for her time in a world dominated by men. Sylvia mentioned to you, I have a 30-year career in marketing. Well, I spent that entire career in industries that were also dominated by men. And so because of those two things, marketing and my experience, when I came across Jo's story, not only could I see the intuitive marketing brilliance that she had, and I'll share a couple of examples of that, but also I just was appreciating and was astounded at the complexity that she had to navigate in a world that was hostile to her, since at that time, the only art dealers that were around were men. But despite this, she persisted, and she ended up dedicating her life to the artists we know today, who then had been swept aside. So why did she think Vincent's artwork was worthy? And why was she the one to bring it to life? Well, you know, Vincent himself, he was worried that his art, his art's acceptance would really never happen. So in a letter to Theo, he wrote, it's a sad prospect to have to say to myself that the painting I do will perhaps never have any value. You know, Vincent was a late starter. He was he was 27 years old when his brother Theo sent him some painting materials and agreed to send him a monthly financial allowance so that he could learn how to be a painter. And that's because he really wasn't successful prior to that. So for four years, Vincent taught himself to draw and to paint in Belgium and the Netherlands. It was in his fifth year that he painted what's considered a masterpiece. And maybe some of you have seen this in the Van Gogh Museum, the potato eaters on the screen, where Vincent was able to capture the dignity of a family that's come together at the end of a workday. They are potato farmers. There is a warmth there, maybe a pride that they're the ones to put food on the table. About a year after Vincent painted this, he decided he was ready to go to Paris. He wrote Theo, I'd like to come. I'm looking for the friction of ideas from other artists. So he decided to go. But the thing is, once he came to Paris, he discovered that Paris was crowded with thousands of artists flooding the city. Now at that time, Paris, and still very much so, is the epicenter of the art world. So picture thousands of young men across the continent coming into Paris to make their mark. As I was reading about this, it seemed to me as though it was like Silicon Valley 20 years ago, when all sorts of tech entrepreneurs were going into Northern California to try to make their fortune. So Vincent, who was just one among all of these people, was virtually anonymous. And the other thing is, he discovered a political reality. Select art dealers controlled the market, and they preferred academic art. With all of those artists flooding the city, there was a lot of money to be made. And so art dealing in the art industry was like a street fight. There were art classes and art studios. For women, there was modeling. But the people at the top of the power pyramid, they have names that we may not recognize today, like Paul Dernand-Ruel and Ambrose Vallard. They were the ones who called the shots. And importantly, they preferred academic art when it came to sales. So think idealistic battle scenes, iconic countrysides. And the problem is, Vincent hated academic art. In fact, just prior to coming to Paris, he'd been attending the Art Academy in Antwerp, and he got into so many arguments with the professors that he ended up having to leave. And that was the third thing standing in Vincent's way. His personality was erratic and off-putting. Remember he was looking for that friction of ideas from other artists? Well, he got it. In Paris, he was exploding with all of these new ideas, new techniques he was trying out. He was introducing color, and he was in constant state of evolution. And the way that he processed this was through constant bickering. I read a story about him at the end of a day when he'd been out painting with another artist, getting into such an argument that he was gesturing with his paintbrush and spattering passersby with bits of paint. So this was a challenge. This was a challenge for Vincent, so that by the time he'd been in Paris for a few years, he said he was ready to make a change. He wanted to move to the south of France. And so moving to the south of France, out of the epicenter of the art world, he was not improving his chances to be discovered. But he was lonely in Paris, and he didn't know it then, but he would be lonely in Arles. He knew he was different, but he couldn't help himself. In fact, in another letter he wrote to Theo, the greatest and most energetic people of the century have always worked against the grain. The next step Jo takes is unusual. Strangely, she sets aside everything she'd grown up believing, and she does something really unexpected. It would be a single decision, but it would turn out to be a turning point that would completely change the trajectory of her life. Now, Vincent had a little inkling of this. In one of his letters, he wrote, great things are done by a series of small things brought together. We'll do appreciate the next decisions that Jo took. It's important to know just a little bit about society in the late 1800s, and in particular, how the late 19th century, what they taught about widespread assumptions about women and their capabilities. For example, Jo had been taught that women have a smaller brain, and so therefore they are intellectually inferior. Her father, Frederick, worked in the shipping industry of Amsterdam. It was work that was risky and dangerous and cutthroat. Business was no place for a woman, and because she had that lower, that smaller, inferior intellect, men are the ones who worked. Remember how Theo took over the welfare for his mom and his sister when his father died. There was no way Jo is expected to go into