8 Famous Artists Who Were Only Celebrated After They Died

He is the one everybody reaches for, and for good reason. In a decade of furious work Van Gogh produced something like two thousand paintings, drawings and sketches, and sold a bare handful — the painting most often named is The Red Vineyard, which went for 400 francs not long before he died in 1890, at just thirty-seven. He leaned on his brother Theo for money, traded canvases for meals and paint, and never had the faintest idea what was coming.

What came was largely the work of one determined woman: Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s widow. She held on to the paintings, lent them generously to the earliest exhibitions, and in 1914 published the brothers’ letters, so the world could finally meet the man behind the color. By 1912 a show in Cologne was calling him “the father to us all.” He had been dead for twenty-two years.

Vermeer gave us those hushed Dutch interiors — the milkmaid, the girl with the pearl earring, light pouring through a leaded window. Yet he worked slowly, left only around thirty-five paintings, and when he died in 1675 he was insolvent, leaving his wife and many children destitute. Then he simply vanished. For the better part of two hundred years his canvases drifted through sale rooms under other painters’ names.

His rescue came in the 1860s from a French critic, Théophile Thoré, who wrote under the pen name W. Bürger. Hunting through European collections, he pieced the scattered work back together under Vermeer’s name and published it to the world. The craze he set off never really stopped. If you have ever waited in a long museum line for one small, perfect painting, you have Thoré to thank.

The elongated figures, the stormy skies, the colors that seem lit from somewhere unearthly — El Greco painted like no one around him in sixteenth-century Spain, and that was exactly the problem. After his death in 1614 his work slid into obscurity for more than two hundred years. To the tidy, classical tastes of the 1700s and 1800s he looked eccentric, even a little mad.

Then the modern world caught up with him. Around 1900, the Symbolists and Expressionists went looking for ancestors and found one in those distorted, feverish figures. Picasso studied him closely; you can see El Greco’s fingerprints on the figures of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. What his own century called a flaw, ours calls a gift.

Rousseau was a Paris toll collector — “le Douanier,” the customs man — who taught himself to paint in his spare hours and dreamed up lush, impossible jungles he had never seen. The critics were merciless. They called his flat perspective and frozen tigers naive, childish, the work of an amateur, and they said so for years.

But a younger crowd saw something the critics missed. Picasso and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire threw him a banquet in 1908, half in jest and half in genuine awe. After he died in 1910, that awe won out. Today he is honored as the founder of naive art, and those dreamlike jungles hang in the museums that once would not have them.

Here is a twist on the usual story. Caillebotte was a wealthy young Parisian who painted rain-slicked boulevards and men scraping a bare wood floor — and who used his fortune to buy his friends’ work when no one else would. Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro: he bought them, bankrolled their exhibitions, and left more than sixty of their paintings to France when he died in 1894 at forty-five.

His generosity nearly erased him. For decades the history books remembered Caillebotte the collector and forgot Caillebotte the artist entirely. It took until the mid-twentieth century — dealers assembling his catalogue, a landmark 1986 show in Washington — for the world to notice that the quiet patron had been one of the sharpest eyes in the room all along.

Working in a German artists’ colony at the turn of the last century, Modersohn-Becker painted plain, tender, strikingly modern portraits — mothers, children, herself — years before the big Expressionist movements got going. Out of roughly 750 paintings, she sold about five in her lifetime. She died in 1907, only thirty-one, weeks after the birth of her daughter.

The recognition, when it came, was a landmark. In 1927 the city of Bremen opened a museum devoted entirely to her — believed to be the first anywhere dedicated to the work of a single woman artist. She never got to walk through its doors, but every visitor since has.

Wallis went to sea as a boy and spent his life as a fisherman, sailor and scrap merchant in the Cornish port of St Ives. Only in his seventies, after his wife died, did he start to paint — for company, he said — using house paint and leftover boat paint on scraps of cardboard, ships and harbors drawn the way he remembered them rather than the way the rules said.

In 1928 two visiting artists, Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood, spotted his pictures through an open cottage door and were floored. Their friendship helped Wallis become known beyond St Ives, though he sold very little and lived modestly to the end. The self-taught fisherman is now counted among the roots of modern British art.

This one happened in our own lifetimes. Vivian Maier was a Chicago nanny who, in her off hours, shot more than a hundred thousand photographs of city streets — sharp, humane, wonderful pictures — and showed them to almost no one. When she fell behind on the rent, the contents of her storage lockers were auctioned off.

In 2007 a young collector named John Maloof bought a box of her negatives for a few hundred dollars. He had never heard of her; a search of her name turned up nothing until her obituary appeared in 2009. He began posting her images online, the internet lost its head over them, and Maier — who died quietly, unknown — is now ranked among the finest street photographers America ever produced.