No artist, no mat­ter how soli­tary by nature, becomes a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non alone. That’s even true of such an iso­lat­ed fig­ure as Vin­cent van Gogh, whose death in obscu­ri­ty at the age of 37 left open the ques­tion of who, if any­one, would vouch­safe his paint­ings to pos­ter­i­ty. The sup­port of the artist’s younger broth­er Theo is often giv­en a good deal of cred­it for mak­ing his work pos­si­ble, and not with­out rea­son. What’s some­what less wide­ly known is that Theo, who’d long been in poor health, died less than a year after Vin­cen­t’s sui­cide. The work of ensur­ing the lat­ter’s lega­cy then fell to the for­mer’s wid­ow Johan­na Bonger — or per­haps she under­stood that if she did­n’t stew­ard it, nobody else would. As Cindy Poh explains in the New­s­think video above, Bonger inher­it­ed a great many of van Gogh’s works and stored them away while devis­ing a plan to make them famous. Prac­ti­cal­ly going door-to-door — and some­times, it seems, lit­er­al­ly going door-to-door — she stayed engaged with the late Theo’s art-world con­tacts. …