business. Secondly, in society, it was taught at that time that women managed the households, had children, and so they were involved and in charge of the private sphere of society, whereas men who were working and in politics were involved in the public sphere of society. This was the way society was supposed to be structured. There should be no coming together of those. Those were separate. And remember, Jo is only 27 years old. She can have more children. So it's expected that she will remarry and have more kids, grow her family, because that's her duty to society. And I remember in my research seeing some Parisian headlines after, I think it was the Paris Commune, where women were told, it's your patriotic duty to start having more children. And then third, the other assumption, and this is my favorite, is that women were taught that they are physically frail. They have no resilience. And in fact, as Jo was growing up, she was always encouraged, if you feel stress, you need to lie down, and that I would like to do that. I would like to do that myself. So resilience and stamina, these are not compliments for a woman. Yet, in 1891, Jo instead opens a boarding house in a small town south of Amsterdam. The now running a boarding house was an acceptable occupation for a widow, although typically not someone as young as she was. She was choosing to raise her son on her own. And then finally, and this is important, instead of leaving Vincent's artwork in Paris, remember, that's where art was happening, she chose to keep the collection together and instructed that all of those paintings, and they estimate about 400 were in the apartment that she shared with Theo, they should be crated up and shipped to her boarding house, where she stored them in the attic of this building. All of this was contrary to beliefs about women. So what gave her this conviction? How did she know that Vincent's artwork was something worth saving? So as I was doing my research, I looked for clues. And I found a number of them. And I'm going to share just one with you today. In my research, I came across a volume of correspondence that Theo and had when they were engaged. So Theo stayed in Paris, Joe was in Amsterdam. And in those days, the train carried the mail. So you could write a letter in the morning, and it would be received in the afternoon. So this correspondence is really fun, because it's almost like a conversation, right back and forth. There's about 100 letters, and I read them all. And in those 100 letters between Joe and Theo, they are exploring art. In the beginning, you know, they don't know each other that well, they've only they only actually met a few times. So they're starting to say things like Theo was saying things like, I have this really cool wallpaper for the dining room, I think you'll like and then Joe was saying things like, I found this red dress, I thought I would, you know, I could wear it, I could wear it when we go to the opera, things like that. But then they start to become more vulnerable. And they talk about what, what do you look for in a partnership? What do you look for in a marriage? And Theo says to Joe or writes to Joe, I need to share my burdens with someone, I want to feel like someone else understands what I'm going through. Remember that cutthroat situation he's in every day, with all of these artists he believes in, but isn't able to sell. And so Joe writes things like, well, she asked some questions like, well, what, what makes good art? How do you look at art? And he wrote things like, art must move the viewer's soul. And regarding Vincent, and they wrote a number of times about his brother Vincent, who then was in the south of France. Theo said, you have to drop all conventional learning. In order to really see his work. And so Joe was learning how to look at art, the way that Theo did, and it was under this sense of being in partnership with each other. So I imagined that after they got married, and they were in that Parisian apartment, Vincent's letters were arriving nearly every day, he was sending these tubes of paintings that he would open and unroll and look at the work that he that Vincent was doing in Arles, that they were talking about this. And so in a way, I felt of it is almost like an informal apprenticeship that Joe was was undergoing. And look how radical Theo was by breaking that wall between the private and the public and introducing Joe to that world of art dealing in art. I don't think she realized how she was being prepared at all. I think they were just simply in their lives together. But that ended up being an unconventional preparation for her. You know, as I so this was part of her preparation. Later, she would go on in this boarding house to begin to correspond with art dealers and galleries constantly. She would curate shows, she would select paintings that were introduced in group shows. And she would travel across the Netherlands to visit them and see how they're going. All of that was the beginning of creating and raising awareness around Vincent's art. Enjoying the video so far? Give it a like, it really helps more people discover it. Remember get the full length version of this video, and every talk and the opportunity to join live in real time and join the q&a session live. You'll find membership details in the description below. And don't forget to subscribe. So you're the first to know when our next episode goes live. But I want to share with you some of the some of the strategies, she would not have called them marketing in her time, but that I noticed in her work. With my background in marketing, as I was doing research, I identified eight different strategies. But I want to share three with you today. One is that Joe gave paintings as gifts to leverage the social capital of respected individuals. Here on the screen is Theo's