Paint a palette blue and grey

Van Gogh: The Life. By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Random House; 953 pages; $40. Profile; £30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

VINCENT VAN GOGH seemed made for a bittersweet Hollywood biopic. The dazzling colours and dashing brushstrokes of his sunflowers, cornfields and cypress trees are among the most familiar and loved works in the history of art, fetching record-breaking sums in auction rooms. The inevitable biopic was called “Lust for Life”. But as an enormous and engrossing new biography shows, van Gogh's lust for conflict was strongest of all.

The book describes a lonely, bad- tempered alcoholic, a syphilitic who liked to bite the hands that fed him. It in no way devalues the quality of the painting, of course, but this portrait by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, two prolific authors who seem to like writing about drunken artists (Jackson Pollock was an earlier subject) demolishes any romance that still attaches to the artist's life.

The book is composed, like a pointillist painting, of thousands of factual details. Nothing is sacrificed to curtail its length; the only concession is to remove the footnotes from the text. (There are enough of these to fill 5,000 typewritten pages and they are all to be found on the book's website.) But the story has a momentum that justifies the time it takes to tell it, and the authors conclude by making a plausible case for van Gogh's accidental death rather than his suicide. No gun was found; the fatal bullet entered the body at the wrong angle and seemed to have been fired from too far away for the wound to have been self-inflicted. Strong circumstantial evidence suggests that van Gogh was the victim of schoolboy bullies.

Van Gogh's earliest job with an art dealer took him to The Hague, and then Paris and London, but his youthful passion was to be heard as a preacher. His first sermon was delivered, in heavily-accented English, by the River Thames in Petersham, but congregations did not respond to him. Only when he accepted that he would not become a minister, as his father had been, did he turn to art. Since he earned no money van Gogh simply assumed that he was entitled to a share of his brother Theo's salary, demanding 150 francs a month from him at a time when the wage of a French schoolteacher was 75 francs a month.

Van Gogh first concentrated on dark charcoal drawings of Dutch peasants. “When I draw I see clearly,” he said. Theo saw clearly that they did not sell, and suggested colourful landscapes instead. Van Gogh was eventually converted to the idea of colour by Rembrandt, and he started to paint bright orange and brown sunflowers in Paris in 1886, hoping they might impress a particularly voluptuous Italian model. His conversion to colour and landscape was not complete, however, until he went south to Arles in 1888.

When he persuaded Paul Gauguin to join him in Arles, van Gogh believed that they would inspire each other's work. It was a tragic delusion. Gauguin, the more forceful personality, wanted to draw in the studio, van Gogh to paint in the open air. Van Gogh was quick, Gauguin was languid. Gauguin worked from the imagination and memory, van Gogh surrendered himself to nature. The Arlesiennes adored Gauguin and ignored van Gogh. The two painters quarrelled bitterly. When Gauguin announced he was leaving for Paris on December 23rd 1889, van Gogh reacted by slashing his own left ear, slicing through to the jaw. Confined to asylums as a psychotic, he did not stop painting, but he was dead of a bullet wound only 18 months later, not long after he sold his first painting. He was 37. Decades passed before it was widely appreciated he was a genius. It has taken even longer to fully understand that his life was a disaster.