In her first diary entry, dated March 26, 1880, Johanna Gezina (Jo) Bonger, a 17-year-old Dutch girl, confessed her desire to do something noble and great in life.
She, the daughter of a wealthy family in Amsterdam, four decades later she had already fulfilled that purpose, since it was she who launched the work of her brother-in-law: the painter Vincent van Gogh.
Wife of Theo, brother of the painter, she also translated into English the letters that both sent to each other and supervised other translations of essential correspondence to understand the figure of the artist.
Both she and her husband were convinced that the painter was a genius ahead of her time, but his suicide in July 1890 and Theo's death just six months later changed Jo's life. .
She is a widow with a young son, also named Vincent,
she learned to navigate in a male-dominated artistic environment.
As of February 10, her work will be highlighted in the exhibition
Choosing Vincent
, which the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will dedicate to the family on the 50th anniversary of its opening.
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Jo Bonger was the daughter of a Dutch insurance agent, Hendrik Bonger, and his wife, Hermine Weissman, the parents of ten children.
Three of her sisters and one of her brothers remained single and in her parental home.
Instead, she and her older brother, Andries, an art collector, studied and traveled.
He settled in Paris.
Jo earned an English language degree and studied the work of the poet Shelley at the British Museum Library in London.
Later, she worked in Dutch schools, in the towns of Elburg and Utrecht.
She was 22 years old when she met Theo van Gogh, an art dealer friend of Andries's, who was beginning to make a name for himself at the Goupil house in Paris.
For Theo, it was love at first sight.
However, Ella Jo wrote in her journal that she had rejected him because they hardly knew each other.
In love,
Theo waited by making his close relationship with Vincent clear from the start.
"He mentioned his painter's brother in the first letter that he sent him already as a fiancée," Hans Luijten, a senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum and author of Bonger's biography, titled, in Dutch, says by phone.
Alles voor Vincent
(All for Vincent, Prometheus).
Poster of the exhibition 'Choosing Vincent'. Van Gogh Museum
Once married, in 1889, and installed in Paris, Vincent sent the pictures he painted in the south of France there.
“So she knew what the painter was capable of creatively,” continues Luijten.
In a letter, Jo describes her marital happiness sweetly and simply.
She says, “Theo is so caring and good to me, and we hit it off right from the start;
nothing forced, nothing weird.
He is so simple and natural that he makes things easy: I did not think that everything was so good ”.
According to her biographer, her young wife admired Vincent, whom she saw in person twice, and remembers another letter from her where she told him that he hoped he would be a brother to her.
In Paris, Jo and Theo had a fluid relationship with the artistic environment.
They received numerous visitors and had Van Gogh's paintings hanging at home.
Among them,
Photo by Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh Museum
Happiness was short lived because Vincent committed suicide in July 1890, at the age of 37, in the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise.
He died in Theo's arms, who ran to his side and passed away six months later.
“He was 33 years old and had been diagnosed in the Netherlands with paralytic dementia, a disease of the nervous system.
At that time it was known that this syndrome could damage the brain as a result of syphilis.
The mercury and potassium that they administered to him were for the cerebral phase of syphilis, but not only for that”, points out the expert.
Jo was 28 years old, with a baby under one and hundreds of paintings and drawings by Vincent, almost worthless even on the art market.
Her subsequent effort did not forget the role played by Theo in the life of his brother, and hence the strength in the mission that had been imposed.
Jo van Gogh Bonger: The Woman Who Made Vincent Famous
(Jo van Gogh Bonger: The woman who made Vincent famous, Bloomsbury).
Jo returned to the Netherlands with the little one and opened a guest house in the town of Bussum, about 27 kilometers from Amsterdam.
There was a community of writers and artists there who helped him navigate his world.
“Vincent van Gogh was appreciated among his young colleagues, but his hard, even rough brushwork was very difficult for the ordinary client to accept.
It was not just because of his style ”, continues the biographer.
Goupil had a branch in the Dutch city of The Hague and they sent, on commission, paintings by Monet, Manet, Degas or Van Gogh himself.
“Half a year later they were returned to Paris.
There was no interest at the time.
There was also little that was lent to others, such as Gauguin and Pissarro.
Imagine, then, a widow with a child and hundreds of unsaleable works until then.
Many men in the art sector found it strange,
Photo by Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh Museum
In her work, Luijten describes it as "a great advantage" that Van Gogh's sister-in-law wrote to dealers in French, English and German.
She read about art, prepared thoroughly, and was very smart.
She “organized sales and exhibitions to give visibility to the paintings, where she mixed great works with less important ones.
She also decided which ones could be sold.
She had her help, but everything happened through her and she asked for the press clippings with the reviews and the exhibition catalogs to follow the reputation of the artist”.
In 1905 she organized a large exhibition at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam [the municipal museum].
She brought close to 500 works and some prices skyrocketed.
"Several critics spoke of the work of a lunatic, and others denied that Van Gogh was an artist to be reckoned with," he says.
That same year, Jo co-founded the Women's Club for Social Democratic Propaganda, committed to improving the education and living conditions of the working class.
She combined her feminist commitment and the demand for the vote for women with the sale of some of Vincent's works to pay for the internment of Willemien, one of Van Gogh's sisters, in a center for mental illnesses.
Jo remarried, in 1901, to the critic and artist Johan Cohen Gosschalk, who helped her promote the painter's work.
In 1912 she was widowed again and in 1914 she moved Theo's mortal remains from Utrecht to Auvers-sur-Oise to be buried next to her beloved brother.
Convinced of the importance of the correspondence between the two, in 1914 she published the letters.
Between 1915 and 1919 she lived in the United States and herself translated two thirds of the letters into English.
By her death in 1925, and after a life dedicated to making Vincent known, she had sold nearly 200 of her works.
Photo Vincent Willem van Gogh, son of Theo and Jo.Van Gogh Museum
Vincent, the son he had with Theo, preferred to make his own career as an engineer first.
In 1962, he signed an agreement with the Dutch state to transfer ownership of the remaining collection of works to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation.
The State took care of creating the museum, opened in 1973, with about 200 paintings, 500 drawings and about 800 letters, the largest collection of its kind in the world.
In 2021, the museum received 366,000 visitors after 24 weeks of closure - the previous year - due to the pandemic.
“I think Jo would have applauded.
She never regretted her efforts to promote Vincent's work, ”says his biographer.
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