Dr. Frederick van Eden, who was well known. He was unsuccessful in curing Theo. But in gratitude, she gave him the painting the sower and you can see it kind of behind the language there on the screen. But it was done with the condition that when she did an exhibition that he would loan it back to her so she could sign so she could mount it but with a little sign that says courtesy of the from the private collection of Frederick van Eden. She did that a number of times with there was a director in Belgium with a group called Levin. There's 20 artists that really believed in modern art. He was supportive of Vincent she she sent him artwork the same thing. And she she did that throughout her career of really selectively giving and then have with that stipulation that paintings be loaned back. And this right at the outset started to raise the stature of how people viewed Vincent's art. Today, we might call it a little bit of FOMO, right? Another strategy that she did was she built a strong base of support among Dutch art dealers to create early advocates. Remember, prior to that, Vincent's work is in Paris, but it is completely overwhelmed by all the other art going on all of the activity. And so it isn't that she didn't want Vincent to be internationally successful. It ultimately that became her goal. But she began on her home turf. And there there was an affinity with the Dutch art dealers and art galleries to want to support another Dutch artist. And so this was her initial thought is to establish that home base, even as she was reaching out to other art galleries. And then the last strategy I want to share with you, and this is one that many of us know about how Vincent was humanized to the Parisian public through sharing excerpts from his letters. She would go on to do this actually in a number of ways. But this I have I have on here the picture of Le Mercure, which was an art magazine in Paris around the turn of the century when she was there. And when Jo had returned to Holland, she received at some point she received some correspondence from his name just escaped me. I'll remember it in a minute. A good friend of Vincent, who's Bernard, Emile Bernard, who said, I know the editor of Le Mercure, what do you think of publishing a few letters by Vincent? And so Jo immediately agreed. But instead of sending an entire letter, she selected excerpts she found within this whole cache of letters, references to drawings. So she got those drawings and put together a couple of crates of translated excerpts. She had to translate them from Dutch into French. And she sent those to the editor who had agreed to just run one issue with something about Vincent Van Gogh. Well, the response to those letters was such that the French public was curious about who this was and wanted to know more so that they ended up running five more issues with excerpts of these letters and drawings that Jo had sent. She understood that once you get behind the reaction to the painting and understood the person behind it, that there was an emotional connection. Now, many of you know, I've been quoting some of them. Many of you know, Vincent wrote a lot of letters. He wrote 900. The Van Gogh Museum has collected 900 letters of his correspondence. The vast majority of those are between Vincent to his brother Theo. And that is a way that Jo really got to know Vincent is because she only met him three times in her life. But about a year after Theo was gone, she pulled some letters out of Theo's desk. And if you've been to the Van Gogh Museum, it's really a piece of furniture where he had been like a pack rat. And he had kept all these letters and she began to read them. And they were all out of order. So she gradually would pencil in dates and locations and put them in chronological order. But over the course of that time, she felt like she got to know him because he was vulnerable. He was angry. He was passionate. He was sad. He was happy. He was delighted. He was all this gamut of emotions that made her feel like she got to know him. And so I read all 900 of those letters because I thought, I need to get to know Vincent the way that Jo did. And through that process, it's so funny, but you really feel like you get to know him. And so this was something that Jo leveraged. She understood that and she used the letters to convert critics into allies. And then later she published her own book of the correspondence between Vincent and Theo. And that in turn was something that crossed to many other countries so that his name gradually became international. So over the next 15 years, 15 years from Vincent's death, in addition to these strategies, Jo was keeping up a constant correspondence with art dealers and galleries. She was constantly shipping out paintings and also having them come back in. So she was keeping countless lists. She would travel to exhibits. She would experiment with entry fees. It was really important to her. She was really involved with women and worker rights. And she thought that Vincent had said at one point that workers really understood his artwork better. And so she reduced fees or collected entry fees in order to donate them for poor relief to help the local communities where Vincent's art was being shown. And across that entire time, she raised prices on Vincent's artwork, including her own commission. I believe without Jo, these gifts would not be here. And that acknowledging her is a critical step whose time has come. She was the keeper of his work. Despite being advised by some to get rid of the art, she held on to it, understanding its immense value. She was his marketing engine, single-handedly taking on the monumental task of promoting his work. And her persistence and determination gradually brought his art to the attention of critics and the public. She revealed the man behind the art, humanizing