By Max Bowen
Joan Fernandez’s historical novel, “Saving Vincent” (She Writes Press, April 15) which tells the untold story of the woman who saved Vincent van Gogh’s art after his death, marketing his works and turning his once-failed career into one of art history’s biggest successes.In this Five by Five, Joan shares how she learned the story of Jo van Gogh, and what inspired her to pen a novel about her, a mixture of fiction and history, and the lengthy research done and what was learned in the process.
Who is Jo van Gogh and how did you discover her?
Jo van Gogh is the famous artist Vincent’s sister-in-law, for she was married to Vincent’s younger brother, Theo, who was an art dealer in Paris. When Jo became Theo’s wife, she knew the brothers’ relationship ran deep, for Theo had nurtured Vincent’s talent for a decade (though he hadn’t been able to sell Vincent’s unconventional paintings). When Vincent died by suicide, Theo was devastated and passed away six months later, leaving Jo and their infant son an inheritance of hundreds of Vincent’s paintings. Motivated to prove the legacy had value, Jo took on advocating for the paintings herself and gradually developed an international market for his art.
I discovered that Jo deserved credit for saving Vincent’s legacy on a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2016. At the time, it stunned me that she was not better known. Her story caught my imagination like a fishhook and wouldn’t let go. Eighteen months later I retired from my professional corporate career to become a full-time author to write her story.
Is any portion of the story fictional?
The Van Gogh and Bonger family members, artists and art dealers, exhibitions, names of specific Van Gogh paintings, day-to-day life in a boarding house are grounded in research. I did adjust the timeline slightly to create tension and imagined the dialogue and characters’ motivations. Happily, some of this could be informed by the diary entries and letters I read. If I couldn’t find photos of real people, I drew from imagination to describe physical features.
The one significant fictional element is Jo’s nemesis, a Parisian art dealer named Georges Raulf, who personifies the negative headwind she faced from the art establishment at that time. I have Raulf embody both the political values of an emerging French nationalism as well as the patriarchal bias Jo felt by entering the male-dominated profession of art dealing. In real life, Jo did not have a singular enemy, but I felt it would provide higher drama for her to be opposed by a powerful enemy.
What did the research portion entail?
To get a feel for Jo and Theo’s relationship I read a wonderful cache of 101 letters the two exchanged when they were fiancés. Jo was in her parents’ home in Amsterdam while Theo was working in Paris. In addition to daily life and family news, they share ideas and questions about Vincent, other contemporary artists like Monet and Pissarro, and philosophize about art. Vulnerably, they share hopes and dreams for their future life together too. I have pages of notes!
I took a similar tack to get inside Vincent van Gogh’s thoughts by reading the collection of letters he wrote to Theo and a few others. My husband gave me the six-volume collection of 902 letters as a Christmas gift. Reading 10 letters a day, it took me months. But at the end I learned about Vincent as Jo had—for she “found” him in his letters too—since she only met him three times in person.
Next I turned to secondary research in search of information about Jo’s life. A wonderful source was a biography published by the Van Gogh Museum about Jo. Great, right? Except that this was 2019 and the biography was only available in Dutch—and I don’t know this language. When the pandemic arrived, the museum’s work on the English translation slowed with no estimated time for when it would be finished. In response, I tried gradually Google translating the Dutch biography, but the output was incoherent.
As I was looking for an answer, an author friend recalled that she knew a teacher in the Netherlands who was furloughed. This Dutch teacher agreed to translate pages of the biography into English. As the pages arrived in my inbox each week, I filled in a spreadsheet of names, locations, dates and more until a picture of Jo’s life emerged. A few years later, when the English-language biography was published, I was able to check the facts I’d gleaned.
What initially drew you to Vincent van Gogh?
Curiosity. Vincent has a legendary mystique as a misunderstood genius ignored by an indifferent world. I believe rooting for an underdog like Vincent is universal because I think we believe deep down that we’re misfits too! And for Vincent it’s even more tragic that he died by suicide because he’s so globally beloved today.
I believe I first heard art criticism about his paintings in a Fine Arts 101 class in college In that class I found out that he’d departed from Impressionism, striking out on his own to experiment but also to tackle expressing something “beyond the paint.” He once testily wrote to Theo “when people say [my painting is] done too quickly you can reply they look at them too quickly.” He was a real maverick. When I traveled to Amsterdam in 2016, it was a foregone conclusion that we visit the Van Gogh Museum.
How does Jo handle marketing and promotion in this time period?
She had an intuitive sense of advocacy. Among the first things she did was to give away paintings to influential people. Frederick van Eeden, Theo’s doctor, received a gift on the condition that he loan it back to her if she wanted to include it in an exhibition. When the painting was hung with a note that it came from the “Private Collection of Dr Frederik van Eeden,” it created a little FOMO.
A similar tactic was to print the names of paintings “not for sale” in exhibition catalogues to demonstrate the volume of Vincent’s work. The inaccessibility created a sense of scarcity.
Jo moved from Paris to a small town in Holland and opened up a boarding house, taking Vincent’s artwork with her to store in the attic. From there she wrote letters to art dealers across Holland, persuading them to include Van Gogh’s in their shows. By concentrating on Vincent’s home country, she established a familiar fan base who would be more open to a fellow countryman’s work then the Parisians with its epicenter of thousands of aspiring artists. Once a footprint had been established in Holland, Jo was able to expand to other geographies,
Finally, one of my favorite marketing strategies is how she shared excerpts of Vincent’s letters to the public, along with his sketches in a series that ran in the Parisian art journal, “Le Mercure de France.” Vincent’s letters can be witty, angry, heartbroken, resilient—all demonstrating a vulnerability and desperate yearning to express himself better through art. Jo revealed the person behind the unconventional paintings. The strategy captivated the public’s curiosity.
