A Note From Bob

Monday. He came to painting late, at twenty-seven, after failing as an art dealer, a teacher, and a preacher. Ten years later he was dead, leaving behind roughly 2,100 works, nearly half of them made in his final two years, and hundreds of letters to his brother Theo that read like nothing else in the history of art. Today we hand you fifteen questions on the Dutch pastor's son whose paintings are now among the most recognized images on earth. Vincent van Gogh is today's featured quiz. Pour the coffee.

Trivia Question of the Day

The answer is at the bottom of this email.

Today's Featured Quiz

He sold almost nothing while he lived. In Arles he rented a yellow house and waited for a school of painters who never arrived, and in the waiting he produced the sunflowers, the bedroom, and the night café. A year later, from a window in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, he painted The Starry Night. How well do you know him? 15 questions.

The Answer

The critic was Louis Leroy, writing in the satirical paper Le Charivari on April 25, 1874. He called his piece "The Exhibition of the Impressionists" and used Monet's hazy view of the harbor at Le Havre as his punchline, complaining that unfinished wallpaper had more craft in it. The painters took the insult and made it their name. That circle, Monet and Renoir and Degas and Morisot and Pissarro, is the subject of today's second quiz.

On This Day

On this day in 1890, Van Gogh walked into the fields outside Auvers-sur-Oise with a revolver and shot himself in the chest. He made it back to his room above the Auberge Ravoux on his own, and died two days later with Theo at his side, thirty-seven years old. He had arrived in Paris only four years earlier, into a city where an older generation of painters had already torn up the rules he would go on to push past. Meet the ones who opened the door.