Vincent met his cousin Kee Stricker while visiting his parents in Etten in 1881. Kee was staying there after the recent death of her husband, and Vincent’s feelings for her ran away with him.

He wrote to Theo: “I wanted to tell you that this summer I’ve come to love Kee Vos so much that I could find no other words for it than ‘it’s just as if Kee Vos were the closest person to me and I the closest person to Kee Vos’. And — I said these words to her”.

Kee did not see her cousin as husband material, however, answering “No, nay, never” to his repeated proposals.

Vincent was not put off and he continued to pester Kee with letters. She sought refuge with her parents in Amsterdam, where Vincent came looking for her. When he failed to see her yet again, the stubborn admirer thrust his hand into the flame of the lamp. Kee’s parents coolly blew out the light and ejected their nephew from the premises.

A few years later, Vincent wrote to Theo about this affair: “The few words about it that we exchanged (…) made me feel that nothing has changed in me in this regard, that it is and will remain a wound which I live above but which is there deep down and cannot heal…”.

Vincent, Sien and the children lived together more or less happily for a while following the birth of baby Willem – who was not, as has been suggested, Vincent’s son.

But Sien was a difficult character, as was Vincent, and they were constantly short of money. The allowance provided by Theo now had to cover medicine for Sien, rent for Sien’s mother and items for the baby.

The couple and their children came under pressure from both their families. The Van Goghs intensely disapproved of the relationship and marriage was utterly out of the question.

Sien Hoornik’s mother, meanwhile, preferred to have her daughter working the streets, from which she too benefited financially.

The pressure began to tell and Sien increasingly failed to come home at night. Vincent could see things were going wrong and so he took his painter’s gear and moved to Drenthe. He did so with a heavy heart, as he had become very fond of the children, especially little Willem.

Choosing prostitutes as models was largely a practical matter for Vincent – respectable middle-class ladies simply did not want him to paint their portraits.

Prostitutes were cheap models and were easy to approach. Above all, however, Vincent was interested in their faces, which bore the traces of their hard lives. He painted this woman in Antwerp.

From time to time, Vincent managed to persuade a woman from the street to pose for him, but few models were prepared to do so entirely nude.

This woman – according to Van Gogh’s artist friend Emile Bernard she was a Parisian pierreuse (streetwalker) – was however willing. He made several drawings and paintings of her in a sensual pose, in which he put his newly discovered ‘stripe’ technique into practice.

Vincent had contact in Nuenen with the farmer’s daughter Gordina de Groot, one of the ‘Potato Eaters’. When Gordina fell pregnant, everyone was positive that that ‘artist fellow’ (schildersmenneke) was involved.

Vincent denied it, and it was later shown that he was not the father. Whatever the case, the parish priest lost patience with all the tittle-tattle and promised to pay villagers if they refused to pose for Vincent.

Vincent did not take it lying down. Following a visit to Antwerp, he told a friend:

“I’ve brought something back from my trip to teach that stupid fellow in Nuenen a lesson.” His friend was very curious as to what it might be, and Vincent then showed him a few dozen French letters; “I shall pass them out among the farm-boys in Nuenen and see what transpires.”

Whether he really did so, and what did ‘transpire’, is sadly not known.

The French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec became virtually synonymous with Paris nightlife. He felt at home in clubs like Le Chat Noir and Le Cirque Fernando, where he depicted a colourful parade of performers: the female clown Cha-U-Kao, the dancer 'Môme Fromage', the cancan dancer 'La Goulue', the contortionist ‘Valentin le Désossé’ and the Spanish dancer ‘La Macarona’.

Vincent met Toulouse-Lautrec through Emile Bernard and the two men became friends.

Vincent shows Agostina in this portrait at one of the ‘tambourine’ tables to which her café owed its name. The establishment was popular among artists, who could also exhibit their work there. Vincent was one of them.

Bernard later claimed that Agostina provided Vincent with free meals in exchange for paintings – mostly floral still lifes.

On one occasion Vincent exhibited Japanese prints at Le Tambourin from his own collection. They can be seen in this painting hanging on the wall to the right of Agostina. When her café went bankrupt, Vincent’s paintings there were impounded and he never saw them again.

“As far as Miss Segatori is concerned, that’s another matter altogether,” Vincent wrote to Theo in 1887.

“I still feel affection for her and I hope she still feels some for me. But now she’s in an awkward position, she’s neither free nor mistress in her own house, and most of all, she’s sick and ill.”

There were more intimate matters involved, however, as Vincent continued:

“Although I wouldn’t say so in public – I’m personally convinced she’s had an abortion (unless of course she had a miscarriage) – whatever the case, in her situation I wouldn’t blame her.”

Vincent could speak freely about his brothel visits to his friend Émile Bernard. The younger painter also immersed himself artistically in the subject.

He owned the two nude paintings that Vincent had made of the Paris ‘streetwalker’, and it was around the same time that Bernard produced the series of watercolour drawings In the Brothel. He sent one of them to Arles, “For my friend Vincent, this silly sketch”.

Vincent responded with an enthusiastic ‘Bravo!’ He was critical about the way Bernard had set down some of the women, but ended on an encouraging note:

“It doesn't matter; it’s already something altogether new and interesting, and the rest, too – at the brothel – yes, that’s what needs to be done.”

Vincent oscillated throughout his life between his respect for women as chaste, unattainable creatures and his need for intimacy and sex. The same struggle might also have contributed to his mental breakdown in Arles.

An agitated Vincent took his severed ear to a prostitute called Rachel. The macabre gesture might be an indication that some kind of ‘short-circuit’ had occurred in his head between feelings of frustration, aggression, guilt and shame.

Vincent painted his Bedroom in the summer of 1888. Revealingly, he placed two pillows on his single bed.

He had already written years earlier that “If you wake up in the morning and you’re not alone and you see in the twilight a fellow human being, it makes the world so much more agreeable.”

He accepted in Arles that there would never again be such a fellow human being for him. He made up for it by seeking affection outside his bedroom.