By the winter of 1888, the little house at 2 Place Lamartine in Arles had become a place of nerves and paint. Vincent van Gogh was living there with Paul Gauguin, and after the quarrel on 23 December he took a razor, severed part of his own left ear, wrapped it in paper, and handed it to a girl at the brothel. The next morning a policeman found him unconscious, and Dr Félix Rey took him to hospital.

He had not begun there. Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, North Brabant, the eldest surviving child of Theodorus van Gogh, a Dutch Reformed minister, and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. He drew as a child, was serious and quiet, and at 20 went to London for Goupil & Cie, where he lodged in Stockwell and earned more than his father. A broken attachment to Eugénie Loyer, and later a failed life as a missionary in the Borinage, drove him towards religion, solitude and, in 1881, painting.

Theo van Gogh changed everything. Vincent’s younger brother supported him financially and kept up a long correspondence from 1872 to 1890, giving him money, encouragement and access to Paris. In The Hague, Nuenen and Antwerp, Vincent worked through peasants, weavers and still lifes, then in Paris from 1886 met Émile Bernard, Paul Gauguin, Paul Signac and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. His colours brightened, and by Arles in 1888 he was painting sunflowers, wheat fields, olive trees and the Yellow House with a force that helped lay foundations for modern art.

But the brilliance came with collapse. He suffered psychotic episodes, delusions and poverty, and in Arles the friendship with Gauguin turned poisonous. After the ear injury, townspeople in March 1889 petitioned for him to be shut away as le fou roux, and he entered Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint-Rémy on 8 May 1889. There he painted The Starry Night, cypresses and olive trees, often from barred windows, while Dr Théophile Peyron oversaw the clinic and Frédéric Salles accompanied him as caregiver.

In May 1890 he left Saint-Rémy for Auvers-sur-Oise, nearer to Dr Paul Gachet and Theo. He painted furiously again, roughly 70 oils in as many days, including Portrait of Dr Gachet and Wheatfield with Crows, while writing of vast wheat fields under troubled skies. On 27 July 1890, aged 37, he shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He died two days later, on 29 July, and Theo followed him to the grave six months afterwards in Utrecht.