Vincent & Me

There's more to Van Gogh than meets the eye. Or the ear, for that matter. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

WHEN I WAS BANGING AROUND IN FRANCE last October I kept on running into Vincent Van Gogh.

He glared at me over a crowd at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris…

…and haunted me in the little village of St. Remy-de-Provence, where he was institutionalized in 1889. I even spent an entire day (and nine miles!) on an art-appreciation death march from Pontoise to Auvers-sur-Oise, in hot pursuit of the painter. It really shouldn’t have been hard to catch him, because that’s where he was buried.

With his intense stare meeting mine everywhere I went, it was almost as if he were trying to send me a message. No, multiple messages—about all the ways he’d been misunderstood, misrepresented, and maligned during his lifetime, and even during his highly profitable afterlife.

Here’s what I learned: Everything I thought I knew about Vincent was wrong! Including…

I was mispronouncing his name. Turns out, the reason he signed his paintings “Vincent” was because he kne…