Unlike her elder sisters, who did household duties, Jo, a "cheerful and lively child", was permitted to further her education by studying English, and earning the equivalent of a college degree.

[6] From the age of 17, barring her marriage to Theo, she kept a detailed diary, which later became an important source for how she helped create Vincent's posthumous fame, and highlighted the role of her late husband.

Leaving home in the Netherlands with her parents and siblings and moving to Paris to take up life with her art dealer husband was a major change for her.

The couple exchanged many letters prior to their marriage, published as Brief Happiness: The Correspondence of Theo Van Gogh and Jo Bonger,[8] where they got to know each other better.

Following Theo's death in January 1891 only a few months after Vincent's, Johanna was left a widow with her infant son to support.

[12] Although advised to leave the paintings in Paris, a center of the art world, instead she moved back to the Netherlands with the canvasses and hundreds of sketches, as well as the large cache of letters from Vincent to her late husband.

[citation needed] In the Netherlands she opened a boarding house in Bussum, a village 25 km from Amsterdam, and began to re-establish her artistic contacts.

[citation needed]In August 1901, she married Johan Cohen Gosschalk (1873–1912), a Dutch painter ten years younger than she was.

[13] Jo's good friend and sister-in-law Wil van Gogh was hospitalized for mental illness for what turned out to be the rest of her life.

For the men of the art world, she seemed an uninformed and obsessed woman connected by marriage to the relatively unknown Vincent and Theo van Gogh.

[...] The work that Mrs Van Gogh would like best is the one that was the most bombastic and sentimental, the one that made her shed the most tears; she forgets that her sorrow is turning Vincent into a god.

[citation needed] She stayed in contact with Vincent van Gogh's friend Eugène Boch, to whom she offered his portrait in July 1891.

The legacy and renown of Vincent van Gogh the long-suffering artist began to spread in the years after his death, first in the Netherlands, and Germany and then throughout Europe.

Publication of the letters helped spread the compelling mystique of Vincent van Gogh, the intense and dedicated painter who suffered for his art and died young.

Jo's son Vincent Willem conveyed to Lies' children his mother's regret about the end of the women's friendship.

[18] In 1914, Jo moved Theo's remains from Utrecht to Auvers-sur-Oise, interring them next to Vincent's grave with matching tombstones.

[19][20] Understanding the necessity of winning Americans' appreciation of Vincent's art, Jo saw translating the letters to English and actively cultivating attention to his talents in the New York as important.

She spent three years in New York, living on the Upper West Side and Queens from 1915 to 1919, where she began the work of translating Vincent's letters into English.

The inventory of her estate shows that in addition to Van Gogh's paintings and letters, she also had works by her late second husband, Johan Cohen Gosschalk.

Her son and grandson continued her work to shore up the legacy of his uncle Vincent and father Theo, resulting in the Dutch government's construction of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

A one-woman show by actress Muriel Nussbaum, Van Gogh and Jo was performed at Fairfield University in the United States in 2005.

[23] Mrs. Van Gogh, a play by Geoff Allen, who previously authored the play Vincent and Theo, was performed in 2012 at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, with a reviewer panning it as "Wikipedia for the stage", lacking in emotion and failing to convey why she spent a lifetime promoting Vincent's work.