- 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.