Best Friends
Though Vincent did not make friends particularly well, there was one bright spot. His relationship with his brother Theo, four years his junior, proved to be a source of comfort and support throughout the years, and the friendship between the two served as the one constant in Vincent’s rocky life. They were close from childhood, with Vincent taking his younger brother with him on treks through nature, and Theo eventually developing as the go-between for Vincent and his parents. The two kept their relationship strong, writing hundreds of letters to each other in their adulthood. Today, almost all of what we know about Vincent’s life and his thoughts comes directly from these letters. Over 650 remain today, giving us precious insight into the mind of a tortured artist, and illuminating the relationship between Vincent and his closest friend.
However, in a turbulent life like Vincent’s, even his brightest relationship is not without controversy. Theo was extremely important to his older brother, so does it not make sense that he may have contributed at least in part to Vincent’s decision to commit suicide? We know that Theo was clearly 
in his brother’s thoughts, as Vincent repeatedly asked for his younger brother in the hours after the fatal shot. Indeed, artist Marcel Marois, among other scholars, argues that perhaps Theo was even too important to Vincent. “The first,” Marois claims, “in the series [of Vincent’s fits of madness] coincided with the news of Theo’s engagement, the second with the announcement of his wife’s pregnancy and the third with the birth of her child” (qtd. Cogniat 81). As his brother drifted further away and developed more of a life of his own, Marois hints, perhaps Vincent struggled to cope with the perceived separation between the two. As Raymond Cogniat writes in his book Van Gogh, “For several years Theo had been the only firm support on which he could wholly rely. Suddenly he realized that he might be going to lose that too” (Cogniat 81). Such a perception would have affected him deeply, and we cannot discount its importance in our exploration of the motives behind Vincent’s suicide.