From a broader perspective, it is an application of a 'limit case' technique: by mapping the limits one defines the whole.
He was an artist who got shit done.
She was three years older than him at most and they were not married.
Is this painting of a girl with her head on her arms and knees [1] your understanding of being "prematurely broken by life"?
That looks like a painting of a geriatric.
Come on. While your students might be able to draw better than Vincent, they are very very likely not even close to being able to create the incredible art he has made.
If you haven't been to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, you should go and compare against your students' work (or, against many many artists, for that matter).
Check out Mary Casset... A great technician but a meh artist compared to Renoir who had a tenth the skill but ten times the soul.
He was ignored all his life and only later he was a hero of individuality. The romantic idea of a struggling artist. I am not saying technically it was not interesting (maybe the materic painting comes from something like his thick paint technique) but Goya, for example, could claim similar things.
Overall, I think it is the best example of a struggling artist where the story of his life matters more than the paintings. I hope it does not seem insensitive.
- As a youngish man, he married a worn-out, alcoholic, middle-aged prostitute. It was she that likely gave him syphilis that in the end drove him insane. She eventually committed suicide.
- He was rejected from the priesthood for being a zealot.
- He started a simultaneous translation of the bible from Latin to English, German and French.
- On many occasions, attempting to create a spiritual union with the working class, he gave up his comfortable middle-class life to live a life of unreal austerity. This is where his painting 'The Potato Eaters' comes from.
- Even his own father wanted to commit him to a lunatic asylum.
He was also, quite frankly, very poorly gifted as an artist. Doubt me? Check out this drawing done when he was 27 (my 19 yo students can draw better): https://www.incredibleart.org/lessons/drama/carpenter.jpg
However, he was also uniquely bloody-minded and eventually found his own way of doing things which was crafted from diverse sources (impressionism, Japanese wood block prints, Dutch genre painting etc). Contributing to this was the atelier system, which was an art school system located away from the establishment.
If he had been born post 1960, he would have been another GG Allin.