him by moving his reputation from being a madman to a sensitive and thoughtful genius. And that established the foundation for all modern Van Gogh scholarship. And finally, she established his legacy. She strategically sold and loaned his paintings to key collections, not only providing financial stability for her own family, but also raising his status in the art world. Ultimately, her work laid the groundwork for the creation of the Van Gogh Museum, which her son would undertake some years later. In short, Jo Van Gogh transformed an artist who was a relative unknown during his lifetime to one of the most famous and beloved figures in history. So what kept her going? Was it money? She did become wealthy, but she led a frugal lifestyle. Was it fame that she was after? I don't think so. I mean, until today, you may not have heard about her. And her work was always with Vincent out front. So what gave her the backbone to continue despite all the setbacks? I will let Vincent have the last word. Before you hear Vincent's last word, I'm back to 2016 on a girlfriend trip when I found Jo and asked, why don't I know about you? Well, now you know about you. You know about her. And here's the motive that I think she had and he had. What is done in love is done well. I think Jo would agree. Jo Van Gogh Bunger, an amazing woman, the unsung champion of Vincent's legacy. And so here is the book that ultimately came out. It took me seven years since my retirement to publish this book. It just came out in April, Saving Vincent. And the QR code goes to my website or you can see the URL to my website there on the screen. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jo. This is such an interesting story. I can see how you were totally drawn to it. But also I can see how it appealed to your marketing background because Jo was a masterclass in art marketing, wasn't she? She was. She was. And it really felt like it was intuitive to her. It just sort of made sense. Yes, because there was nothing to go by before her. Right. It was a it was a it was completely different than the power structure where the art dealer said, look, I'm the gatekeeper. I'm the expert. Clients come to me. I tell them what is good art. Instead, she she tried other ways to actually get to just to to people who are not in the art trade. And he Vincent caused a lot of waves. There were times when she got reviews that said his work is ugly, it's unfinished. And yet she and oftentimes gallery owners said, I love the conversation. People are taught people come here and they view the art and they're talking about art. And that's what they wanted. Fascinating. So we already have questions coming in. Did we see in the fragment that you showed on the screen of the letters, was it written in English? No, no, it would have been Joe. Joe was fluent in a couple of different languages, Dutch, English and French. And so and Theo was Dutch. I mean, he was living in Paris. So I I, of course, read English translation, but you get a lot of translating in her in her. But they would they would have corresponded in Dutch. Probably. Yeah, probably. Yeah. Fantastic. And we have another question that is a little bit related to what you just mentioned about the process. Can you give us an example of any poetic licenses that changed part of the story or where you had to depart from the biographical story? I did not. Whoops. I did not depart. I didn't depart from the biographical story. But here's what I did do. I felt like what was missing was she was a single parent. Like I felt like we really needed to have more about what was going on day to day in the boarding house. And so I researched boarding houses. And so you'll see you'll see that I'm reflecting that in the book because that was a big deal. She was she was running a boarding house. She was single parenting and she was doing this art dealership. And in other biographies, they there I felt like I felt like that needed to be more emphasized. And the other thing was I felt as though there is there was not enough recognition of how challenging it can be to be a woman in a man's world and the opposition that one can have. And so it's not it's not a departure from the biography. But I would say that I pulled those elements out. Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much. And yeah, it was really, really courageous, actually, the way she just faced it all and kept going. And do you know if she ever did remarry? She did remarry. She did. That's in the book. I there I read I read a note that said on the night before their marriage, she sort of thought, should I be doing this? He sort of he became he was a bit of a hypochondriac. And it was not the love of her life that that Theo was. But he was he was he was an art critic. And so he got the world that she was in. And I think all proof shows that he was he didn't have a big ego. He was very supportive of what she did. So it was a nice partnership. But I don't think it was a big love affair. It's companionship and meeting of the minds. Well, that's fantastic. Thank you so much. This was absolutely fascinating. So you can find Joe's book and on her website or anywhere you get your books. So thank you again, Joan. Thank you so much. I hope we have you back for another talk sometime soon. And congratulations again on your book. Thank you. It's my pleasure. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks, everyone for your participation, as always from all of us at Bonjour Paris. Thank you for watching. If you'd like to access our complete video library and exclusive member only content, join the Bonjour Paris membership using the link below. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and subscribe to our channel for more expert talks, insider Paris tips and French culture stories. We look forward to seeing you at our next event.